Chater Five
Gabriel
“Let’s start here,” Gabriel told Whiskey. “I need to put my feet under my desk, so we need to figure something else out for you.”
He started by stacking one of his guest chairs on top of the other to free up some floor space, then lifted the trench coat from the hook on the back of the door and opened it wide.
The winter lining still in place, Gabriel had worn it back from a work trip up to Maine two weeks ago, where it snowed at night, and he came back home to warm air filled with cherry blossoms.
Gabriel laid the coat on the cold terrazzo flooring, bunching it up on the edges to make a nest, then called Whiskey over.
Whiskey settled and seemed both satisfied and tired. It had been a busy day, and it was getting late.
“Whiskey, I’m going to turn off the lights now. I focus best on the details when I’m in the dark.”
With the light off and his door locked, Gabriel sat down and took a few breaths to clear his mind and shift his focus.
Gabriel played the video through three times.
This video was a distraction, though. The posture of the man who scrambled for safety and was brought up short with the barrel of a gun at the nape of his neck was a gut punch.
Gabriel often had to ignore something that roiled his nervous system: a pool of blood, a child’s shoe, because emotions took him out of an analytic frame of mind.
Daniel had often said they worked the same damned job; only Daniel went off on foot, exposing himself to the elements and the intrinsic dangers of a manhunt, while Gabriel sat in his comfy office hunting people.
Gabriel took the chiding; that was fine. A victim saved, a bad guy in the clink, everyone did what they could, and few people had the kind of brain that could do what Gabriel did.
Gabriel locked in on a frame of the video and snipped it.
From the shift of the camera and the line of light, this was the frame that picked up the best reflections in the high-rise across the street.
What Gabriel needed were clues.
The first one was that it was morning. How did he know?
The garbage bins were empty but hadn’t yet been pulled back from the curb.
No bags were lying in the street. They’d already been collected.
Cars parked along the curb made way for the trash collectors to get in.
And there were dew streaks on back windows.
Morning.
Which morning?
Gabriel homed in on the street sign on the pole—it was written in English, which narrowed the possible countries.
Street cleaning was every Monday and Thursday on that particular road.
If he could get an idea of the city, he could narrow down which streets were serviced on those days, which should tighten things down further.
This attack didn’t happen on a Monday or a Thursday. Municipalities were careful to schedule trash collection on other days so the street sweepers wouldn’t be obstructed by objects in the gutters.
It didn’t happen on a Saturday or Sunday morning, when trash usually wasn’t collected.
This was most likely filmed on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday morning.
Which Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday morning?
Icing on the cake if he could figure that out, but Gabriel was a geolocator, not a psychic.
If someone saw something that was going wrong and they taped it from the …
yeah, they’d have to be on the third story.
If they taped it from a third-story window …
” He pulled a pad over and plucked a pen from his jar, writing: Find the location, then check the weather for temperatures and dew point, and sunrise information to figure out possible dates.
The person who took the video was cunning.
There was a difference between smart and cunning.
A cunning person—someone with a strategic mind—might try to include clues for the FBI to follow.
Granted, it wasn’t a given that the person who took the video was cunning. They could have called a cunning person and asked them for action steps.
Gabriel tried that scenario on. Someone was looking out their bedroom window—it was so early that they were either on a shift job or waking up somewhere. Regardless, they saw something terrible happening below and started recording it on video.
Once the bad guy dragged the FBI agent from the scene, the witness would have shakily called a friend—a boyfriend?
Someone close and reliable.
Gabriel thought it was a woman who took this video.
There was something about how things were framed that, after thousands of videos and pictures over the course of his career, he just got a feel for the eye that gazed through the lens.
Gabriel would wager that this was a woman, that she called someone, and that someone helped her come up with a plan.
They had done a good job of protecting the digital data.
This was a smart person behind the camera, not a cunning person. A cunning person would sweep the camera across a business name or a street sign, focus in on a license plate, so the FBI could get there fast.
He was back to the two-witness scenario—a smart person and a cunning person.
A cunning person protecting an identity might have wanted the FBI to know about the special agent but not to figure out the location, because they were afraid of being identified. Gabriel bet that was the case.
Gabriel jotted on his pad: Was this video edited? Did they take out any information? If yes, where was the cut made?
If yes, Gabriel would focus on the last frames of the splice to see if they accidentally left anything there.
At any rate, the videographer got their intended end. Here he was looking into the reflection on the window to see two white license plates on two gray sedans.
Could be happenstance.
Might be a clue.
Of course, about eighty percent of the cars on the road were on the gray scale, and a shit ton of states had white license plates.
The steering wheels were on the left. So that canceled out a few countries. They weren’t in London, for example.
Gabriel looked at the frame with the gun resting at the base of the victim’s neck.
If only the agent had looked up, then others in the research department could have run that image against all the FBI agents out there, figured out who was grabbed, and known what city he was in.
Oddly, the collars on both the men’s jackets were up, concealing their ears, ears being biomarkers that could identify them, not that this video had enough pixels that it was possible.
“What else, Whiskey? What else could give me a clue?”
Gabriel stood and walked around his desk and crouched down, his knees splayed wide, and he reached between his thighs for Whiskey's soft, floppy ears.
Whiskey was a droopy-looking dog, a dog whose face melted into folds of flesh.
