we’ll have breakfast in that last town we went through on the way.”
“South Haverley? Why South Haverley?”
“It looked a little bigger and livelier than Coulter, even an hour ago. I’d rather not hang around here doing nothing while we wait for something to open up.”
Walker turned onto Main and headed out of town. This time, when he came to an intersection, he stopped only long enough to be sure he wouldn’t be accused of running the stop sign. Now there were lights on in a few of the houses, and twice he saw police cars. One was cruising along a parallel street in the same direction he was going, and the other had stationed itself on a quiet block just off Main, in the time-honored way of traffic cops waiting for speeders.
When he had crossed the bridge across the river and was driving between the open fields again, he kept staring into his rearview mirror.
“What are you looking for?” asked Stillman. “Cops?”
Walker glanced at him. “It’s not entirely out of the question, is it? We did just pull off one of our many unsuccessful burglaries.”
“Relax,” said Stillman. “I saw two patrol cars on the way out, and if anybody had reported anything, they would have collared us then. And it wasn’t entirely unsuccessful.”
“No?”
“No. We know James Scully was one of them, and we know he wasn’t the one who’s been moving all those insurance claims from your company.”
“You could tell that?”
“I told you he wasn’t in the habit of making long-distance phone calls—none at all last month, when there might have been a lot of conversation with people who were getting started on scams in Pasadena, Miami, and God knows where else. After seeing his place, we know he had plenty of spending money, but it was the sort of money that a guy who does high-risk work might get as pay. And he didn’t have the kinds of things that the money guy will have.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Office supplies. Pens, calculators, computers, airline timetables, maps. His friends might have gotten in and out already and removed incriminating paper. They would have no reason to get rid of paper clips. The magazines I found all had subscriber’s address labels, so they were his—all guns and naked women.” Stillman paused. “I’d say that Scully was pretty much what he seemed to be the night we met him: the sort of guy you tell, ‘Go get Walker and Stillman,’ and he goes out to get Walker and Stillman.”
“So now we’re stuck again.”
“Temporarily becalmed,” said Stillman. “If the other guy in Florida was a sort of relative, it’s possible he lived nearby—maybe in Coulter, or in one of these other little towns around here.” He let his eyes rest on Walker for only a half-second before he said, “Let’s find some breakfast.”
Walker began to breathe more evenly as soon as he was back on the Old Concord Road. There were other cars on the highway now, and the bright summer sunlight seemed to lend not exactly benevolence, but at least reality to the world. What he could see now included long views of trees and fields and hills, not just a section of pavement lit by the funnel-shaped beams of his headlights surrounded by vague shapes and shadows. There were flowers growing in patches here and there, and being able to see the detail and complexity of their forms made him less uneasy. Approaching traffic now resolved itself into sequences of cars, and not just the glare of headlights brightening and then disappearing. It even made him feel better that two of the first six cars had out-of-state license plates. This was tourist season, and the uncomfortable feeling he’d had that he and Stillman were the only strangers disappeared.
They found a restaurant just outside South Haverley that had been built to look like an enlarged farmhouse. A few of the dozen cars in the parking lot had plates from Massachusetts, New York, or Vermont. When he pulled into a space and got out of the Explorer, he noticed that the muscles of his shoulders and neck were stiff from the tension of the night and morning, then remembered that he had been awake for twenty-four hours.
They sat beside a window that looked out on the highway, ordered steak and eggs for breakfast, and then watched the traffic continue to build while they ate. When Stillman was signing the charge slip, Walker let himself return to thoughts of the immediate future. They got back into the Explorer and Walker started the engine, moved to the edge of the highway, and signaled for a left turn while he waited for an opening in the traffic.
“You know where we’re going?” Stillman asked.
“What choice do we have?” said Walker. “The case is in Coulter.”
They drove back to the sign that said COULTER and made the turn. There were two cars ahead of them on the road that sliced between the hills and onto the flat plain beyond, and as each turned to the right, Walker stared at the occupants. The first car held a couple in late middle age and the second a younger couple with children in the back seat.
Walker drove more confidently over the covered bridge this time, and across the fields to the town. Coulter looked different in full daylight. There were people on the street, cars parked in front of the old-fashioned commercial buildings. The public library was not open yet, but there were lights on inside, and two little girls were on the front steps with stacks of books beside them, watching two slightly older boys playing catch with a baseball on the lawn.
They went on past the old church, and Walker could see the blue sign ahead that said POLICE.
Stillman seemed to read his mind. “Keep going. I want to see it.”
It was a wide, single-story modern building made of tan bricks that didn’t match the reddish color of the older buildings in the area. Walker’s second glance made it look even better. The town was about half the size of Wallerton, the little place in Illinois where Ellen Snyder had been murdered. There, the police station had been about half as big, and much older.
“Pull around the corner, and we’ll park on the side street,” said Stillman. When they got out and walked back toward Main, Stillman nudged Walker. “Look at the parking lot.”
Walker looked at the row of police cars. “Looks like sixteen,” he said.
“I guess we didn’t have to worry about car thieves,” said Stillman. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Walker’s impression of the place began to grow more specific now that his slower pace let him see details. The town had been laid out in the eighteenth century, when there had been a hope that cities designed on a rational plan would stay that way, and this one had. The streets were on a regular grid. Main Street ran down the middle of town from the bridge, with two parallel streets on each side of it: Federal and New Hampshire on the left, and Constitution and Coulter on the right. The cross streets began with Washington, set right above the river on the first high ground. Then came Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Grant. Walker suspected that Grant Street had been changed from something else, because all the houses on the street seemed to be older than the Civil War. It had probably been a tree, because this was where the names of trees began: Sycamore, Oak, Maple, Birch, Hemlock, and Cherry. The streets all ended in fences that separated the town from old pastures.
The houses were nearly all of the older varieties—wooden ones that seemed to belong in the late eighteenth century, and brick ones with Victorian-style porches and elaborate wooden trim. A few were nearly new, but they were built to the scale of older times, when a family might include eight children and a couple of maiden aunts. As they walked up another street, and another, Walker’s impression was confirmed. “It’s a pretty prosperous place.”
“Yeah,” said Stillman. “I suppose the houses don’t tell the whole story. Most of them are a few generations old, when the money could have come from something we can’t see anymore because they sold it—lumber, or granite, maybe. Real estate has got to be cheap around here.”
“They take care of the place, though,” said Walker. “About a third of these houses look as though they’ve just been painted.” They walked back the way they had come.
A few minutes later, at the next intersection, Walker noticed something at the end of Grant Street that looked different. It was a long, one-story building that appeared to be the work of the same architect who had built the police station. It was plain, tan brick with only tiny windows at the top, just below the roof. The parking lot beside it seemed to be full.
Stillman noticed it too. “I wonder what that is.”
They walked down the street toward the building, until Walker could make out the stainless-steel letters attached to the brick facade. “ ‘New Mill Systems,’ ” he read.
