The Good Guys by Bill Bonanno

Author:Bill Bonanno [Bonanno, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, FIC000000
ISBN: 0446529656
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

TEN

Numbers can’t lie. Dig deep enough into the numbers and the answer is there. Most people never think about it, but almost all of their daily transactions generate numbers, and those numbers can often be attached to them and can then be used to create the legendary paper trail. Law enforcement agencies not only think about it, they rely on it. The foundation of pretty much all intelligence-gathering is built of numbers.

The FBI’s information-gathering machine was finally operating at close to full strength, collecting those raw numbers from banks, credit card agencies, the telephone company, even the Motor Vehicle Bureau, any numbers that might be used to track the professor. But as always, it was up to the agents to turn those numbers into facts.

O’Brien got to the office almost an hour earlier than usual the following morning. He walked into the conference room just as Russo was taking a big bite out of a lightly buttered bagel. Two empty coffee cups and an opened folder were in front of her. Another pile of reports was sitting in the middle of the conference table. “Morning,” she said midbite.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” he asked incredulously as he hung his wet trench coat over the back of a chair.

“Sure I do,” she said. “I think I did it last year.”

He took his own bagel and two cups of coffee from a white paper bag. “Here you go,” he said, placing one of those cups and two packs of Sweet’n Low in front of her. “So?” He indicated the pile of reports: “What do we got?”

“Thanks,” she said. She tore the sipping triangle off the plastic lid. “Some of this stuff is pretty interesting.” She flipped through several pages until she found what she was looking for. “Look at this. These are his phone records. Remember, his wife told us that the phone call that got him moving came in at about seven-thirty? There were only two calls to his number around that time, give or take what, fifteen minutes, say. One was from his office, the other one was”—she searched for a different sheet of paper and found it almost immediately—“from a phone in a place called Off Limits. It lasted”—she checked the first sheet—“one minute and twenty-eight seconds.”

“What’s Off Limits?”

She smiled. “Nothing, apparently. That’s the joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s a strip club. That’s their slogan, ‘Nothing is Off Limits!’”

O’Brien squared his shoulders, stood up ramrod straight, and in the most officious tone he could muster said nobly, “Perhaps it would be better if I take this interview on my own.”

“Down, boy,” she commanded. “Down, boy.”

His shoulders deflated. “You never let me have any fun.”

Ignoring him, she continued reading from her notes. “The morning after he disappeared somebody used his ATM card at three different banks for a total of $650. He still has in his possession a Visa, a MasterCard, a Macy’s charge card, a discount card from something called Diner’s Delight, a few more things like that, but except for the bank card and the Visa at the Heights restaurant, none of them have been used.

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