“That’s it!” I announced. “I’m going to kill him . . . or her . . . whoever the hell this Chief Kay is!”
I jumped out of my chair, so frustrated I didn’t know what to do.
“You don’t fuck with my credibility!”
Fists clenched, I practically racewalked to the great room, where I suddenly stopped and looked around as if I were in some place that I’d never been before.
“Two can play this game,” I said as I returned to my study.
“But how can two play when you don’t even know who Chief Kay number two is?” Marino asked.
“Maybe I can’t do anything about that goddamn chat room, but there’s always e-mail.”
“What kind of e-mail?” Marino warily asked.
“Two can play this game. Just wait and see. Now. How about we check on our suspicious car.”
Marino slipped his portable radio off his belt and switched to the service channel.
“What’d you say it was again?” he asked.
“RGG-7112,” I recited it from memory.
“Virginia tags?”
“Sorry,” I replied. “I didn’t get that good of a look.”
“Well, we’ll start there.”
He relayed the tag number to the Virginia Criminal Information Network, or VCIN, and asked for a 10-29. By now it was after ten o’clock.
“Any way you could make me a sandwich or something before I leave?” Marino asked. “I’m about to die of hunger. VCIN’s been a little slow tonight. I hate that.”
He requested bacon, lettuce and tomato with Russian dressing and thick slices of onion, and I cooked the bacon well in the microwave instead of frying it.
“Ali gee, Doc, why’d you have to do that?” he said, holding up a crispy, non-greasy strip of bacon. “It ain’t good unless it’s chewy and got some flavor left that wasn’t soaked up in all those paper towels.”
“It will have plenty of flavor,” I said. “And the rest is up to you. I’m not going to be blamed for clogging up your arteries any worse than they probably already are.”
Marino toasted rye bread and slathered it with butter and Russian dressing he conjured up from Miracle Whip, ketchup and chopped butter pickles. He topped this with lettuce, tomato liberally dashed with salt and thick slices of raw sweet onion.
He made two of these healthy creations and wrapped them in aluminum foil as the radio got back to him. The car was not a Ford Taurus, but a 1998 Ford Contour. It was dark blue and registered to Avis Leasing Corporation.
“That’s kinda interesting;” Marino said “Usually in Richmond all rental cars begin with an R, and you have to request a plate that doesn’t. They started doing that so it wasn’t so obvious to carjackers that someone was from out of town.”
There were no outstanding warrants and the car wasn’t listed as stolen.
17
At eight o’clock the next morning, Wednesday, I squeezed into a metered space. Across the street, the eighteenth-century capitol of the Commonwealth was pristine behind wrought iron and fountains in the fog.
Dr. Wagner, other cabinet members and the attorney general worked in the Ninth Street Executive Office Building, and security had gotten so extreme that I’d begun to feel like a criminal when I came here. Just inside the door was a table, where a capitol police officer checked my satchel.
“If you find anything in there,” I said, “let me know, because I can’t”
The smiling officer looked very familiar, a short, fleshy man I guessed to be in his mid-thirties. He had thinning brown hair and the face of one who had been boyishly cute before advancing years and added weight had begun to have their way with him.
I held out my credentials and he barely gave them a glance.
“Don’t need those,” he cheerfully said. “You remember me? I had to respond to your building a couple times when you used to be over there.”
He pointed in the direction of my old building on Fourteenth Street, which was only five short blocks east.
“Rick Hodges,” he said. “That time they had the uranium scare. ‘Member that?”
“How could I not?” I said. “Not one of our finer moments.”