Chapter Twenty-One
Gabriel
Tuesday
Gabriel moved through the door into the Joint Task Force conference room. Prescott, Kennedy, and Finley sat on one end of the table. Their guest, Hinton, sat at the other end, leaving a chair vacant for Gabriel.
“You never got back to me with feedback about that video I analyzed for you.” Gabriel was ticked.
It was courtesy.
Gabriel needed feedback so he’d know whether he was accurate with the pins he put on maps.
Okay, it was curiosity, too.
“You nailed it,” Hinton said.
Gabriel had to bite back the “And?”
Luckily, Finley did that. “We have them on street cameras from the far corner and moving down the road, but we didn’t establish how they left the area.”
“You’re sure they did?”
“Positive,” Finley said.
“The street cams didn’t capture the whole scene the witness captured, though?” Gabriel asked.
“The last frames when the witness camera turned,” Hinton said.
Those last frames were down at the corner where Gabriel found the pole with the fliers stapled up.
Interesting that this case landed in the Joint Task Force’s lap. The JTF worked terrorist cases where an international hand was moving the puppets.
“What about an identification?” Gabriel asked. “Do you at least know who the guy is?” It had been three months. As horrible as it was to say, if the victim hadn’t been found yet—or even identified—that man’s chances of walking out of the shadows were nil.
“No, we don’t.” Hinton said, “We’re continuing to work on it, but in the meantime, from that same email with the same words in the subject heading, we received another video.”
Prescott lifted his hand from the table. “Look, I’m going to cut you off, Hinton. I want Gabriel to know that, in the video you’re about to hand him, we recognize the man holding the gun as a Prokhorov enforcer.”
“East European crime family,” Rowan said.
“Okay,” Gabriel said. The players were meaningless to him.
Finley leaned in. “That’s the same family as Igor Prokhorov. Last year we handed you the picture. He was arrested, indicted in the grand jury, and is—”
“Coming up for trial Tuesday. I’ll be testifying about how I go about geolocating from photographs to prove that the FBI didn’t set up in a sting.” Gabriel turned to Hinton. “And Igor has something to do with your video?”
“Only that you were handed a second puzzle dealing with the same family. The one where you identified the address where the FBI special agent crossed the road at gunpoint. And now this third one.” Prescott answered.
“You saw this enforcer in the video. Did you see the special agent’s face?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s inside a building,” Hinton said. “The lights are very dim. It’s a long shot, but if you can tell me anything at all about what you see, it would be more than I have right now.”
“Where did you get this?” Gabriel asked as Hinton slid a tablet toward him.
“In the same way we got the first. Same words in the subject line. It was a new email address. It must be someone who works in the building and is both observant and willing to take a risk.”
The video that played was of a garage interior. Dim and empty. Worn. Dirty. The doors had long windows that let in the only light.
In the video, a man stood in a garage with a gun in his hand. Hunched over and leaning against the wall was a second man. A third stood closer to the garage doors with a fan of light crossing his face. “The Prokhorov guy?”
“There,” Rowan said, pointing. “That’s him.”
“Our team made the garage discovery,” Hinton planted his flag on that hill. “Then I brought it to The Joint Task Force for input.” He turned to Gabriel. “We gave you credit for the address.”
Credit? Gabriel didn’t need that. He wanted the victim found.
“You’ve had this for a while?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes, for a while now. It occurred to me,” Hinton sent a quick look toward Rowan, “that you might see something I didn’t.”
“You put this through the computer systems to see if AI couldn’t adjust those shadows to get a better view of the victim’s face?”
“I did. We had hoped to finally get an identification on our captured special agent,” Hinton said. “But his face is swollen from a beating. There’s nothing identifying about him in this video.”
Gabriel watched as the criminals forced the victim at gunpoint to undress all the way to naked. Were they looking for something? Or was this some kind of dehumanization technique?
A fourth figure went through his clothes.
“They’re looking for a wire,” Finley said.
Then they had the victim kneel. And they shaved his head bald.
Interesting.
“We think they’re looking for tiny audio wires or cameras,” Rowan said. “We can make them look like hair and super glue them to people’s heads.”
Gabriel nodded. Huh, he had no idea that technology existed.
They gave the victim another set of clothes. The same type of clothes that Gabriel had seen in the first video with the man walking across the street with the gun pointed to his head. The collar of his FBI jacket had been up, and Gabriel couldn’t see anything of that man’s face.
