Chapter 93
ALMOST AS SOON as we pulled away from the office, Maggie turned to me and asked, “What’s the latest on Leonard Barr?”
“That’s impressive. Are they doing it that way because it’s the smart way or are they doing it because they’re friends of yours and doing you a favor?”
“That’s awfully cynical of you, Agent Chin.” My comment was as playful as her question.
“I see how they treat you in the city. They cut you all kinds of slack. That’s the sort of thing I probably won’t find at the ATF.
We’re too spread out to have those kinds of relationships.
Plus we get transferred to new jurisdictions all the time.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to develop as many contacts as you.
I’m positive I don’t have the patience to do it. ”
That made me chuckle. Maggie, like most of the people I knew who were interested in engineering and building things, had a certain disdain for social interaction.
On the one hand, I understood. But in my case, having a family as large as mine meant that I was always engaged with people.
It was natural for me to develop friendships at work.
To meet the clerks at the court or the lab technicians, even some of the local attorneys.
And once I’d met and talked to people, I’d always found it easier to come to some sort of an accord.
As we drove, Maggie told me that they’d had some leads regarding Thomas Owens’s family members. “We may have located Owens’s uncle in Baltimore, and a brother in Chicago. We have ATF agents going to both houses now, hoping to find them. Someone will get in touch with us pretty soon.”
We planned to check the other addresses Maggie had come up with until we heard from the ATF agents trying to find Owens’s family.
The first address was a tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn that Owens had rented for a summer while he was doing an internship almost a decade ago. At least that’s how the elderly super remembered it.
The tall man, who appeared to be well into his seventies, said, “Tom was a nice boy. I haven’t seen or heard from him since he moved out eight or nine years ago, but I remember him well.
That brain of his, let me tell you, was out of this world!
I think he was finishing up his engineering degree and doing some kind of internship around here, but he showed me a way to redirect heating in the building that is so much more efficient, I haven’t had one complaint in all the years since he fixed it. He really was a visionary.”
While Owens had clearly made a big impression on the super, the same couldn’t be said for anyone else at the other two addresses.
No one there remembered anything about Owens.
Finally, just as we got back into the car after another fruitless attempt at finding someone who remembered Owens, Maggie’s phone rang, with a standard, boring preset ringtone.
It was clear she didn’t have kids who constantly changed her ringtone.
She answered it, and all I heard was “Okay, okay, good. Tell him to call me in two minutes.”
“What’s up?”
Maggie turned to me and said, “An agent is sitting with Owens’s brother in Chicago. The brother is willing to cooperate with us and knows where Owens was living as of a week ago.”