Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (i can read books TXT) 📕

as the Free Range Vampire Squirrels and other racist bands, links to white power websites, Candy Crush and eight other games, and half a dozen porn sites. Unlike his Lansing alter ego, John had next to no social media presence, except for the occasional comment in response to an article on a Nazi or Klan site.

Yvonne and Cissy had taken turns tracking down everything from his search history to his few online purchases, with little to show for their efforts. The emails were impersonal, mostly solicitations sparked by searches or gaming. Three noted receipt of online job applications but there were no follow-ups to offer regrets or congratulations. Contacts with full names were easier to evaluate—friends, acquaintances, former co-workers, women he’d met here or there, a Walgreens in Maryland, assorted restaurants and take-out joints, half a dozen in Buffalo. Most of the contacts listed only as initials were attached to phones no longer in service, probably burners. We had no way of knowing whether these were white supremacists, drug lords, gun dealers, or ministers and doctors. A few were part of the non-committal text message chains that gave no details worth investigating.

Most of the named contacts lived in Maryland, DC, or Virginia and were home when Yvonne called to say Carter John had listed them as job references. Some asked her to repeat the name and claimed they didn’t know him. Others said they’d met him once or twice at an event or through a swap sheet but were in no position to make a job recommendation. A few hung up without comment. Four former co-workers recalled he had been fired from jobs in retail or a warehouse. Three women said they had met him in a bar and exchanged phone numbers but felt so uneasy after one or two conversations that they blocked his calls. Walgreens refused to give any information without a warrant, and four of the Buffalo take-out restaurants recalled Dr. Lansing as a nice man who ordered his food by phone and always picked it up himself. Two of the take-out places were on the very diverse West Side, near my apartment. That he might have stayed within walking distance of Bobby and me was disconcerting enough. That he was a semi-regular at an Ethiopian eatery on Grant Street near Buff State was a stunning surprise.

In search of where he’d been staying, Yvonne tried to pinpoint networks he had used to access the internet. She located IP addresses in coffee shops, stores, hotels, and public buildings, including, ironically, the downtown library. But he was just as likely to get to his porn sites and racist bulletin boards through his 4G network. After reviewing hundreds of images of rallies with people in hoods or masks, random street scenes, women obviously photographed without permission, and dick pics—but no faces even close to Wally Ray Tucker’s mugshot—Cissy was relieved when I took her off phone duty to locate Wally Ray Tucker’s lawyer cousin. After a full day, she was able to tell me with certainly this only child of two only children of four only children had no cousins. “Looks like he lied to his people,” she said—which came as no surprise because by not telling the others to wipe away their prints he had set them up to take the fall.

Having spent hours finding next to nothing, Cissy was delighted to dive into the personnel files of both Torrance Towers and DPS—as an independent contractor. As the security arm of the hotel, Donatello Protective Services had a legal right to all relevant information and could choose an outside vendor to review its own records as well as the hotel’s. More jaded, Yvonne expected to find nothing of use but said as long as DPS and I were both paying her, she was in.

Meanwhile, even as we took turns accompanying Drea to sessions on ethnic dance, countering the language of hate, and building inclusive community gardens, Pete and I used the blue badges that gave us access to everything in the hotel to walk through offices, store rooms, kitchens, service rooms, break rooms, locker rooms, the loading dock, and all the mechanical rooms in search of someone who resembled Casper the Unfriendly Ghost with shoe polish slathered on his head.

By the end of the third day, we were no closer to Wally Ray. Though I had kept Drea from the plenary sessions as a precaution, the likelihood her nemesis could find her in a crowd of hundreds was slightly higher than his ability to find which breakout room she would be in at any given moment. I knew—probably had always known—that if he was going to make his move, it would have to be on the last morning, when she was on stage, giving the keynote address at the awards brunch.

35

An hour before the brunch, Rafael and I did a complete walk-through of the conference level: restrooms, meeting rooms, coat rooms, storage rooms, utility closets, kitchen, and, last, the main hall. Police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs had already done a sweep that ended with checking the undersides of the eight-person banquet tables set up there, the spaces behind decorative curtains, and the area around and beneath the small portable stage from which Drea would deliver her speech. The first thing we checked was a utility closet curtained off from the stage. All the keys to that windowless room were locked in James Torrance’s desk, except for the one in my pocket and those carried by Pete and Ramos. If circumstances demanded, one of us would get Drea to a safe room.

The rest of our walk-through was partly a comms check and partly to be certain each access point to the catwalk was covered by a uniformed officer. Rafael was double-connected, to his department colleagues through his handy-talkie and to my team with an earbud. Maxine Travis, in the catwalk and armed with something that looked like the lovechild of a sniper rifle and a giant tuning fork, was