“Not that I ever saw.”
“Did he act strange at times?”
“Strange, how?”
“Secretive. Defensive. Paranoid.”
“That’s not the way…” Her lashes batted, and a small crease of concentration appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Well, there was one kind of weird thing.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, see, one time I walked in on him when he wasn’t expecting me. He’s on the phone. Sees me and goes ballistic. Says I should ring the goddamn doorbell next time. I say, then what’d you give me a goddamn key for?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like shit, but man, it felt really bizarre. I mean, he never gave a crap whether I rang the doorbell any other time.”
“Which room was he in?”
“Uh… the bedroom.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I don’t know. He must have hung up right after.”
A knock on the door, and Peter Lovejoy stuck his head in.
“Just got off the phone with Drury.” Deputy associate director. “He wants us on a plane to Miami ASAP.”
“I’m not finished here.”
“How about letting Baxter take the rest of Miss Tate’s statement?” Linda Baxter was a street agent in the L.A. office.
“Right.” Moore smiled at Sheila. “Got to run. Sorry.”
“Is Jack in Miami? Is that why you’re going there?”
“We don’t know where he is,” Moore said, rising. She left before Sheila could press her with another question.
Lovejoy was already heading for the elevator, wiping his runny nose. Moore caught up with him in the hallway. “My things are at the hotel.”
“Mine, too. We’ll pick them up on the way.” He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-forty. Delta has a redeye to Atlanta at twelve-fifteen. We can connect with an eight-twenty flight to Miami and get in at ten a.m. Eastern time.”
“Can we stop off at Dance’s apartment first?”
“Why? The girlfriend tell you something?”
“She may have.”
The apartment building was only a few blocks east of the FBI office. Moore watched the Wilshire corridor blur past. It reminded her of Phoenix at night. Tall modern buildings, elegant landscaping, many lights. Wealth built beauty; she’d always known that.
And the absence of wealth… She knew about that, too. The Oakland projects. The urine-stained stairwells, the caged light bulbs, the concrete walls of her mother’s apartment, beading with sweat on summer afternoons.
The worst part of poverty was the grinding ugliness of it. That feeling of never being clean. She wondered if Sheila Tate had ever known that feeling, or ever would.
She turned to Lovejoy at the wheel. “How positive are we that Jack flew to Miami?”
“Maybe eighty percent. Miami P.D. got the flight attendants out of bed to look at his mug shot. One of them is almost certain she remembers him.”
“Wearing glasses?”
“Right. And blue jeans. Just like Mr. Markham said.”
Hugh Markham represented a lucky break for the task force, and a bad break for Jack Dance. Sixty-eight years old, a retired bus driver, he ate lunch at a Burger King in Encino every day, usually lingering over the L.A. Times. Said his wife was grateful to have him out of the house for a while.
Markham was a people-watcher. In thirty years of driving for RTD, he had seen a parade of characters pass in and out of the bus’s folding doors. He noticed things.
He had been watching when a man in a blue business suit, carrying two shopping bags, entered the restaurant via a side door and disappeared immediately into a rest room. For a few minutes Markham tried idly to guess what line of work the man was in. It was a game of his.
Then it occurred to him that the man was taking a long time to come out. He found this mildly interesting. He went on watching the rest-room door over the top of his newspaper.
Five minutes. Ten.
Finally the door opened, and someone emerged. But it couldn’t be the same man. The outfit was different, the hair was different, the shopping bags were gone.
No, it was him, all right. He’d undergone a complete transformation. Left without ordering any food, too. Very odd.
When he told his wife about it, she made him watch the local news, waiting for an update on the day’s big story, the manhunt for Jack Dance. “Was that the man you saw?” she asked when Jack’s picture appeared on the screen.
Hugh Markham said it was. Twenty minutes later, he was saying the same thing to a West Valley cop.
Markham had a good memory for details. He ticked off the specifics of Jack’s new look: moussed hair, glasses, denim shirt, blue jeans, knapsack.
A sketch artist altered the mug shot accordingly. Police circulated copies of it in the vicinity of the Burger King. A taxi driver stationed outside a hotel two blocks away recalled driving Jack to LAX. The American Airlines terminal.
The ticket clerks had already gone home for the day. LAPD tracked them down and showed them the picture. One clerk remembered selling that man a one-way ticket to Miami.
“Miami P.D. is still trying to find someone who might have observed him in the terminal,” Lovejoy said. “So far they’ve had no luck. Of course, it’s late there-three a.m.-and they can’t roust all the employees.”
“If the flight attendant can’t make a definite ID, how do we know Jack was ever on the plane? He might have bought the ticket just to throw us off. He could still be in L.A.”
Lovejoy nodded. “I raised that possibility with Drury, strictly on a conjectural basis.” Strictly to cover your rear, Moore corrected silently with a brief smile. “But it appears unlikely. If Jack were trying to divert us, he would most probably have charged the plane fare on one of his credit cards. That way we’d be certain to know about it.”
“True.”
“Anyway, Miami appears to be our best lead, and Drury wants us to follow up.”
“Why can’t the Miami field office handle it?”
“They will. But we’ll supervise.”
“Drury say anything about the, uh, problems with the arrest?”
“Oh, yes.” Lovejoy showed her a tight, nervous smile, and for the first time she realized how scared he was. “Yes, he said a great deal.”
Moore looked away. She’d had no opportunity to consider any implications of the botched raid this morning other than Jack Dance’s continued elusiveness. Now she saw the matter from a different perspective: Peter Lovejoy’s career. He was the task force leader. He would take the heat for the screw-up that had allowed Jack to evade capture.
Every facet of Lovejoy’s life, every detail of his daily routine, even his mannerisms and vocabulary, had been carefully selected to protect him from the ultimate catastrophe of a career meltdown. Tonight he was facing that nightmare-perhaps already had faced it, in his talk with the deputy director.
She glanced at his face in profile, read no expression there. His hands gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual. That was all.
He was taking it well. Better than she would have expected. She wondered if she had underestimated him. She hoped so.
The whine of electric saws was the first thing she and Lovejoy heard as they emerged from the elevator on
