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“We better look,” she said, anxiously. She opened the door with a key.
The apartment was a shambles, with an overturned easy chair and coffee table, a thick skein of paper scattered like snowflakes, maybe thrown at someone, and a palm-sized blood spot on the beige carpet.
“Look at this,” Letty said, pointing at the blood.
“Oh, my God,” the manager said. “I gotta call the police.”
“We’ll wait here,” Letty said. “We won’t touch anything.”
The manager opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and half-jogged down the hall. Letty picked up the edge of the carpet: the blood had barely soaked through. Whoever had been hurt, she told Baxter, had lain on the floor for a short time, but hadn’t been terribly wounded: “Looks like a bad bloody nose.”
“So maybe he’s still alive.”
“We can hope, but...” She didn’t have to say it.
Delph’s wallet was on a bedstand, with twenty dollars inside, and Baxter spotted the edge of what turned out to be a cell phone, poking out from under a pillow. Other than the speakers from what apparently had been a desktop computer, there were no other electronics: Baxter said that whoever had the desktop must also have gotten at least one laptop, because everybody had at least one laptop. “It’s the Russians, they got him.”
“No point in searching the place,” Letty said, looking around. “We don’t have the time and if Delph was like Barron, we probably won’t find anything that’s not encrypted.”
“I agree. Let’s get out of here before the cops come,” Baxter said. “We need to call Nowak and have her get the FBI over here to check for DNA and fingerprints. Looks like there was a fight.”
“And we need to find his girlfriend; I think that might be her,” Letty said, nodding at a commercial double-portrait photo of ayoung man and a young woman, nicely framed, sitting on a couch table; it looked like a gift.
Baxter said, “Uh... wait a minute. What kind of phone was that in there?”
“I don’t know... is it important?”
“Maybe...” Baxter retrieved the phone: “Samsung... Android.”
He clicked the phone to bring it up, hurriedly stripped the glass out of the picture frame and positioned the phone in front of the photo of the young man. The phone opened up. He said, “Shazam. Shitty Android face recognition. iPhones are way harder to fool.”
“Keep it open,” Letty said. “Take the photo. And let’s go...”
As they were walking down toward the elevator, they heard it start up: “Gotta be the manager,” Letty said. “Take the stairs.”
They took the stairs and got out clean. In the truck, Letty called Nowak again: “We’ve got a missing guy who probably was kidnapped... You need to get the FBI to his apartment to process it. LAPD is probably on the way. Looks like there was a fight, so they may find some biologics.”
“I’ll get the FBI over there. You two are okay?”
“So far,” Baxter said. “We think we’re about done.”
“Not quite yet,” Nowak said. “You’ve tripped over a situation that has created intense interest here—the Russian involvement. We want you to be careful but keep poking around. See what you turn up.”
“We can do that... carefully,” Letty said.
Letty gave Delph’s addressto Nowak, asked her to hold on for a moment while they ran quickly through Delph’s phone, where they found a phone number, but no address, for “Annie.”
They gave Nowak the number and she said, “I’ll get back in a minute.”
They waited in the truck for ten minutes, then Nowak called with the billing address for Annie’s phone number—another apartment, not far away. Letty called and the phone went to an answering app. “Turned it off. Let’s check the apartment.”
“You think they took her, too?”
“Don’t know. We need to find her.”
Annie Bell’s apartmenthad an outer lobby with mailboxes and doorbells in the lobby, but with another set of doors that kept them from getting inside. They found “Bellado” scrawled on a sticky-tab on one of the mailboxes, for an apartment on the second floor, and pushed the doorbell. Seconds later, a woman asked, “Who is it? Danny?”
Letty looked at Baxter and shrugged: “My name’s Charlie Snow. I’m a friend of Able’s and William’s and Melody’s and we’re trying to find Daniel Delph. Can you let us in?”
