“These men are with the FCLE, Ms Sabitch,” Ortega said. “Could you repeat your observations, please.”
She looked at us and nodded. “No big deal. I like to look outside at my birds, got a dozen houses in the trees. I sit in my living room and drink coffee and read magazines and watch the birds. I’m eighty-seven, it’s what I do best. Some people may think I’m a nosy old biddy but they can take a—”
“What’d you see or hear, ma’am?” Harry said, stepping in.
“Just a car going down the street. Twice. It slowed down as it went by Mr Warbley’s house, like checking for an address.”
“What time was this, Ms Sabitch?”
“Earlier, around seven thirty. The guy inside was Mexican or Cuban or something like that. Not real old, like in his thirties. He had on one of those tight hats they all love so much. I saw his hands on the steering wheel, tattoos all over them.”
Harry’s eyes scanned the distance from the house to the street, fifty or sixty feet. “You have very good eyesight, ma’am.”
“No. I have very good binoculars. I watch birds, remember?”
“Do you know the make or model of the car?”
“Some big shiny thing, red. Not like those boxes, SUVs? This looked low to the ground, like a prowling cat. It even made a purring sound.”
We turned. Vince was standing at the edge of the conversation, listening. We now had two sightings of a tattooed and probably Latin male, one possibly scouting the neighborhood, the other in a bar at the same time as John Warbley. Vince turned and yelled some names, adding to the crew checking for potential surveillance in the area.
It was closing in on 3.30 a.m. and there was no more sleep tonight. Harry and I went to HQ and bagged out on our couches for a bit, anything resembling rest would keep us moving through what promised to be a long day.
I arose at 8.00, ran through the shower downstairs, put on one of the three changes of clothes I keep in my office, the suit option, since I had a 9.15 deposition at the DA’s office, about fifteen minutes of looking serious and professional.
I returned 45 minutes later to find Harry in my office, rolled back in my seat and staring at my video monitor.
“I hid all my porn vids,” I said, stripping off the formal look to change into jeans, blue tee, and a tan linen sport coat. “For ten bucks I’ll tell you where they are.”
“Your man Vince does good work,” he said.
“He’s in the vids?” I said, buckling my belt.
Harry walked to the player and loaded a disk. “If you’re heading to Warbley’s place from the nearest major highway, there’s one good route, the way a GPS would go. Detective Delmara had his men check for CCTVs along that three-mile route, found three. One’s at one of those personal storage locations, but it doesn’t reach the street, another’s at a restaurant, nothing there. Then there was this from a restaurant three blocks down; had a couple robberies so they put in surveillance that overlooks the parking lot and some of the street. This was the nearest thing they found.”
Harry pressed Play and we watched a grainy shot of a Camaro slowing for the corner stoplight and stopping for a three-count until the light changed. The windows were smoked and the driver was hunched down: Nada to work with.
“Sure looks like a cat,” Harry said. “A big red prowling cat.”
“It affirms Sabitch’s story,” I said. “But that’s about all.
“One more snippet,” Harry said. “This is from a c-store about four miles from Warbley’s home.”
“Four miles?”
“Like I said, your man Vince does good work. Casts a wide net. Check it out.”
We watched a scene from an exterior cam at the c-store, probably there to record drive-offs. I saw a man filling the tank of a Camaro Z/28. He was dressed in black with flash at the beltline, definitely a shiny buckle. Topping his round dome was a black skullcap. He was shoulder heavy, a chunk of muscle, and he was moving fast, like he had an appointment somewhere.
“What time?” I asked.
Harry froze the playback. “Fifteen minutes before midnight. So here’s the time frame: Warbley’s in the bar from nine until eleven. If this is the perp, it wasn’t opportunistic, because he’d scoped out Warbley’s presence in the bar. He follows the prof, or is already waiting in the dark near Warbley’s house, made easier because he’s dressed in full black. He kills him with a single blow, yanks wallet and cell, and walks calmly to his vehicle, stashed around the corner.”
“Putting him in at the gas pump in just that time frame,” I said. It was all conjecture, but it was all we had and there had been times when we’d started with less.
“I can’t make out a plate,” I said, squinting at the monitor. “Mr Black pay in credit?”
“Nope. But there’s one last scene, Carson.”
Harry advanced to a shot from an interior camera; the door swinging open and our suspect entering while pulling his wallet, showing the tats on his hands. He seemed cautious, keeping his head down like knowing the camera was there.
“Awfully camera-shy, you think? All I see is the freaking hat.”
“Wait for it …” Harry said.
A horn blasted in the fueling lot, loud and strident, and for a split second Mister Black’s head lifted and spun to the commotion. Harry pushed pause, framing a full-face shot, moderately blurred, but with enough definition to know the man was hard-eyed and looked Hispanic. I could make out tats on his face and neck.
“Say cheese,” Harry grinned.
“Vince and his people have any idea who this guy is?”
“They’re showing a still around MDPD, especially the gang units. But they’re coming up blank.”
I sat on the couch and pulled on black running shoes, staring at the half-focused face frozen on the monitor. I saw another face in my head: a short cheerful guy in his late fifties who thought it was forever 1975.
“You think Dabney Brewster’s still running the facial-recognition project at Quantico?” I said.
Harry lifted my phone and called the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, putting the phone on speaker. When he asked to speak to Dabney Brewster, the voice on the other end sounded uncertain. “I’m not sure if we have a—”
“Try R&D,” Harry said. “Research and Development.”
“Got him,” the voice said, taking Harry’s name. “Here we go. Hang on while I connect you.”
Harry covered the phone and spoke to me. “The Dabster’s still there. Second piece of luck.”
He picked up seconds later, a rich southern voice vibrating the lines. “Harry-freaking-Nautilus … talk about a voice from the past. How’re things in good ol’ Mobile?”
Dabney Brewster was an old-school hipster computer geek from Mobile who sometimes consulted on our computer-crime cases back in the day. His spare-time hobby had been computer-generated art, portraiture, using pieces of photographed actual faces to construct odd and funny montages of invented faces. He’d created a library of facial features, building algorithms to define certain characteristics so he could catalog them. His work caught the attention of the FBI and he was