There’d been no movement overnight. The day shift was back in the truck and the cameras were focused on the car wash.
“What happened to the Hat?” Devlin asked Orish.
“He owns an apartment house over on the east side, six apartments. He went in, and that’s the last we’ve seen of him. He could be in any of the apartments and we haven’t seen anybody arriving who might be carrying off the heroin. Makes a raid tough.”
“He’s probably cutting it,” Devlin said.
“Or he sleeps late,” Kerry said.
One of the computer operators said, “The hearse is moving.”
Orish and Kerry went to the windows and looked out. “There it goes,” Orish said, looking down at the hotel driveway. “Probably back to Florida for the second load.”
“We need to keep close track of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, what if the dope is still in the hearse, and they did the whole car wash thing to make sure they were clean?”
Orish and Kerry glanced at each other, and then Kerry said, “Unlikely.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “But I’d sure hate to lose track of the dope . . .”
Orish said to the computer operator, “If that hearse slows down for more than a traffic light, I want to know about it. I want a car on it until it’s well out of town. Not where it could be seen, but where it could catch up in a minute or so, if the hearse starts to wander.”
“Got it,” the computer operator said.
They stood around, watching the arrowhead that represented the hearse crawling across Staten Island. It was approaching water when the computer operator who was monitoring the surveillance camera called, “We got another one.”
* * *
They went to the surveillance screen and watched a Cadillac SUV disappear into the garage. The plate went to a Cheri Malone; she showed no criminal record at all.
“I’d call that a possibility,” Orish said, looking at the photo on Malone’s driver’s license. She was a hard-faced fifty and held a New York real estate license. “What do you think, Lucas?”
“Don’t know. Like you said, a possibility. If she’s never been inside, the prospect might frighten her. On the other hand, she’s not likely to draw a lot of time . . . clean record, she might even claim to be doing a favor for a friend.”
The Cadillac backed out of the garage after a two-minute stay and rolled away.
The hearse had crossed into New Jersey and had turned south on I-95.
Twenty minutes later a pickup truck drove into the garage. “Paul Curry,” Orish said. Wrinkles appeared on her forehead. “I know that name. I think he might be . . .”
A computer operator said, “He might be the one. He’s been inside four times, twice for dope, once for ag assault, once for criminal sexual assault. He’s fifty-two, one more big bust and he goes away forever.”
“Anything on his family?” Kerry asked.
The operator rattled some keys and then said, “Married, two children in their twenties.”
“The problem is, if he flips on Sansone, Sansone’s people could take it out on his family, even if Curry and his wife are in witness protection,” Devlin said. “Of course, being an asshole, maybe he wouldn’t care.”
“But he’s another possible,” Lucas said. “Let’s start digging on him. Find out where he’s going, where he has the dope.”
“Crank up an entry team?” Orish asked.
“Not yet,” Lucas said. “Let’s just track him.”
They tracked him to a neighborhood called New Dorp, south and east of the car wash.
“We got another one. They’re starting to come in,” the surveillance operator said.
They went to look: a black five-liter Mustang. The tag went out to a Kent Pruitt, and when they looked, they found a complicated rap sheet that involved drug sales, burglaries both alleged and proven, and three alleged sexual assaults, a guilty plea on one with the other two nol-prossed. “Prosecutor traded a guilty plea for the nol-prosses,” Kerry said.
They all read through the rap sheet and Lucas pointed at the bottom of the computer screen: “Look at this. He was a witness in a rape trial. Actually, if I’m reading this right, it looks like he was a victim of a rapist, while he was in prison. He will not want to go back. If we hit him for anything heavy, like possession of a kilo of heroin, he’ll be going back forever.”
“Attention, people,” Orish said to the group, clapping her hands twice. “We’ve got a live one. We need everything we can get on this Pruitt. We need to move three cars and box him, don’t lose him. He could be our man.”
* * *
The surveillance teams tracked Pruitt to a house that was owned by a Kills Realty, which apparently specialized in rental management. The trackers watched, but Pruitt didn’t immediately reemerge.
Orish wanted to watch for more prime distributors and Lucas agreed with that, but suggested that she was unlikely to find somebody better than Pruitt. “Devlin and I will pick him up,” Lucas said. “You need to have someone good at interrogation, I think in Manhattan—and we don’t take that ferry over there, we drive him. We don’t want anyone to see his face after we have him in a car.”
“We feel one of our teams would be better,” Orish said.
Lucas shook his head. “Look. You guys do a mountain of research and you’re really good at that, but you do two kinds of arrests. One is, you send in a SWAT team, knock down all the doors, and pile on top of people; the other is more like a party. You all show up wearing your FBI vests and you seize all the file cabinets. And that’s fine, you do it well. Us marshals arrest individual fugitives. That’s what this is going to be: we can’t have any excitement at all. Devlin and I will sort of amble up to him and ask for a light and tell him he’s under arrest and if he resists we’ll beat the shit out of him, in a hurry. Mug him. That’s what we do. That’s what we need in this situation.”
“If it goes wrong?”
“That’s where you come in. We’ll want surveillance watching us with some of your people ready to jump, if it all goes to hell. But it won’t. We’ll take him, and nobody will know except us chickens.”
“I’ll talk with the AIC,” Orish said. “We need to clear it.”
“Clear it, then. Tell the AIC to have a chat with Louis Mallard before he makes a decision,” Lucas said. “By the way, we’re going to need a warrant to go into Pruitt’s house after we crack him, and we’ll need at least some surveillance all day today. We need to know how many people are in the house, whether there are any children, whether there’s a back way out, and all that.”