Middle Of Nowhere

   Fingers drumming, he considered various means to pinpoint the address and locate Bryce Abbott Flek. One option was to drive around the three-block area looking for that blue van with Colorado plates and put it under surveillance when they found it. He would then wait for Flek to show up and hope to follow him back to an apartment, put that under surveillance. The time and manpower requirements seemed enormous.

   He tried a friend at US West. No go: Not one of Flek's aliases kicked for a current listing. No great sur prise—if the man was using a cloned cellular, why bother with a Ma Bell installation?

   If Flek was renting a room or an apartment, LaMoia had no way of finding out where. There were no tax records and no utility bills, at least not that he could locate. He racked his brain for some other way to find the guy, and to find him fast, before the news leaks Boldt had warned of reached Flek, and he heard of his little brother's contact with Seattle police. If and when that happened, Flek was certain to go underground, perhaps not surfacing again. He debated whether to put out the word on the street—he had Flek's mug shot, courtesy of the NCD database. He thought of liquor stores and Domino's Pizza, delivery boys. He called a friend at a credit bureau—no credit cards, no loans, no bank accounts under any of the aliases.

   In the end, using the patrol force to search Ballard for any blue vans appeared the best choice. He put the word out over the Mobile Data Terminals network— notifying nearly two hundred patrol cars simultaneously.

* * *

An hour before Boldt and Daphne's plane touched down at SEATAC, LaMoia was notified by an SPD radio car that a blue van with Colorado plates was currently fueling at a gas station in Ballard, not five blocks from LaMoia's current location. LaMoia had issued the Be On Lookout for the van with little hope. To his surprise, he had been notified of four blue vans in the past thirty minutes. This radio call represented the first mention of Colorado plates. Within minutes, LaMoia confirmed the registration: Bryce Abbott Flek.

   About that same time he double-parked his fire-engine red 1968 Camaro with a view across the street. The gas pump's black hose hung from the van's tank like an elephant's trunk, the driver nowhere to be seen. He spotted the cruiser patrolling a block away, hailed them over the radio and ordered them to park out of sight. He then radioed dispatch and ordered all SPD patrol cars kept out of a ten-block area surrounding the gas station. He didn't want anything, anyone, alerting Flek to their presence. When he requested additional unmarked cars, the dispatcher had the audacity to laugh at him. "Request is noted," the uncharacteristically amused dispatcher announced. LaMoia understood the subtext: In terms of winning unmarked cars and plainclothes detectives as backup, he was in this alone.

* * *

The Quik Stop gas station teemed with activity. Some customers pulled up to the pumps; others parked, shopping for a soda, a bag of chips, or a quart of milk. But by his count, every customer arrived and left by automobile. He observed no bicycles, no pedestrians. This latter realization prompted a second study of the back of a big man already a half block behind the Quik Stop and moving away. The man wore a thigh-length leather jacket, blue jeans and high-top running shoes. The telltale sign that got LaMoia's adrenaline pumping had nothing to do with clothes but instead, the lack of anything carried. No paper or plastic bag. No soda. It seemed conceivable the man had purchased a pack of cigarettes or something small enough to be pocketed— it was no crime to leave a Quik Stop on foot—but his recollection of the case file suggested otherwise: The burglar was believed to monitor police radio bands, probably on a portable scanner, and LaMoia had impetuously cleared the area around the Quik Stop by radio, naming the gas station's location. Foremost on LaMoia's mind: Where had this guy come from? He had not seen anyone arrive on foot in the last few minutes.

   More to the point, according to his criminal records, Bryce Abbott Flek stood six foot one, and weighed in at two hundred pounds. That fit well with the man now nearly a block away.

   LaMoia needed someone to watch the blue van while he pursued its apparent owner on foot, but he didn't want the car's police radio to communicate about it. The real Flek, whether or not he was the man on foot, might be listening in, wandering the aisles of the Quik Stop, wondering how to play his situation.