The Discarded

CHAPTER 20

Sifting through saved traffic-cam data, Orlando tracked Ethan Boyer’s Maserati across the city to the McCrillis International headquarters. Twenty minutes later, he was back on the road, heading east into Maryland. She lost him five miles past the border, however, when he turned off the highway onto a road not monitored by traffic cameras.

A quick look at the map told her his route led through some of the more exclusive bedroom communities that surrounded DC. A search through property records told her all she needed to know.

“You find him?” Quinn asked when he came back downstairs.

She nodded. “I believe so. Last eyes I had on him, he was heading toward a gated community called The Hilltop, which happens to be where he owns a home.”

“Text me the address. A layout of the place would be great, too.”

“Already pulled. I’ll send both to you.”

He leaned down and kissed her. “Don’t wait up.”

“Be careful.”

“I’m not worried about us,” Quinn said. A moment later, he and Nate were gone.

Orlando sent him Boyer’s address and the layout of the man’s house, then considered what her next task should be. Finding Daeng was of utmost importance, but until Quinn came back with more information, there was really nothing she could do on that front.

Her time, she decided, would be best spent working on the Eli angle and trying to uncover the rest of the information he had planned to give Abraham. She delved back into his computer to finish her search but found nothing else.

“Do you think the photo was all he had for you?” she asked Abraham.

“I don’t think he would have thought it necessary to meet in person if it was just a photo. There had to have been something more.”

“What about Tampa? Was it random or did he want you there for a reason?”

Abraham looked surprised by her question. “I…I’ve been thinking it was random. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be.”

“Does it mean something?”

He thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Nothing comes to mind.”

She could see he was starting to feel defeated so she tried a different tact. “Why don’t you tell me more about him? What was he like?”

“Like I said before, a bit of a loner. Cautious.”

“Paranoid?” she asked.

“Perhaps a little, though I’m not sure I’d use that word myself.” He paused before adding, “Clearly he was a collector. I knew he’d done a little bit of it, but didn’t realize the extent.”

“When was the last time you saw him in person?”

“Two summers ago,” Abraham said. “Every few years he’d come to San Diego for Comic-Con and we’d get together for lunch one of the days.”

“So…nerdy, kept to himself for the most part, borderline paranoid,” Orlando summed up. “The perfect CIA analyst.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, given those factors, even after he’d snuck out of DC, he would have still considered himself in potential danger, right?”

“Sure. That makes sense.”

“Then he would have taken precautions, left a backup somewhere you could find it if something happened to him.”

“But I searched the hotel room. If he left anything there, the others got it.”

“You’re looking at this wrong. I mean, yes, if you were just a normal guy, never worked in the business, you might hide the information in the room. But Eli wasn’t a normal guy. He may not have been in the field, but he lived on the edge of our world.”

“So…what? He dropped a copy in the mail to me? He knew I’d be there in a few hours so that seems unlikely, don’t you think?”

“Exactly. And you’re not a normal guy. You were an operative and he knew that. Now, think. What would he have done? What would he have done that you specifically would have been able to figure out?”

Abraham fell silent, his gaze resting unfocused on the tabletop. “I really don’t know. He wouldn’t have even been there long enough to do much by the time the ambulance came for him.”

“That’s true. There was a very finite window.”

She grabbed her laptop and jerked it forward. Within seconds she was in the system for the Azure Waves Hotel. The security department monitored over a hundred cameras spread throughout the facility. From the amount of storage they had, she knew they wouldn’t keep old footage for long. As she dove into the archive, she hoped she wasn’t too late.

Her immediate impression was that the majority of old footage was dumped within twenty-four hours, but this tended to be true only for cameras in less traveled areas of the facility. The footage from those in and around the elevators, the lobby, the pool area, and the main entrances were held on to longer.

Since nothing remained from the seventh floor in the building where Eli had been staying, Orlando concentrated on the lobby, starting early evening. Running the playback at high speed, she scanned the comings and goings of the guests and employees, not spotting Eli until the timer on the image read 09:43:21 PM. She slowed the footage to double speed and observed as he checked into the hotel.

“He’s nervous,” Abraham said.

That was an understatement. Every fifteen seconds or so, Eli would shoot a look over his shoulder as if expecting someone to jump him.

When he received his key, he headed immediately to the elevators.

“He’s carrying a bag,” Orlando said. It was a small suitcase. “It wasn’t in the room, right?”

“The room was empty.”

As soon as Eli disappeared, she increased the speed again. She thought the next time they see him, he’d be on a gurney, but—

“Stop!” Abraham shouted.

