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“What!”
“Shot them, probably with silenced pistols and subsonics—we weren’t far away, I had the car window down and we didn’t hear shots. They had to be professionals. The woman’s name was Brianna Wolfe and she was thirty-one; we’ll send you a photo of her driver’s license. We also have photos of the two men and their vehicle’s license plate. Your tracker guy is following their truck. We want to move that all onto you guys and let your big brains sort it out.”
“Murdered! My God! Two people?”
“Get over it,” Letty said. “Here come the photos...”
Baxter: “You need to tell us what to do.”
“We’ll talk about it here,” Nowak said. “Are you safe?”
“For the time being—but I gotta tell you, Delores, there’s something going on that Rod and I don’t know about,” Letty said. “I have the feeling that it doesn’t involve gas companies, unless SoCalGas has hit men on the payroll. I have the feeling you may have been telling us a few fibs.”
Nowak didn’t respond for a moment, then said, “Hang on, I’m calling our tracker to see where the SUV went.”
While she was doing that, Letty put her thumb over the microphone and said, “Don’t tell her about the CDs or the flash drives. I’d like to see what’s on them before we have to ship them off.”
“Probably all encrypted,” Baxter said.
“So it wouldn’t make any difference if she got them right now, or later.”
“Probably not,” Baxter agreed. “Except she’ll be pissed at me.”
Nowak came back: “The tracker says the SUV is on the 405 headed toward the Valley.”
“Okay. We may head over there,” Letty said. “Maybe you could jack up the FBI SWAT squad...”
“We’ll talk about that and let you know,” Nowak said. “I’m going to take this up a level. Whatever Barron was involved in, even if it wasn’t attacking a gas line, he drew in killers.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Letty said.
“This is bizarre,” Nowak said. “Nobody knows you were in the house?”
“No. And the killers don’t know they’ve been spotted and tracked. A SWAT team could grab them right now.”
“We may not want to do that,” Nowak said. Pause. “Or, we may. Is there any possibility these men spotted your Hertz?”
“Don’t think so,” Baxter said. “Our license plates are in the LAPD database; you could have your tracker look at our plates and see if anyone followed us.”
“I’ll do that,” Nowak said. “If you think you’re clean, keep the Hertz. You may need more than one vehicle.”
Letty: “What about Able and his friends? We don’t know how the killers got to Barron’s place—if they followed him from Able’s, then Able might be in trouble. We need to warn him and his friends.”
“Not yet. I’ll be back to you within an hour or two. Maybe sooner... Maybe with a plan of some sort.”
When they rang off, Baxter said, “They’re hiding information from us. What is it?”
“Don’t know,” Letty said.
“Then what do you want to do?”
“Find that SUV.”
Baxter pulled at his lower lip for a moment, then smiled and said, “All right.”
Eleven
The NSA tracker called back: “They stopped somewhere on Ventura Boulevard. We got them through one stoplight, but they didn’t go through the next one. They should be somewhere on that block, since you can’t get out of it without running past a camera. It’s possible they stopped and changed their license plate, but that seems unlikely. There’s a Vons supermarket there... they could be in the parking lot.”
