Criss Cross

Chapter 82

Forbes’s former partner and his attorney went in to give him the good news. But after I’d learned the real name and most recent address of the man we called Pseudo-Craig, I’d decided not to go with them. I told them to give Marty my sincere best, and I left.

The first thing I did was call Keith Karl Rawlins to tell him to start digging. Then I called Ned Mahoney and told him to meet me in the lab beneath the FBI’s cybercrimes unit at Quantico.

Mahoney was already there when I pulled open the lab’s glass door and was met with the thudding techno dance music Rawlins listened to when he was working.

The cyber expert was sitting at his keyboard facing an array of six screens. Ned was standing behind him. I tapped Mahoney on the shoulder and he jumped.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, almost shouting, and then he pointed to the silicon earplugs he’d stuffed into his ears.

Rawlins’s head was bobbing to the beat, but at that point, he stopped and shut off the music. He looked over his shoulder at me as if he’d expected to see me there and then gestured with his chin toward my phone. “It’s clean now. You can take it.”

I picked the phone up off the bench, put it in my pocket, and said, “What about Nolan?”

“Oh, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on him already.”

“Tell me,” I said, coming closer. “And let’s lose the techno soundtrack. I’ve already had a ridiculously long day.”

Rawlins didn’t like that, but he shrugged. “Your loss.”

He gave his keyboard an order and up popped a digital rap sheet on one William Nolan, age forty-six, address in Encino, California.

“Look at him!” Mahoney said. “He is an absolute dead ringer for Kyle Craig.”

“From all three angles,” I said, shaking my head.

“But I ran Nolan’s prints against Craig’s old prints. Not even close to a match.”

There it was, then, finally. Kyle Craig was still a dead man, and I wasn’t crazy.

I let that make me feel better about things and listened intently as Rawlins gave us a summary of what he’d found. Nolan had been a stuntman and a B-movie actor in Hollywood until he’d developed a taste for cocaine, which got him involved in burglary and then grand theft auto.

The latter move had gifted him with a three-year swing in the California Institution for Men at Chino. Nolan had served his term and left prison four years ago.

There was a phone number for his parole officer, whom we caught at her desk. She called Nolan a model parolee. After his release, he’d worked in a car wash and then for a company that dealt with contamination on construction sites.

“Where would we find him?” Mahoney asked.

“The company’s offices in Encino,” she said.

But when we called, we learned that Nolan had quit his job six weeks before. He’d told coworkers he was getting back into the film business, that he’d gotten the role of a lifetime.

When we hung up the phone, Rawlins jumped up from his console, flipped on the techno, and started pumping his fist overhead.

“You’re killing me with this music,” Mahoney said. “Nuke it.”

The FBI contractor rolled his eyes and turned it off. “You know the problem with most Americans and definitely most FBI agents, Special Agent Mahoney?”

“Do tell,” Ned said, crossing his arms.

“They’re all stick and no carrot,” he said. “They drive themselves day and night, but when they score, they don’t celebrate. I believe in celebrating every victory, especially one as big as this.”

“So let us in on the reason for the celebration,” I said.

Rawlins smiled. “William Nolan has a bank account and two high-interest credit cards, the kind given to risky creditors like ex-cons.”

“He use them?”

“Six weeks ago, he bought a ticket for a flight from LA to New York, then a train ticket to DC, and then twenty-two nights at a one-star in Gaithersburg called the Regal Motel. Snap! Eat the carrot, Cross! You’ve got him now!”