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Lucas sighed: “I guess we gotta ask.”
—
Lucas called thepolice hotline and asked for Mellon, who’d gone home, but he’d left behind a sergeant to deal with virus questions. Lucas asked about bike shop ownership, and he said he’d call back.
Stuart said, “If we’ve got them cornered, their best bet would be to infect a large group of people here in town, and hope some of them get out to spread the virus. You guys are telling me this virus is crazy infectious. I think us guys ought to set up in all the places that will still attract crowds in town. People have to eat, so…supermarkets, you know. They’ve got this plaza here, if that pulls people…”
“Where else?” Rae asked.
Before anyone answered, Lucas’s phone rang and the sergeant gave him two names of bike shop owners. He had addresses but no phonenumbers for them. “They’re also the store operators, so if Scott bought a bike, they’d probably know.”
When Lucas rang off, Rae said, wearily, “Let’s mount up, go knock on those doors.”
“Hang on a minute,” Letty said. She looked down her list of contacts and punched one, and put the phone on speaker so everybody could hear.
An extremely cranky woman asked, “What?”
“This is Letty…”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
“We need cell phone numbers for two people in Taos, New Mexico,” Letty said.
A frigid silence. Then, “Give me what you know about them.”
Letty gave her the names and addresses, said, “That’s all we’ve got,” and the woman rang off without saying goodbye.
“That’s a friendly sort,” Devlin said. “I wonder if she dates?”
Made Letty smile, and Rae asked, “Why would you wonder that, my little sweetie?”
“What else we got?” Lucas asked. “Anybody?”
“I think Hoang is right—they might start looking around for crowds,” Hawkins said. “We not only need us, we need the local police and the MPs to cover everything where more than five or ten people congregate. Indoors, only, I think…”
Letty’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and when she answered, a man asked, “Do you have a pencil?”
“Yes.”
“I have four phone numbers for you…the subjects and their wives…”
Letty took down the numbers, the man asked, “Got them?” and she said “Yes,” and he hung up.
“My God,” Hawkins said. “What was that, five minutes? Six minutes? That’s disturbing.”
Cartwright: “She’s dealing with the NSA, America’s crime family.”
Letty called the first number, for the owner of Popcycle. The phone rang six times and went to the answering app. She hung up, dialed it again, and a man answered. “Who is this?”
Trying to explain exactly who she was would be too complicated, so she said, “U.S. Marshals Service. We are asking local bicycle shop owners if they sold any bicycles today or yesterday, especially mountain or off-road bikes…”
“You mean so somebody could sneak out of town cross-country?” the man asked sleepily.
“That’s exactly what we mean, yes.”
“Uh, we did sell a bike this morning, but it was to an elderly lady and she bought it for her nephew…she said. She bought a helmet and gloves to go with it.”
“Did you get a name on her card?”
