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“Well . . . you’re not going to believe this.” Rapp pulled out his phone and showed her the photos. “Art just sent me these. This is why I asked you to come up here. They found these fake IDs at the crime scene in Iowa. One of these—” Rapp checked the small screen. “This one right here, I’m almost certain, is a Moroccan named Ahmed Abdel Lah, who Catherine tells me is one of the three men we are looking for.”
“And just how does she know that?”
“Unofficially, and I mean really unofficially, someone Catherine trusts picked up Ahmed’s brother and had a long talk with him. I don’t know all the details, but it sounded pretty solid to me.”
“And?”
“You know Catherine as well as I do. She wouldn’t dump something like this on me if it was bullshit.”
“What about the other photo?”
“I don’
t know. When Marcus gets up here I’ll have him send it to George and Catherine. I don’t want it to come directly from either of us. Better to make it look like it was part of an information dump.”
Kennedy thought about it for a second and said, “So Ahmed’s brother was more than likely tortured.”
Rapp shrugged as if to say of course he was.
“And if we share this information with the FBI, they will want to know where we got it?”
“Exactly.”
“And then at some point in the not-so-distant future they’ll send a couple dozen agents and attorneys over there to question Ahmed’s brother and Catherine’s man.”
“And we can’t let that happen,” Rapp said.
“No, we can’t.” Kennedy stared out the window.
“What I need you to do is come up with a plausible explanation for why we think this double homicide is linked to the attacks of last week, and do it in a way that doesn’t compromise George and Catherine or their people.”
“We could alter those photos and dump them into the database.”
“Not a bad idea, but Art already ran them through TIDE and came up with nothing. This has to come from overseas.” Rapp looked toward the door, hoping to see Dumond. “As soon as Marcus gets up here he’ll know how to handle it without leaving any fingerprints. I also have him looking into an issue in New York.”
“New York?”
Rapp was getting ahead of himself. “The farm in Iowa was purchased through an LLC . . . I don’t know . . . six . . . eight months back. The lawyer who handled it was out of New York. I wanted to get a look at his files before all the Dudley Do-Rights show up on Monday.”
“Follow the money?”
“You got it. I’m half tempted to fly up there myself and slap the guy around a little bit. Make sure I get the whole story out of him.”
Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t like that idea.”
Rapp knew she wouldn’t, but asked anyway. “Why?”
“If this adds up like you say, the FBI will most certainly be all over this attorney on Monday. I know you can be persuasive, but there is no guarantee the attorney won’t file a complaint . . . in fact, once he’s surrounded by a bunch of federal agents I can almost guarantee he’ll file charges, and then I’ll have to explain to a lot of upset people what one of my top operatives was doing beating an American citizen and subject in a major criminal investigation.”
Before Rapp could answer, there was a knock on the door. Dumond entered the office and ambled over. He was wearing khaki flat-front pants, a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and an old black knit, square-bottom tie. With his afro he looked like a reject from the seventies. “What’s up?”
“We need your expertise,” Rapp said. He showed Dumond the two photos. “I need you to pull these off here and send them over to Charles and Catherine. Can you make it look like an information dump? Send it to them first and then send the photos to all our allies asking for help in identifying them.”
“No problem.”
“How’s it going with the lawyer in New York?”
“James Gordan,” Dumond said.