But Whiskey was no slacker. Despite her appearance, she had amazing stamina and focus.
For a free dog, she was exceptional—even if she hadn’t been free, she would have been exceptional—a highly skilled sniffer dog. From field tests and competitions, she was one of the best in the state at tracking.
Daniel had lucked out when he found a sign on a telephone pole that read: “Bloodhound puppies need a good home.”
As soon as he saw the sign, Daniel had made up his mind. He was going to get a puppy and have his up-the-street neighbor, Reaper Hamilton, train her up at Cerberus Tactical as a field dog.
Gabriel remembered that phone call. It had been one of the infrequent moments of elation that reminded Gabriel of when they were kids. Daniel had become darker and broodier with age. A little enthusiasm, a little bit of joy, Gabriel hoped Whiskey would provide both for his brother.
Whiskey was born for the job, lived for the job.
And now Whiskey didn’t have the man who doted on her, and Gabriel didn’t see how she could continue the work that she loved.
Sure, Gabriel was a tracker, too. But no part of his job description put him in the woods as it did for Daniel when he was looking for arms stashes and meth production along the state border.
“Mopey dog, this is going to be hard on you,” Gabriel said. “You just lost the two things that gave your life meaning. Now you’ve got me, and I’m sorry about that. But I appreciate your patience today.”
Whiskey looked up at Gabriel like she understood every word.
With closed eyes, Gabriel leaned his back against his desk, rubbing Whiskey as he thought through the clues, trying to come up with a strategy that would produce results.
His mind kept bringing him back to the telephone pole and the sign offering free puppies.
Had he picked up something?
Gabriel moved back to his desk and played the video, landing at the very end of the clip as the witness focused down the road.
There was a pole with fliers.
He moved that frame into the software that would make it as clear as possible. If he were lucky, he’d be able to read a phone number, and minimally he’d know the area code.
When his phone rang, Gabriel groped around the top of his desk until his fingers found the case.
He checked the screen. “Hey, Cath.”
“Checking in to see how you’re doing after today. Where are you?” Cathy sounded exhausted. It meant something to him that she reached out.
“I’m at the office working. Whiskey’s lying on my coat being a good girl.”
“Whiskey should behave beautifully. She’s a Cerberus Certified K9.”
“True.” Daniel had put all his disposable income into training her so Whiskey could do good in the world.
If Daniel had a job in the military that took him outside the wire, Gabriel might think that do-gooder streak had something to do with penance.
But Daniel had been a mechanic for the Army, and he went on to be a state police officer for no other reason than he felt the calling. He wasn’t doing it to atone.
“But Daniel knows I don’t do that kind of thing with my job,” Gabriel said. “Why wouldn’t he give Whiskey to an organization where she’d be of service? This doesn’t make sense.”
“You don’t love Whiskey?” Cathy’s voice turned tight with offense.
“Whiskey is fine as dogs go. But would I choose a bloodhound as my bestie?
“What dog would you choose?”
“I wouldn’t, or I’d have a dog.” Gabriel was tired, too. It had taken a lot of energy to stay focused on the case. Typically, lives on the line usually sharpened his focus. But tonight, he was pushing through.
“You like dogs. We’ve always had dogs.”
“I’m not saying I don’t. It’s just that dogs are a commitment to time and energy, and with my travel schedule. I’m just saying …” He needed to get off the call and get back to thinking.
“You’re not traveling that much anymore. If you didn’t get custody of Whiskey in the will, you might have considered a dog to keep you company.”
“I travel for competitions.”
Her voice was tightening with each exchange. “You can run in the woods closer to home.”
The last thing he wanted was to cause Cathy more grief.
“It’s Danny’s daughter,” she said. “Wouldn’t you change things up for your nephews? You’re my kids’ godfather; should I strip you of the honors?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. But he was sure his sister could feel the dark cloud gathering around her poorly chosen words.
“Okay, not daughter. I apologize about the boys. That was mean. You’re the only one I would trust with my rowdy bunch. But Whiskey is more than a dog. Danny left you custody of his partner. As much as he loved Whiskey, Danny must have believed that you’d give her the best life possible.”
“I’m the chosen one.”
He’d tried to make a joke; it fell flat.
“Okay, this isn’t going well,” Cathy said, “so I’m going to hang up. First, though, I texted you a number for Reaper Hamilton Cerberus Tactical. I don’t know why I said that. You know Reaper. Daniel told me you two became friends during Daniel’s hospice. You probably already have it.”
“Why did you text it to me?” Gabriel asked. “I thought Whiskey was fully trained already. She’s certified, right?”
“She is,” Cathy said. “You talked to Danny most days.”
“We did. But we didn’t talk about his dog.”
“Danny wasn’t able to keep Whiskey’s training up, so she would go back over to Cerberus.
It was a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ situation.
” In exchange for keeping her training on point, the teams would use Whiskey whenever they needed her.
I thought you might make some sort of similar arrangement. ”
Gabriel got tangled in those words. He stared down at Whiskey, feeling suddenly possessive, and forgot to answer.
“So you seem fine after today at the lawyer’s and your office emergency,” Cathy’s voice became artificially sweet. “I’ll let you go. I know you’re busy saving lives. Love you.” She hung up before he could respond.
He felt like a shithead.
Deservedly so.