“They’re forcing him to put on the FBI jacket,” Hinton said. “This person who’s watching him and taking these videos, they’re risking their life.”
“Where do you think they were standing to shoot this video?” Gabriel asked. “There’s no audio, but this isn’t a super camera with a lens that can read a page from a mile away. I mean, they’re in a garage.”
“They’re in a garage that has windows along this side,” Hinton said. “They’re eye height. They’re not filtering much light into the interior. It’s an alleyway.”
“You think the person is standing in the alleyway taking videos of a crime family?” Gabriel asked.
“The computer mapped where the lens would be,” Hinton said. “We have the exact spot.”
“Okay.” Gabriel tapped the video to restart it at the beginning. “But if you know that, you know the location of this garage.”
“It’s right across the street and down three doors from the place where he stumbled out in the first video,” Hinton said.
“If you know that,” Gabriel tapped the screen to pause the video, “then why am I here?”
“I wanted to see if you had anything to add,” Hilton said.
“I’m a geolocator.” Something about Hinton made Gabriel’s teeth itch.
He hoped that the Joint Task Force was taking this over and that’s what this meeting was all about.
Gabriel turned to Finley. “I’m sure you already tried to turn Igor.
Do you think he’d be interested in talking to you about these videos? ”
“For now he’s keeping his mouth shut,” Finley said.
“Do you blame him?” Rowan asked. “We had another individual. He was offered a plea deal that required cooperation. After his arraignment, we drove them back to jail, and even though the guy turned us down, he ended up—”
“According to the coroner,” Finley said.
“--committing suicide,” Rowan finished.
“Suicide, how?” Gabriel asked, since the sarcasm in Finley’s voice was thick enough to cut with a knife.
“He swallowed a plastic trash bag,” Rowan said.
“Oh wow.”
“That’s the story.” Rowan turned his hands palms up.
“Wow.” Gabriel shook his head in disbelief.
Finley spun his pen. “A few years back, there was a group called El Primo, and a gang member who died from a bar of soap getting stuck in his throat. Somehow that seems worse to me.”
Gabriel dropped his head. The things that humans could and did do to each other were mind-bending. He looked up to catch Rowan’s gaze. “But you’ve safeguarded Igor, right? I’m still needed on Tuesday?”
“We have him in solitary. It’s the best we can do.”
Gabriel pulled the tablet closer and watched the video a second time, then a third.
“First, your witness isn’t a good guy—gal, I’m pretty sure this is a woman taking the videos,” Gabriel said.
“We don’t need them to be,” Hinton held his pen in his hand with all eight fingers pressed tightly together on the top and his thumbs underneath. It made Gabriel think of raccoon hands.
“What was second?” Rowan asked Gabriel.
“This isn’t the same man as in the first video.”
“What?” Hinton looked wild-eyed. “Walk me through that.”
“There are very few clues here. I mean, we're talking dust in the air.” Gabriel played the video and stopped on the frame that focused on the window. “I'm looking at pollen in the air through the window—a cloud of yellowish green.” He spread his fingers on the screen so that the others could see it clearly. “That’s tree pollen. I was researching this for a different case just recently. If this took place at the address I found for the first video I was shown, then you can put the date on this video around April twentieth when the pollen was really bad. That is, if it’s from this year. And April Twentieth is after the March video that I already analyzed. The first one you have on camera, so you have the date. This one was about six weeks ago.”
“Listening,” Hinton said.
“There was no pollen in the first video. Tree pollen in D.C. is inescapable. There would have been some somewhere in that video—on the cars, in the gutters. We had that late-February snowstorm. As I remember it, the cars in the first video were clean. There was no salt and mud on them. There were no last piles of snow in the shadows. If they happened in the same year, and if it was this year, I’d say that the first video took place in the second week of March. ”
“That’s correct,” Hinton said.
“This video happened around April twentieth. You said you had street camera verification of the first video?”
“The camera range stops at the corner,” Hinton said. “That’s why we thought this was a video from earlier on the same day in March.”
“Check April twentieth, around that date, and see if you see this guy crossing the street. If not, at least verify that I’m not right in terms of the pollen.
I’ll also remind you that the man in the first video was bald as he crossed the street.
And this man started off with hair. If they are videos on different days, these are different victims.” Gabriel’s mouth was dry, and he wished someone had set out water bottles.