The Professionals by Owen Laukkanen Read Free Book Online Page B

vanished to their rooms, Stevens left his wife snoring into her files and crept to the front door. His hand was on the doorknob when she spoke up behind him. “You know, a lesser wife might accuse you of sneaking around,” she said, a clutch of papers in her hand and her face set to a frown everywhere but her eyes.
    “I am sneaking around,” Stevens told her.
    “You got a new girlfriend?”
    Stevens took his hand off the doorknob and placed it, instead, on his wife’s hip. “I do,” he said. “Name’s Lesley.”
    Nancy moved closer, moving his hand up to her sweater. “Sounds sexy.”
    “Very,” said Stevens. “His first name’s Tim.”
    “Tim Lesley. You dog.”
    “I think I have a problem.” He was cupping her breast now, watching her eyes half close as he touched her.
    “You have more than one problem,” she said. “You passing me up for Tim Lesley is your biggest.” She slid her hand slow down the front of his pants.
    He forced himself to pull away. “I’ll be back soon.”
    “I’ll be asleep.”
    “That never stopped me before.”
    She smacked his arm. “Get out of here. But come back quick, understand?”
    He left her at the doorway and stepped out into the cold, wondering what kind of fool passed up good sex and a warm home on a night like tonight. A fool cop with a dead-end case, apparently, but at least the case was getting better. T-Mobile’s snarky lawyer had run off with his tail between his legs when Stevens came back with a warrant, and the company had promised to fax over the call locations that afternoon. And this Ashley McAdams lead was the most promising development yet.
    Stevens pulled into the bureau lot, nearly empty so late at night. Still a couple lights on upstairs: the keeners. The guys with no wives and no lives.
    Upstairs, he found the T-Mobile information waiting on his desk. Three sheets of paper: one cover letter and two lists, one for each phone. Each list contained a breakdown of calls made and received with a corresponding cell phone tower for each call. The first phone hung mainly around a cell tower in Brooklyn Center, northwest of Minneapolis along the 694.
    The second phone moved around a bit more, calling in on a cell tower out near the airport a couple times and then, six or seven times,from a tower near Harper’s place the night he was nabbed and then again for a couple hours after he’d been given back. Ballsy.
    The last phone call on each list was a head-scratcher. Both phones used a tower way to the northwest of the city off I-94. Out near the Crow-Hassan Reserve. Interesting.
    Stevens looked over the T-Mobile sheets once more, searching in vain for something else he could use. Then he turned to his computer and brought up the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database. He typed in “Ashley McAdams” and pressed the search key, sending the FBI’s digital bloodhounds on a search for Ms. McAdams’s criminal record.
    A minute or so later, the Fed computers called off the search. Ashley McAdams was clean.
    Fifteen minutes later, Stevens was driving west on the 694 across the Mississippi River. His little extracurricular field trip would mean taking a rain check on Nancy’s quality time, but Stevens was onto something and he knew if he went home he would spend most of the night awake in his bed, wishing he’d followed up on his instinct.
    As he drove, he made a list of tasks. He would need to look deeper into the McAdams situation, find out all he could about the curly-haired girl from Georgia. And he would need to look into the phone calls out by the Crow-Hassan Reserve.
    But for now, he was going to check out the locale around the kidnappers’ first cell tower. It was a little ambitious, searching for an apartment in a sea of apartment buildings, but Stevens had never lost a case because of too much legwork. He drove north, humming along to an old Springsteen song on the radio, and when the 694 merged with I-94 and he drove into Brooklyn