Troubleshooter

Chapter 64

Tim had entered the squad room carrying the pages triumphantly. His energy proved contagious, and virtually all the other deputies had pulled chairs around his desk to dig back into the case. In the printouts Krindon had broken down the Lexus's headings into five-minute snapshots, yielding a profusion of numbers, but still it took maps, a military GPS computer program, and trial-and-error strategy to evaluate the data. In some places Krindon had pegged the area to within a hundred feet, in others within a few blocks. Not until lunch did they start connecting the dots to figure out travel routes, which they then harmonized with the street maps and traced with red pens. Tim Sharpie-marked as potential destinations anywhere that no movement was recorded between snapshots, but this assumption didn't account for traffic and was further complicated by the fact that satellite towers were not closely spaced in rural areas.

At 2:15, Jim looked up at the wall clock and said, "It's been a week. Since Den Laurey's escape. Since Frankie."

They returned to the data with newfound vigor. Routes overlapped, but Uncle Pete proved to be surprisingly mobile. It quickly became plain that they had more leads than they could parse in a feasible time frame. Even once they carved up the routes between deputy teams and pulled in the FBI, they looked to be weeks away from completing the follow-up, and if Tim knew one thing, it was that they didn't have weeks. Den Laurey would likely lie low until his face was off the front page and the news teasers; then he'd slip away to an ironically named desert town where cash was king and anonymity the rule.

Tim was just resigning himself to the new set of frustrations when Bear floated out of Miller's office holding a sheaf of faxes aloft like a waiter bearing a steaming entree. "Do you know what I have here?"

Jim, gamely matching his tone: "Why, no, Bear. What have you there?"

"Here, my little friends, I have a set of billing records, sent to us by our dear friend at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Jeffrey Malane."

Tim felt his heart quicken.

"And to whom, Mr. Jowalski," Jim asked, "do those billing records belong?"

"To one Dana Lake, Esq. And do you know what lawyers bill for?"

Miller, thrice divorced, said, "Everything."

"Including phone calls." Bear threw the sheaf on Tim's desk, and Tim grabbed the top page eagerly. It was in spreadsheet format, the auto-spit-out of a computer billing program attached to Dana's phone system.

DL Telephone Conferences 11/4

Laughing Sinners, Inc.

Hurwitz, Gregg – Rackley 03

Troubleshooter (2005)

Number

Hurwitz, Gregg – Rackley 03

Troubleshooter (2005)

Description

Hrs.