“Hanky-panky?”
“No,” she said, sure of that. “She would, with anything in pants, but not him. He’s a cold guy. With me, when I stopped him, he wore this affability like a coat, it wasn’t him.”
“The cloak of invisibility,” Barry suggested.
“Exactly. Who knows who he is, down in there?”
“Well, if he’s still around,” Barry said, “and if he still has something to do with Mrs. Langen, you’ll find him.”
“Is he connected to my gunshot victim? I wonder,” Gwen said. “You know, the guy I told you about in the hospital.”
“A farmer boyfriend of Mrs. Langen.”
“Who may have shot him, I don’t know yet. But she and this Allen guy.” Gwen shook her head. “I just have the feeling, whatever those two are up to, and it isn’t hanky-panky, it would be very interesting to find out.”
“You’ll find out,” he told her. “I know you, you’re a bulldog.”
“Thanks, Barry,” she said, grinning comfortably at him. “Tell me about this veterinarian of yours. Why’d he strangle his wife?”
A little north of where they sat, in the restaurant that was only a restaurant for tonight, Elaine Langen, having not eaten her dinner and not drunk her coffee, but definitely having drunk her scotch and her wine, saw that the speeches were about to begin, and murmured to her husband, Jack, at her left hand, “Liddle girls’ room.” She stood carefully, so as not to stagger, and walked in more or less a straight line out of the room, out of the building, and into her car.
As Elaine was slipping shakily into the white Infiniti, Parker and Dalesia and McWhitney were getting into Dalesia’s Audi and driving, at first with parking lights only, slowly out of the factory building and away along the road in the opposite direction from where they would meet the armored cars later tonight. Their goal was a diner down near the MassPike, where they could have their dinner in guaranteed anonymity. They reached the diner, and as they drove into its parking area, the four armored cars from Boston rolled by unseen up on the Pike, slowing for their exit just ahead.
A few minutes later, when the armored cars turned in at the entrance to the Green Man Motel, their headlights cut short the goodbye kiss of Dr. Madchen and his Isabelle, who whispered hurried endearments, got into their separate cars, away from the headlights of all those trucks, and drove away to their for-the-moment homes.
The twelve crew members from the armored cars were booked into six rooms. It was nine-thirty now, and their escort would pick them up at one in the morning to lead them to the bank. In the meantime, they could shower, watch television, play cards, visit together, even nap. And when they did leave here at one o’clock, their traveling kits would stay in the rooms because they’d be coming back here once the move was finished, to get some real sleep before heading back east late tomorrow morning.
During the lead time before the robbery, Dalesia had been the man on the ground, learning the routes, finding places like the diner where they were eating now, and choosing the vehicles they would use tonight. Now, after they’d finished and paid, they got back into the Audi, and Dalesia led them first to the civilian car they would drive instead of one of their own. “It’s a wreck,” he told them, “but it runs. At least it’ll run as long as we need it.”
The used-car dealership he drove them to, just east of Rutherford, did not boast cutting-edge-security on its premises, but then, it didn’t have cutting edge in its goods for sale either. This was not an operation connected with a new-car dealer, selling pretty good trade-ins, but a small private guy whose stock consisted of clunkers waiting for their fourth or fifth owner, and meantime lined up in gloomy rows under flapping pennants.
Two floodlights atop the trailer used for an office were the main deterrent to thieves, but Dalesia ignored them, pulling onto the lot and stopping in front of the trailer door. Illuminated by the floodlights, he twisted around to hand a key on a cardboard tag to McWhitney in the backseat, saying, “The first time, I picked my way in, but then I found an extra key to the front door in the desk, so here it is and just leave it. Top drawer.”
“Good.”
Next, Dalesia gave McWhitney a small piece of notepaper from Trails End Motor Inne, saying, “When you get in, on your left, there’s a keypad. The number’s two-eight-five-seven. He’s got that in his Rolodex under ‘Alarm.’ The car key you want is on hook seventeen, for that Chevy Celebrity back there. And this is your route from here back to the factory.”
“See you there,” McWhitney said, and got out of the Audi.
They waited until he’d entered, stepped inside to disarm the alarm, and stepped back out to wave that everything was okay, and then Dalesia drove them away from there, southeast. Along the way, he said, “The situation with this police car, this is the wrong season for it. It’s in a very dinky little town, this time of year they don’t have a police force at all. I broke into their town hall to check them out, and they’ve got two retired cops come in the beginning of December and play police department until the middle of March. It’s because they’re right next to the base of a ski area, so all of a sudden the joint’s jumping. The rest of the year, the police car’s kept in a separate little garage out behind the town hall.”
“But it looks like a police car,” Parker said. As they drove, he was changing into the hat, shirt, and jacket of a police uniform.
“It
It was a twenty-minute drive to the garaged police car, during which time, at Deer Hill Bank, the last of the invited guests finally trailed away, leaving Jack Langen and the hired security guy, Bart Hosfeld, and the other people in charge of tonight’s big move. “Time to start bringing everything upstairs,” Bart said, and the moving company people, who’d been waiting outside for nearly half an hour, came in to start the move. Every piece of paper from the downstairs vaults had been boxed and labeled, and now the boxes would be brought up to bank level and stacked near the front door, to make the transition as rapid as possible once the armored cars arrived.
At the hospital, the pill they’d given Jake had taken effect, but it had to fight a very troubled mind. Jake was groggily asleep, harried by bad dreams, never sinking all the way down into real rest. He argued with his dreams, fretfully, inconclusively, and some of the argument surfaced in muttering, low, distressed phrases that nearly made words.
The police car, which looked exactly like a police car, was twelve years old and had only forty-three thousand miles on it. It was a little stiff at first, but then smoothed down. Parker turned on the police radio to listen to the night as he drove toward the intersection where the job would go down.
In her room at the Green Man, Sandra Loscalzo also listened to the night, and it seemed to her that something unusual was going on out there. Every once in a while, there’d be a directive or a report that didn’t appear to contain a subject, and she was beginning to believe they were all on the same subject:
