Authors: Michael Connelly
“Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh’ is right, Buddy. Look, if you’re going to work for me you gotta listen to what I tell you.”
“All right, all right, I understand.”
“Good. Where are you?”
“Vegas, man. Like you told me.”
“You get the stuff off the boat?”
“Got it.”
“No FBI?”
“Nah, man. Everything’s cool.”
“Where are you right now?”
As I was speaking I noticed something on my notes and remembered something else about the
Times
story on the missing men. Rather, I remembered the circle Terry had drawn on the newspaper clip.
“I’m at the B,” Lockridge said.
“The B? Where’s the B?”
“The big B, man.”
“Buddy, what are you talking about? Where are you?”
He whispered his reply.
“I thought everything was on the QT, man. Like they might be listening.”
“Buddy, I don’t care if they’re listening. Quit with the code. What is the big B?”
“The Bellagio. It’s a simple code, dude.”
“A simple code for a simple mind. You’re telling me you checked into the Bellagio on my tab?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, check out.”
“What do you mean? I just got here.”
“I’m not paying for the Bellagio. Check out and come here and get a room where I’m at. If I could afford to put you in the Bellagio I’d be staying there myself.”
“No expense account, huh?”
“None.”
“All right. Where are you at?”
I gave him the name and address of the Double X and right away he knew I was in a fringe location.
“They got pay-per-view there?”
“They don’t have shit. Just get over here.”
“Well, look, I already checked in here. They’re not going to give me my money back. They already charged my card and besides, I already crapped in the toilet. That’s like implied ownership of the room, you know. I’ll stay one night here and then I’ll come stay over there tomorrow.”
There’s only going to be one night, I thought but didn’t say.
“Then everything above what this dump costs is coming out of your pay, man. I didn’t tell you to check into the most expensive place on the strip.”
“All right, all right, dock my pay if you want. Be that way. I don’t care.”
“All right, I will. You got a car?”
“No, I took a cab.”
“Okay, go down the elevator and get another one and bring that stuff over here to me.”
“Can I get a massage first?”
“Buddy, Jesus Christ, if you don’t —”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Can’t you take a joke, Harry? I’m on my way.”
“Good. I’m waiting.”
I disconnected without saying good-bye and immediately dropped the conversation from my radar screen. I was excited. I moved on. I thought I had inexplicably solved one of the mysteries. I looked at my re-creation of McCaleb’s file notes and at one line in particular.
Triangle theory?—1 point gives 3
On the newspaper story he had also circled the word
circle
in the Metro detective’s quote about the mileage on the rental car of one of the missing men, giving the investigators a large circle in which to look for clues as to what happened to the missing man.
I now believed that McCaleb may have circled the word because he thought it was wrong. The search zone was not a circle. It was a triangle, meaning that the miles on the rental car formed the three sides of a triangle. Point one was the airport, the origin. The renter picked up the car and drove to point two. Point two was the place where he crossed paths with the abductor. And point three was the place where the abductor took his victim. Afterward, the car was returned to point one, completing the triangle.
When McCaleb had written his notes he didn’t know about Zzyzx Road. He had one point—the airport car rental return. So he wrote, “1 point gives 3,” because he knew that if one more point on the triangle was identified, it would lead to the remaining point as well.
“One more point of the triangle means we can figure out all three,” I said out loud, translating McCaleb’s note from shorthand.
I got up and started pacing. I was jazzed and thought I was getting close. It was true that the abductor could have made any number of stops with the rental car, thereby leaving the triangle theory worthless. But if he didn’t, if he avoided distractions and single-mindedly took care of the business at hand, then the triangle theory would hold. His thoroughness might contain his weakness. That would make Zzyzx Road point three on the triangle because that would have been the last stop for the car before it was returned to the airport. And that would make point two the remaining unknown. It was the intersection. The place where predator and prey came together. Its location was not known at the moment but thanks to my silent partner I knew how to find it.
22
B
ACKUS SAW RACHEL PULL OUT OF THE SIDE LOT of the FBI building in a dark blue Crown Victoria. She turned left onto Charleston and headed toward Las Vegas Boulevard. He hung back. He was sitting behind the wheel of a 1997 Ford Mustang with Utah plates. He had taken the car from a man named Elijah Willows, who no longer needed it. His eyes left Rachel’s car and held on the street scene, watching for movement.
A Grand Am with two men in it pulled out into traffic from the office building next to the FBI building. It went in the same direction as Rachel’s car.
“There’s one,” Backus said to himself.
He waited and then he watched a dark blue SUV with triple antennas pull out of the FBI lot and turn right onto Charleston, going in the opposite direction as Rachel. Another Grand Am pulled out behind it and followed.
“There’s two and three.”
Backus knew it was what was called a “sky bird” surveillance. One car to maintain a loose visual surveillance while the subject was tracked by satellite. Rachel, whether she knew it or not, had been given a car with a GPS transponder on it.
All of this was okay with Backus. He knew he could still track her. All he needed to do was follow the follow car and he would get there just the same.
He started the Mustang. Before pulling out onto Charleston to catch up to the Grand Am following Rachel, he reached over and opened the glove compartment. He was wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, size small so they would stretch across his hands and be almost unnoticeable from a distance.
Backus smiled. Sitting in the glove box was a little two-shot vest gun that would nicely complement his own remaining weapon. He knew he had sized Elijah Willows up perfectly when he had first seen him leaving the Slots-o-Fun on the down side of the strip. Yes, he was what Backus had been looking for physically—same size and build—but he had also sensed a detachment about the man. He was someone who dwelled alone and on the edge. The gun in the glove box seemed to prove that. It gave Backus confidence in his choice.
He hit the gas and pulled loudly out onto Charleston. He did this purposely. He knew that on the off chance there was a fourth car, a trailer, the car they would find the least suspicious would be the one with the driver boldly drawing attention to himself.
