Speaking in Tongues

Following her. When she goes to school, when she goes to pom-pom practice.”
    Tate tried to picture Megan as a cheerleader. “As if.”
    “He knows where she’s going to be this morning. He gets her, drugs her, drives her to Vienna, where he’s left his own car. He’s got to switch wheels. The Mercedes.”
    “Right.”
    “Leaves her car with the timetable. So it looks like she’s headed off on Amtrak . . . He took off to wherever he was going to stash her. Which means what, Counselor?” Tate couldn’t think.
    When he said nothing Konnie gave a harsh laugh. “Damn, I’d forgot how I had to hold your hand when we were putting all those bad guys away. What’s sitting right under her car at the moment?”
    “Tread marks! The Mercedes’s tread marks.”
    “There’s hope for you after all, boy—if you apply yourself and work real hard. Okay, Counselor, this’s gonna take some time. Listen, you sit tight and have some nice hot mashed potatoes. And think of me when you eat ’em.”
    •   •   •
    Konnie Konstantinatis’s first lesson in police work was to watch his father fool the tax men like ’coons tricking hounds.
    The old Greek immigrant was petty, weak, dangerous, a cross between a squirrel and a ferret. He was a born liar and had an instinct for knowing human nature cold. He put stills next to smokehouses, stills next to factories, stills in boats, disguised them like henhouses. Hid his income in a hundred small businesses. Once he smooth-talked a revenuer into arresting Konnie’s father’s own innocent brother-in-lawinstead of him and swore an oath at the trial that cost the bewildered man two years of his life.
    So from the age of five or six Konnie had observed his father and had learned the art of evasion and deception. And therefore he’d learned the art of seeing through deceit.
    This was a skill to be practiced slowly and tediously. And this was how he was going to find the man who’d kidnapped Tate Collier’s daughter.
    Konnie arranged for a small crane to lift Megan’s car out of its spot, rather than drive it out and risk obliterating the Merce’s tread marks.
    He then spent the next two hours taking electrostatic prints of the twelve tire treads that he could isolate and differentiate—ones he determined weren’t from Megan’s car. He then identified the matching left and right tires and measured wheelbases and lengths of the cars they’d come from. He jotted all this, in lyrical handwriting, into a battered leather notebook.
    He then went over the entire parking space with a Dustbuster and—hunched in the front seat of his car—looked over all the trace evidence picked up in the paper filter. Most of it was nothing more than dust and meaningless without laboratory analysis. But Konnie found one obvious clue: a single fiber that came from cheap rope. He recognized it because in one of the three kidnapping cases he’d worked over the past ten years the victim’s hands had been bound with rope that shed fibers just like this.
    Speeding back to the office, the detective sat down at his computer and ran the wheel dimensions through the motor vehicle specification database. One set ofnumbers perfectly fit the dimensions for a Mercedes sedan.
    He examined the electrostatic prints carefully. Flipping through Burne’s Tire Identifier, he concluded that they were a rare model of Michelin and because they showed virtually no wear he guessed the tires were no more than three or four months old. Encouraging, on the one hand, because they were unusual tires and it would be easier to track down the purchaser. But troubling too. Because they were expensive, as was the model of the car the man was driving. It was therefore likely that the perp was intelligent, which suggested he was an organized offender—the hardest to find.
    And the sort of criminal that presented the most danger.
    Konnie then started canvassing. It was Saturday evening and although most of the tire outlets were still open—General Tire, Sears, Merchants, Mercedes dealerships—the managers had gone home. But nothing as trivial as this stopped Konnie. He blustered and bullied until he had the names and home phone numbers of night staff managers of the stores’ recordkeeping and data-processing departments.
    He made thirty-eight phone calls and by the time he hung up from speaking with the last parts department manager on his list, faxes of bills of sale were starting to roll into police