Orlando paused the image.

“Go back,” he told her. “He just walked through.”

She scrolled back until Eli was clearly in frame. He had exited the elevators at 10:46:09 PM, walked straight across the lobby, and out the front door. She stopped the image and switched to a camera outside. Matching the time code, she found the point where he came out. He paused on the sidewalk for several moments, looking both ways. Three cabs were at the curb to the left. The driver of the first stuck his head out his window and said something to Eli. Eli shook his head and then turned right and walked off.

“So he was on foot,” Abraham said.

“Or caught a cab somewhere else,” she said.

She sped up the image. Eli returned twenty-four minutes later. Not really enough time to drive anywhere far away and get back, so she thought it unlikely he’d grabbed a taxi. She followed him through the lobby to the elevators. When he got on, a drunk-looking woman stumbled on with him, but not just any woman. The same one who had been in Eli’s apartment and met with Boyer.

Gloria Clark.

Once more Orlando sped up the footage, this time slowing when the two men dressed as paramedics wheeled a gurney holding an unconscious Eli toward the front door. Right behind him was Clark.

“It’s her,” Abraham said, seeing it now, too.

Orlando nodded as she opened a new window on her browser and brought up a map of the area surrounding the Azure Waves Hotel. “All right. Eli could have gone, what? Maybe a mile and a half out and back, if he kept walking the whole time. But we’ve got to figure he would have stopped for a bit and—”

“Orlando, that was the woman,” he said.

“I realize that. Not a big shock she was there, though, is it? Now, come on, I need you to concentrate.” She created a circle with a mile radius around the hotel. “Wherever Eli went, I’m pretty sure it’s in this circle. Think. What kind of place would he have gone to?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was getting something to eat.”

“All right. Restaurants. We’ll start there.” She put in the parameters and the program highlighted all the known eating establishments in the area. There were dozens. “Does he have a favorite type of food?”

“When we met up, we sometimes went for Italian or Chinese or for steaks. Nothing in particular.”

“If we’re working off the premise that he did leave something behind, and it would be somewhere you could figure out, then I guess restaurants are out.”

Abraham reluctantly nodded.

“What, then? Bars?” she asked, then remembered the stack of posters at his townhouse. “How about a movie theater? He liked movies.”

“That could be it.”

She searched for movie theaters, but the only two were right at the edge of the mile — unlikely candidates.

“Bookstores,” she said, thinking back to his place again.

She tried that. There were seven hits. Five were used bookstores, one of which was only a couple blocks from the hotel. Another was part of one of the big chains.

“That’s it,” Abraham said, pointing at the last store on the list. “If he did leave something, that’s where it would be.”

She couldn’t argue with him.

The seventh bookshop was a place called DeeDee’s Comics, and was located somewhere between a five- and ten-minute walk from the hotel.

She brought up the store’s website. “They’re open to eleven. You want to give them a call?”

“Why not?”

The call connected after the fifth ring.

At first only loud rock music came out of the speaker on Abraham’s phone — a classic Arctic Monkeys tune, if Orlando was correct — then a man said, “DeeDee’s.”

“Good evening,” Abraham said. “I, um, have a bit of an unusual question to ask.”

“You wouldn’t be the first. What is it?”

“I’m wondering if a friend of mine left something there for me.”

“This isn’t a mailbox store,” the guy said, sounding like he was about to hang up.

“I realize that,” Abraham said quickly. “He would have come in three nights ago just before you closed.”

“I wasn’t on three nights ago.”

“Well, is there someone there who was?”

An exasperated “Hold on.”

The Arctic Monkeys filled the absence until a woman came on and said in a much friendlier voice than her colleague’s, “This is Vanessa. Can I help you?”

“Yes, my name is…Abraham Delger. I think a friend of mine may have left something there for me the other night.”

In an unexpectedly cautious tone, she said, “It’s possible. Who was your friend?”

“Eli Becker,” he said. “Oh, or he may have been going by Charles Young.”

“May have been going by?” the woman asked.

“His name is Eli. It’s…well, it’s a long story. Did he leave something for me?”

If it weren’t for the fact they could still hear music, Orlando would have wondered if they’d been disconnected. Finally Vanessa asked, “What was the girl’s favorite game?”

Orlando could see that Abraham was shocked by the question.

“Hey, you still there?” the woman asked.

“Checkers,” he blurted out. “She loved checkers.”

“Then yeah. I do have something for you. When do you want to pick it up?”