'What 'local authorities'?' Chief Coughlin asked.
'The county sheriff, Chief,' Leibowitz said. 'We gave him a camera with a tripod and a telephoto lens-'
'You gave him a camera?' Peter Wohl asked.
'I asked about that myself, Peter,' Walter Davis said. 'It was cost-effective, Agent Leibowitz told me. I suppose a good camera like that is worth five hundred dollars…'
'I think that particular camera outfit cost us $412.50,' Leibowitz said.
'How do I get on your gift list?' Wohl asked.
'Anytime you're willing to place a premises such as the Reynolds summer home under at least part-time surveillance and save the FBI the man-hours of keeping it under surveillance ourselves.'
'Clever,' Wohl said appreciatively.
'And it has a certain public-relations aspect, too, Peter, ' Davis said. 'Getting a camera from the FBI makes the local authorities look on us as their friends. As hard as you may find this to believe, not all police officers look on us fondly.'
'But on the other hand, Walter,' Wohl said, 'some of my officers like FBI agents so much that they take them on sight-seeing tours, absolutely free of charge.'
'Actually, now that my temper has had time to cool down,' Leibowitz said, 'I have to admit that was sort of funny. But let me show you what our $412.50 bought.'
A somewhat grainy photograph of a Ford sedan came on the screen.
'We ran the plate. The plate was stolen. There were no recent reports of a Ford like that having been stolen in a four-state area.'
'They switched plates,' Denny Coughlin thought out loud.
'We think that's probable. And there are just too many two-year-old Fords like that to make it cost-efficient to run every one of them down.'
'Yeah,' Wohl agreed.
'This is, in case anyone can't guess, the Reynolds summer house,' Leibowitz said. 'And this gentleman is Mr. Bryan C. Chenowith,' he said, as a picture of a young man in sports clothing and wearing horn-rimmed glasses getting out of the Ford appeared on the screen.
'Bingo!' Chief Coughlin said.
'On this occasion,' Leibowitz said, 'Mr. Chenowith was accompanied by Miss Ollwood.'
The screen now showed Jennifer Ollwood, wearing a tweed skirt and a sweater, standing on the porch of the Reynolds cabin. She was being embraced by Susan Reynolds.
Jesus Christ! Matt thought. There's no question about it now. Susan is in with these lunatics up to her cute little ass.
'Obviously,' Chief Coughlin said, 'you didn't get this in time to do anything about it, and the sheriff's deputy?'
'We asked the local authorities to locate and identify, not apprehend,' Leibowitz said. 'We want the Chenowith Group alive, taken into custody without the firing of a shot. The last thing we want to do is kill one of them and make a martyr out of him,' Leibowitz said, 'or, especially, one of the females.'
'But aren't these photographs enough to pick up the Reynolds girl?' Denny Coughlin asked. 'Charge her with aiding and abetting? Accessory after the fact? Lean on her hard?'
'After we get the Chenowith Group, Chief,' Leibowitz said, 'I'm sure the U.S. Attorney will go after her. But the priority is the apprehension of the Chenowith Group.'
'I understand,' Coughlin said.
'Once we had these pictures, and identified Chenowith and Ollwood, we put the premises under surveillance, of course,' Leibowitz said. 'And the to-be-expected result of that, of course, was that they never went back to the Poconos.'
'They spotted the surveillance?' Peter Wohl asked,
'That's possible, of course,' Leibowitz replied. 'But we think it's equally possible that they simply suspected they had been using that rendezvous point too often. Whatever the reason, they never went back to the Reynolds summer house.'
'What's the purpose of the rendezvous?' Matt asked.
'I was about to get to that,' Leibowitz said. 'First of all, we think it has to do with money. We believe that since we have been looking for them, the Chenowith Group has been involved in as many as four bank robberies. We have surveillance-camera proof that Chenowith and Ollwood have been involved in two bank robberies. A total of $140,000, in round figures, has been taken. One of them was a very recent case.'
The lights went out and several surveillance-camera images of a female with a kerchief on her head wearing a raincoat and large dangling earrings appeared on the screen.
'That's Ollwood?' Detective Wee Willy Malone asked doubtfully.
Leibowitz chuckled. 'That's Mr. Chenowith,' he said.
'My God, the very ugly white woman with hairy legs,' Wohl said, laughing. 'The Girard Bank job in-where was it?'
'Bucks County. Riegelsville,' Leibowitz furnished.
'I'm missing the point of the humor here,' Chief Coughlin said.
'Mickey O'Hara wrote a hilarious story about it,' Matt said. 'The guy in the bank described the bandit as a very ugly white woman with hairy legs.'
'That woman is Chenowith?' Coughlin asked.
'The lab did some interesting stuff, comparing the nose, hands, ears, and so on, of the 'woman' with Chenowith 's features. That's him, Chief.'
The news did not seem to please Coughlin.
'So they're wanted on bank-robbery charges, too?' he asked.
'In a sense, Chief,' Leibowitz said. 'We have not charged any of them with bank robbery. We don't want them to know we know they're involved. Our thinking here-the thinking of the attorney general-is that once we apprehend them, we can quickly bring them to trial in Federal Court and get a conviction, using the surveillance-camera footage as proof. There is very little sympathy for bank robbers, and the evidence for the two bank jobs where we have surveillance-camera footage is not circumstantial. Their defense cannot bring up the morality of using animals in medical research, et cetera. And once they are convicted, then we can try them on the University of Pittsburgh bombing charges.'
'Public relations, huh?' Coughlin said in disgust.
'Unfortunately, that has to be considered,' Davis said.
'Now, our thinking is that they are thinking that since we are not searching for them on the bank-robbery charges we may not know about the bank robberies. Consequently, if we should get lucky and get them into custody, they don't want to be found in possession of a large sum of money that even the none-too-bright FBI might decide came from unsolved bank robberies.'
'You mean you think Reynolds is holding the bank loot for them?' Matt asked.
'Yeah,' Leibowitz said. 'And dispensing it as needed to pay their expenses. Being a fugitive is expensive.'
'I thought she might be getting money to them,' Matt said. 'Not the other way around.'
'In a sense, she is, Payne,' Davis said. 'But I see what you mean.'
'And even if you could get a search warrant,' Wohl said, 'the question would be where would you search?'
'Precisely, Inspector,' Leibowitz said. 'If we'd tumbled onto the Reynolds woman's connection to the Chenowith Group earlier, maybe we could have done something. And, of course, the minute we would serve a search warrant on her, that would be the end of any meetings with any of them.'
'Yeah,' Wohl said thoughtfully.
'So what we have to do is find out where the Reynolds woman is going to meet with the Chenowith Group, or Chenowith individually, in sufficient time to set up an arrest that can't possibly go sour. We don't, to repeat, want to have to shoot any of these individuals and turn them into martyrs.'
'If we winged one of them in the arm,' Jernigan said. 'Their defense counsel would wheel them into the courtroom in a wheelchair, in a body cast, with intravenous tubes feeding him blood, an innocent college student showing his-even worse, her-grievous injuries suffered at the hands of the American Gestapo.'
