Free The Disposable Man by Archer Mayor Page A

morning—at least he seemed to.”
    Gail raised up to prop her head in her hand. “He
knew
about it? How?”
    “That’s what I asked him. He pulled the all-seeing-eye routine, implying he even knew who the mugger was.”
    “Why would he tell you that?”
    “To impress me, to hoodwink me, to scare me. You name it. Whatever it is, it worked. I left his office so full of theories I had no idea which one might be right. We’ve practiced disinformation at the department now and then, either to flush someone out or to get the press to cut us some slack, but this took the cake.”
    “But why go to all the trouble?” Gail asked.
    “Specifically? I have no idea,” I answered. “But it keeps boiling down to a single common denominator. Regardless of whether the CIA is hoping we’ll drop it or pursue it, we’ve obviously stepped into something pretty interesting, and I would love to find out what the hell it is—and why the FBI is apparently also being kept in the dark.”
    · · ·
    I waited for Ron and J.P. to squeeze themselves into my two office chairs, one wedged between a couple of filing cabinets, the other shoved under a tiny side table loaded down with files. Each man knew to move slowly and cautiously, having suffered paper landslides in the past.
    “You both get the memo on my trip to DC?” I asked.
    J.P. nodded. Ron asked, “How real is the CIA connection?”
    “Real enough, not that we can do anything about it right now. For the moment, I’m pretending they don’t even exist. What did you two dig up while I was gone?”
    Ron started off, cradling a thick folder in his lap, which he patted apologetically. “Not much on the paper trail. All the inquiries we sent out are still dangling, including the ones to Canada. INS and DEA have nothing on their books. I drove to Boston to look over the airline passenger lists personally, but Boris Malik doesn’t show up anywhere, meaning he either used another name, or he picked up the car at the airport as a decoy. In the three hours before he rented the car, planes came in from all over the place, including Moscow, but without a name, I don’t guess it matters. I kept the lists just in case another alias crops up, but otherwise, it’s a dead end.”
    “You talk to the rental people?” I asked.
    “Yeah, but there again… The girl who did the paperwork recognized him, but she couldn’t remember if he had luggage or not, or if he said where he was headed. She wasn’t even sure if he was alone. She did say he had an accent. It was the only reason she remembered him at all—’cause they had such a hard time communicating.”
    “What about the credit card?”
    “Counterfeit. The charge went through to some poor bastard in Illinois. The name on the card was Malik’s.”
    “He didn’t ask for any maps or directions?”
    Ron shook his head.
    I looked at J.P. “You fare any better?”
    He smiled, despite the absence of a file folder of any size. “I think so. I got two items linking the car trunk to the dead man. The first is a definite blood match, and the second might give us the leg up we’ve been looking for, although to give credit where it’s due, one of the crime lab guys discovered it. Remember the debris collected from Boris’s hair and clothes? Most of it was pond scum, but there was a single leaf fragment that caught this guy’s eye. He’s an amateur botanist—studied it in college—and this thing looked like nothing he’d ever seen. So instead of just sending it down the pipeline for someone else to figure out weeks from now, he took it to a consultant after work. Turns out it came from a ginkgo tree—a
Ginkgo
biloba
, to be exact—native to China, so it’s pretty rare.”
    He was about to continue, which I knew he could do for a quarter hour if properly stimulated, but I was too curious to wait. “How rare?” I asked.
    J.P. blinked at me a couple of times, caught off guard. “I don’t know—maybe a couple of hundred in the state.