Nobody Runs Forever

again, and with more than the usual traffic on these secondary roads, Parker traveled as due west as he could, figuring to leave Massachusetts and drive well into New York State before turning south. He wanted to get out of the search area as fast as possible, but he did need to eat.

The diner he found was still in Massachusetts. They had placed a television set on the back counter, because an Albany station was doing a special on the robbery and the search for the “bandits,” as they called them. Parker gave his order, looked at the television screen, and the first thing he saw was Dr. Madchen.

It was some sort of press conference, a podium in front of a blank yellow wall. Standing at the podium was the doctor, with a hangdog expression on his face, and a balled-up white handkerchief in his right hand that from time to time he pressed to his eyes. Standing beside him was a thirtyish woman, slender, with severe good looks and black hair in a bun. She wore a black broad-collared suit and high-neck white blouse, and it was soon obvious she was the doctor’s lawyer.

A number of reporters were apparently out of sight behind the camera. When Parker first looked at the screen, the doctor was answering a question from one of them:

“I just feel so sorry for poor Jake right now. I know he tried to reform himself, I sincerely know he sincerely wanted to live a good life. If my own personal tragedy hadn’t just now occurred—I mean, it’s so hard for me to think after what’s just happened—if I could, I’d do what I could to help Jake. He’s a weak man, I admit that, but he isn’t a bad man. He was led into this, just led into it.”

One of the unseen reporters, male, asked, “Do you think there’s any chance the authorities will think you were involved, Doctor?”

Looking more surprised than worried, the doctor said, “Well, I certainly hope not. I mean, I can’t think why they would. I’m a doctor, not a— Why would those people even want me with them, those robbers?”

The lawyer leaned in at that point to say, “We are in discussion with the authorities, and there is no doubt that Mr. Beckham said some very strange things while he was in his delirium, when the police first talked to him. We take those statements, from a delirious and apparently guilt-racked mind, at face value, which is to say none, and we expect the police will make the same evaluation. It is of course a terrible accident of timing. This is a moment when Dr. Madchen should be permitted the solitude of his private grief. Instead of which, he cannot grieve for his departed wife, as anyone else would be able to, but has to defend himself against the ravings of a temporarily disordered mind.”

Another reporter’s voice asked, “Doctor, did your wife have a history of heart disease?”

“Not at all.” Dr. Madchen could be seen to be overcome for just a moment as he lowered his head, dabbed the handkerchief against his eyes, and clung hard to the podium with his other hand. Then he took a deep breath, nodded out at the reporters, and said, “I was not my wife’s primary physician, of course. I’ve been on the phone with her regular doctor, and he did tell me things I hadn’t known. That he had counseled Ellen about her eating habits, for instance, and the lack of exercise in her life. I’d been aware of all that, but I had never— Ellen was so healthy, and then all at once—” And he lowered his head again.

Parker’s burger and fries arrived. As he ate and watched the press conference, he remembered what the good doctor had said, that time in his car when Parker and Dalesia had told him to stay away from Jake. “If this thing you two are doing doesn’t happen, I’m going to die. I can’t live. You’re my last hope.”

“Yes, the police phoned me at seven thirty this morning,” the doctor was saying. “They wanted to tell me to stay at home, because they were coming to interview me. They told me about poor Jake, but not at that time about those . . . things he was saying. I said I’d wait at home for them, and I went to tell Ellen, and that’s when I . . . I found her.”

Parker ate his lunch. As soon as Dr. Madchen had been told, in that phone call, that Jake had been picked up, he’d known, no matter whether the robbery worked out or not, there would be nothing in it for him. As he’d said, in that case, somebody was going to die. He’d thought he would be that somebody, but when it came down to it, he’d found a substitute.

Parker ordered coffee, and when he looked back at the screen, a commercial was ending, to be replaced by a black-and-white drawing of a head shot, faced forward, the kind of thing done by police artists based on the memory of eyewitnesses. Like all such drawings, the guy looked too mean to be true, glaring out at the television audience. Over the picture, a woman’s voice was saying, “One police officer in our area does seem to have encountered at least one of the robbers shortly before the crime took place.”

The television picture cut now to two women seated at a table, with a bank of television screens on a wall behind them, showing an array of news and sports scenes. The woman on the left, about forty, was metallically pretty, with ironed-on blonde hair, a lemon- yellow sports jacket, and pale yellow blouse. The woman on the right was the cop who’d braced Parker.

The first one made the introductions: “I have with me now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa of Massachusetts CID, who seems to have tied together some of the loose ends in this case. Welcome, Detective.”

“Thank you.” Detective Reversa smiled, happy to be there, but showed she wasn’t going to be overly impressed by her moment of fame.

“Detective Reversa, your encounter with the alleged robber began with your investigation of what seemed to be a very different case, did it not?”

“Yes, Sue. I was assigned to investigate the shooting of Jake Beckham. In a case like that, where there doesn’t seem to be any reason for what happened, you want to talk to as many of the victim’s acquaintances as possible, and one of those was Elaine Langen.”

“The most astonishing character in the whole event,” the other woman said, with a big happy smile. “You could have had no idea, when you first went to interview Elaine Langen, that she was in the middle of a scheme to rob her own husband’s bank.”

“No,” Reversa said, with her own little smile, “that one was not going to occur to me. Nor that she was the one, in fact, who’d shot Mr. Beckham, who it turned out was a former lover of hers.”

“Elaine Langen’s gun had gone missing.”

“Yes, Sue, that was the first hint that the situation might not be as clear-cut as it seemed. And a car outside the house when I arrived she said belonged to a landscape designer. When I later saw that same car—”

“Which turned out to be stolen.”