Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly Page A

page down. It’s a simple process.’
    â€˜There’s one guy back there but I don’t think he’s authorized to do anything. Besides, he was sort of asleep when I looked in there.’
    Pierce leaned over the counter and put a forceful tone into his voice.
    â€˜Lilly — I mean, Wendy, listen to me. I insist that you go back there and wake him up and bring him out here. You have to understand something here. You are in a legally precarious position. I have informed you that your website has my phone number on it. Because of this error I am repeatedly receiving phone calls of what I consider to be an offensive and embarrassing nature. So much so that I was here at your place of business this morning before you even opened. I want this fixed. If you put it off until Monday, then I am going to sue you, this company, Mr. Wentz and anybody else I can find associated with this place. Do you understand?’
    â€˜You can’t sue me. I just work here.’
    â€˜Wendy, you can sue anybody you want to in this world.’
    She stood up, an angry look in her eyes, and pirouetted around the partition without a word. Pierce didn’t care if she was angry. What he cared about was that she had left the file on the counter.
    As soon as the sound of her sandals was gone he bent over and flipped open the file. There was a copy of the photo of Lilly, along with a printout of her ad copy and an advertiser’s information form. This was what Pierce wanted. He felt a surge of adrenaline zing through him as he read the sheet and tried to commit everything to memory.
    Her name was Lilly Quinlan. Her contact number was the same cell phone number she had put on her web page. On the address line she had put a Santa Monica address and apartment number. Pierce quickly read it silently three times and then put everything back in the file just as he heard the sandals and another pair of shoes approaching from the other side of the partition.

7
    The first thing Pierce did when he got back to the car was grab a pen from the ashtray and write Lilly Quinlan’s address on an old valet parking stub. After that he pulled the dollar bill out of his pocket and examined it. It had been face down under the blotter. He now studied it and found the words Arbadac Arba written across George Washington’s forehead on the front of the bill.
    â€˜Abra Cadabra,’ he said, reading each word backwards.
    He thought there was a good chance that the words were a user name and password for entering the Entrepreneurial Concepts computer system. While he was pleased with the moves he’d made in getting the words, he was unsure how useful they would be now that he had gotten Lilly Quinlan’s name and address out of the hard-copy file.
    He started the car and headed back toward Santa Monica. The address of Lilly’s apartment was on Wilshire Boulevard near the Third Street Promenade. As he got close and started reading the numbers on the buildings, he realized that there were no apartment complexes in the vicinity of the address she had written on the advertiser’s information sheet. When he finally pulled up in front of the business with the matching address on the door, he saw that it was a private mail drop, a business called All American Mail. The apartment number Lilly Quinlan had written on the info sheet was actually a box number. Pierce parked at the curb out front but wasn’t sure what he could do. It appeared that he was at a dead end. He thought for a few minutes about a plan of action and then got out.
    Pierce walked into the business and immediately went into the alcove where the mailboxes were. He was hoping the individual doors would have glass in them so he could look into Lilly Quinlan’s and see if there was any mail. But the boxes all had aluminum doors with no glass. She had listed her address as apartment 333 on the info sheet. He located box 333 and just stared at it for a moment, as if