23
I
T CAME DOWN TO basic high school geometry. I had two of the three points on a triangle and I needed the third. It was that simple and that difficult at the same time. To get that point I had the total distances of all three sides of the triangle to work with. I sat down, opened my notebook to a new page and went to work with McCaleb’s map.
I recalled from the
Times
article that the mileage recorded on the rental car of one of the missing men was 328 miles. Under what I believed McCaleb’s theory to be, that mileage count would equal the total of all three sides of the triangle. I knew, thanks to the notations on the map page, that one side of the triangle—Zzyzx to the airport in Vegas—was 92 miles. That left 236 miles for the remaining two sides. That number could be divided in a variety of ways, putting the missing point of the triangle in a myriad of possible positions on the map. What I needed was a charting compass to accurately plot the triangle but I made do with what I had.
According to the map’s legend, one inch equaled 50 miles of terrain. I took out my wallet and removed my driver’s license. Holding one of its short edges to the legend I was able to determine that the side of the license equaled 100 miles on the map. Working with that I composed a number of triangles that approximated the remaining 236 miles of roadway. I plotted points both north and south of the baseline I had drawn from Zzyzx Road to Las Vegas. I spent twenty minutes working the possibilities, my plotting taking the third possible point of the triangle down into Arizona and as far as the Grand Canyon and then north into the bombing and gunnery ranges under the command and restriction of Nellis Air Force Base. I soon grew frustrated, realizing the possibilities were endless and that I could have already identified the missing point of the triangle and not even know it.
I got up and went to the half-fridge for another beer. Still annoyed with myself I opened the cell and called Buddy Lockridge. The call went through to voice mail without being answered.
“Buddy, where the hell are you?”
I slammed the device closed. It wasn’t like I needed Buddy there that moment. I just needed to yell at somebody and he was the easy target.
I stepped back out onto the balcony and checked for Jane. She wasn’t there and I felt a glimmer of disappointment. She was a mystery and I liked talking to her. My eyes swept across the parking lot and the jets beyond the fence and caught on the figure of a man standing in the far corner of the lot. He had on a black baseball hat with gold lettering I couldn’t read. He was clean-shaven and wore mirrored glasses and a white shirt. His lower half was hidden by the car he stood behind. He seemed to be looking right at me.
The man in the hat did not move for at least two minutes and neither did I. I was tempted to leave the apartment and go down into the lot but was afraid if I lost sight of the man for even a few seconds he would disappear.
We stood locked in our stares until the man suddenly broke from position and started walking across the lot. As he came out from behind the car I saw he wore black shorts and some sort of equipment belt. That was also when I could make out the word
Security
on his shirt and realized he apparently worked for the Double X. He walked into the passageway that separated the two buildings that made up the Double X and was gone from my sight.
I let it go. It was the first time I had seen a security man at the place in daylight but it still wasn’t that suspicious. I checked the next-door balcony for Jane again—there was no sign of her—and went back inside to the dinette table.
This time I approached the geometry differently. I ignored the miles and just looked at the map. My prior exercise had given me a general idea of how far and wide the triangle could stretch on the map. I started studying the roadways and towns in this zone. Each time a location interested me I measured the distances to see if I could come up with a triangle of approximately 328 miles.
I had measured out nearly two dozen locations, failing to get even close on the approximation of mileage each time, when I came across a town on the north side of the baseline that was so small that it was denoted by only a black dot, the smallest demarcation of a population center in the map legend. It was a town called Clear. I knew of this place and I suddenly got excited. In a moment of flash thought, I knew that it fit the Poet’s profile.
Using my driver’s license I measured the distances. Clear was approximately 80 miles north of Las Vegas on the Blue Diamond Highway. It was then another 150 miles approximately on rural routes across the California border and down through the Sandy Valley to the 15 freeway and the third point of the triangle at Zzyzx. Adding in the baseline mileage between Zzyzx and the airport in Vegas, I had a triangle of approximately 322 miles, just 6 miles shy of the total put on the rental car belonging to one of the missing men.
My blood started to jump in my veins. Clear, Nevada. I had never been there but I knew it was a town of brothels and whatever community and outside services are spawned by such businesses. I knew of it because on more than one occasion in my career as a cop I had traced suspects through Clear, Nevada. On more than one occasion a suspect who voluntarily surrendered to me in Los Angeles reported that he had spent his last few nights of freedom with the ladies of Clear, Nevada.
It was a place where men would go privately, taking care to leave no trail that would reveal them as having dipped in such murky moral waters. Married men. Men of success or religious piety. In a strong way it was much like the red-light district in Amsterdam, a place where the Poet had previously found his victims.
So much of cop work is pursuing gut instinct and hunches. You live and die by the hard facts and evidence. There is no denying that. But it is your instinct that often brings those crucial things to you and then holds them together like glue. And I was following instinct now. I had a hunch about Clear. I knew I could sit at the dinette table and plot triangles and map points for hours if I wanted to. But the triangle I had drawn with the town of Clear at the top was the one that held me still at the same time the adrenaline was jangling in my blood. I believed I had drawn McCaleb’s triangle. No, more than believed it. I
knew
it. My silent partner. Using his cryptic notes as direction, I now knew where I was going. Using my license as a straight edge I added two lines to the map, completing the triangle. I tapped each point on the map and stood up.
The clock on the wall in the kitchenette said it was almost five. I decided it was too late to go north tonight. I would arrive in near darkness and I didn’t want that—that could be dangerous. I quickly put a plan in motion to leave at dawn and have almost an entire day to do what I needed to do in Clear.
I was thinking about what I would need for the trip when there was a knock on my door that startled me even though I was expecting it. I walked over to let Buddy Lockridge in.