Dead Drop by Jack Patterson (reading cloud ebooks txt) 📕

“I mean, there’s a big gap in the lineup now, and you’re the person who will be filling it.”

“Last night wasn’t the first time I’ve started. What are you implying?”

Cal put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not implying anything. I just noticed that you hadn’t started much until John Akers got injured and you started filling in for him. He came back last night—and you likely wouldn’t have started if Sid Westin was still around.”

Lynch stood up. “Enough of you. Get outta here. What kind of jerk asks questions like that? I bet Paul Holloway didn’t even authorize this interview. How dare you imply that I don’t deserve to be starting?”

Cal stood up as well. “I’m afraid you’re misinterpreting my question. That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Sure sounded like it,” Lynch said as he sneered at Cal. “Now get lost. We’re done here.”

Lynch stepped back and watched Cal collect his effects and hustle away. When he was about forty yards away, Lynch dropped a ball down on the ground and kicked it in Cal’s direction. After a few seconds, it smacked Cal in the head, causing him to stumble but not fall down.

Cal glanced over his shoulder at Lynch but kept walking.

“Sorry about that,” Lynch said, waving at the reporter. Then he muttered under his breath. “Jerk!”

CHAPTER 13

KITTRELL RETURNED FROM LUNCH with Quinn with a new sense of urgency. Roman sent both of them a text explaining that he was convening with city council members in a closed-door meeting on Thursday afternoon about the pair of armed bank robberies in Seattle over the past few weeks. Apparently, some of the council members were concerned that the Seattle PD was failing to protect the banks, and the longer these cases went unsolved, the more it was likely to embolden thieves. In forty-eight hours, he needed some answers.

“Don’t you wish you could just snap your fingers and solve cases?” Quinn asked.

“It’d make our jobs so much easier,” Kittrell said as he snapped his fingers in a mocking gesture. “I swear these people must think criminals volunteer to be caught.”

“It’d make our job a lot easier, too,” said Darrell Barrow, one of the members of the forensics teams.

“I hope you found something,” Kittrell said to Barrow.

“Follow me.”

Kittrell and Quinn fell in step behind Barrow as he led them down to the forensics lab. Barrow led them toward a bank of monitors, manned by Misty Morton.

“Misty, show them what you’ve got,” Barrow said.

Morton sighed and punched a button. A snowy image appeared on the main screen. Kittrell squinted at the screen, trying to make out the figures moving around.

“Is that our perp?” Kittrell said as he leaned in and pointed at the screen.

“Supposedly,” Morton said, “but he’s difficult to see here.”

“Can you enhance it?” Quinn asked.

“Only if you’ve got a time machine,” Morton quipped.

Kittrell furrowed his brow and stared at her. “Come again.”

“These guys were pros. They had some type of jamming device with them that makes it nearly impossible to see what exactly was going on.” She leaned forward in her seat and pointed at the screen. “Now, we can tell what’s going on by piecing together the eye-witness reports with the timeline you guys concocted, but I’m afraid it’s never going to get much clearer than that.”

“In other words, we have evidence that wouldn’t be admissible in court anyway.”

Morton pointed at him. “Exactly. Besides, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to determine anything else that happened here without a clear picture. From what it looks like, these guys stormed a bank and robbed it, shooting two men on the way out—just like we already knew. Not a single new piece of evidence was introduced here.”

Kittrell rubbed his face with both hands. “There’s got to be something.”

“Sorry, K-man, but this is all you’re gonna get,” Morton said.

Kittrell eyed her closely. “K-man? Really? That’s your nickname for me?”

“Beats Kitty, doesn’t it?”

He growled and headed for the exit with Quinn right behind.

“I need some good news this afternoon—any good news,” Kittrell said aloud.

“Then I guess you don’t want to see this then?” said Pat Logan, another member of the forensics team.

Kittrell took the paper from Logan. “What’s this?”

“Our report on an abandoned van found last night by a couple of officers on foot patrol,” Logan said.

“And?”

“And as you can see, they pretty much wiped the van clean. We had a couple of partial prints inside the van, but they didn’t match anything we had on file.” Logan pointed at the page. “However, you can see that the van they found matches the description—and the license plate—of the van fleeing the scene of the bank robbery.”

“So, you found the van but didn’t call us?”

Logan stepped backward. “It was late. Nobody wanted to wake you for something that we weren’t sure was actually what you were looking for.”

Kittrell slapped Logan in the chest with the papers. “Wake me up any time for anything you find on this case. I don’t care what time it is, day or night.”

Logan pushed the file back toward Kittrell. “That wasn’t all we found.”

He returned his gaze to the report. “Did you find any bullet casings in the van?”

“Actually, we did,” Logan said. He took the report from Kittrell’s hands and flipped through several pages before stopping. He pointed at the bottom. “Right there.”

Kittrell scanned the page, holding it up so Quinn could see as well.

“They came from a gun that was reported stolen in a simple B and E a few months ago.”

Kittrell sighed. “So, someone breaks into a home, steals this gun, and uses it in a robbery? No pawn shop stop in between.”

“Nope,” Logan said. “It appears that it was stolen with the expressed intent of using it in a crime. Nothing too out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, “except these guys are good at covering their tracks. Whoever they were, they went out of their way to keep us from looking