After a half hour, Kanezaki said, “We should get to it. The sun’s up, and if Rispel has somehow learned about Grimble, we don’t want to give her another chance to get ahead of us.”
“I doubt the plan would be to ambush us straightaway,” John said. “Rispel doesn’t know what we learned from Schrader. It might be something she needs. So the smart play would be to hang back until we’ve made contact with Grimble. At that point, if all goes well, we’d have the entire puzzle. Rispel could swoop in and collect it all at once.”
“Great,” Dox said. “Maybe she’ll capture and waterboard us, like she did Schrader.”
“We already sketched out an approach,” Larison said to John. “It tracks with your point. But Tom, you’re going to have to bring us up to speed on the transport. I mean, you did order the horse, right? The bicycles? The screaming yellow Porsche?”
“I did,” Kanezaki said. “I knew that by the time we were here, it would be too late to get ahold of anything I hadn’t thought of earlier. So I tried to be comprehensive—including fake license plates we’ll attach to the truck and the Porsche. But listen, Maya found a few interesting things about Grimble on the flight over. Maya, you want to tell them?”
“He’s into figurines,” Maya said. “I’d heard something about this before, but didn’t realize the extent. I mean, big-time. Obsessively.”
Once upon a time, Dox would have made a crack about that—about his own interest in figurines, or at least in figures, something like that. But he didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Livia. He really was smitten. And even as the thought took shape, Delilah realized smitten was probably her own attempt to downplay the depth of his feeling, a reluctance that was an outgrowth of her distrust of Livia. She would have to be careful about that. If Dox was in love with this woman, Delilah would have to come to terms with it, lest she force Dox to make a choice that ultimately would be no choice at all.
“What kind of figurines?” Delilah asked, knowing that if no one else raised the question, Larison would, and probably less delicately.
“Japanese,” Maya said. “Samurai, feudal lords, that kind of thing. Something called the Battle of Sekigahara.”
“How is that relevant?” Larison said, and Delilah had to suppress a smile.
“He spends a ton of money on it,” Maya said. “And apparently a ton of time. Casts his own figurines, paints them, uses authentic materials like silk and leather to construct their outfits. He has a whole room dedicated to it. He’s given a couple interviews, but he won’t allow photos.”
“The Battle of Sekigahara involved almost two hundred thousand soldiers,” Rain said. “If he’s serious about depicting even a portion of it, yes, he’d need some space.”
Maya nodded. “The point is, we can’t be sure of where he’ll be on the property—only of where his phone will be. That’s not the same thing. People don’t ordinarily go out without their cellphones, but they do sometimes leave them on chargers while moving around their homes. And this guy’s home is on twenty-three acres with ten buildings. Knowing what he spends his time on could help us narrow things down.”
The room was quiet for a moment while the group digested that. Livia said, “We have a lot to plan, and not much time. Schrader said the next release is scheduled for three o’clock this afternoon.”
Delilah wasn’t surprised. They all had different concerns, and Livia’s were about the girls in the videos more than they were about the people in this room. And while those priorities weren’t indefensible, from Delilah’s perspective they didn’t make the woman trustworthy, either.
“We all have different puzzle pieces,” Kanezaki said. “Maya knows Grimble. I’ve been arranging transport and other gear. You guys have the schematics for his compound. Now we need to turn it into a plan. So let’s put our heads together and get this done.”