close.” He turned onto Main Street. “On the phone, I managed to eliminate all but thirty-eight of them.”
“How did you do that?”
“By talking to them, mostly,” said Stillman. “Our boy is dead, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Some of them had wives who said their husbands were at work and could I call back at five-thirty or something. A lot of them gave me phone numbers I could call to reach the old man right away. Those I eliminated too. A few I didn’t talk to turned out to be too old for our purposes. Anyway, we’ve got thirty-eight left that weren’t answering last night or today, or whose relatives said they were out of town.”
“That was pretty good,” said Walker.
“But not good enough.”
“What if we limit it to the phones that nobody at all answers?” asked Walker. “He’s dead, after all.”
“You mean we can assume that if a woman answered and she wasn’t crying, then the man in her life isn’t lying on a slab in Florida? You’re forgetting that the FBI hasn’t identified either man yet. This guy’s next of kin hasn’t been notified yet, so we can’t be sure they know he’s dead. And if you were a man who committed felonies professionally, it would be pretty hard to keep the little woman in the dark about it. If she knows what you do for a living, she knows how to cover. Even if you were good enough to deceive her, you would still have to feed her a bullshit story, so she could tell people why you weren’t out front mowing the lawn this week. And these guys seem to travel a lot. Most likely their relatives are used to them not showing up on time.”
“I suppose so,” said Walker. “Forget that idea. What about making a list of people who have no visible means of support?”
“You mean like the idea I had about checking their health insurance in the drugstore?”
“It’s not as elegant, but we only need to eliminate thirty-seven now. We go in every door on Main. Write down the men who work as waiters or store clerks or cops: anybody who has a name tag, or anybody whose name is on an office directory. That should eliminate a few of the ones you couldn’t reach by telephone. They were out working when you called.” He squinted. “A big step would be to somehow get a list of employees at New Mill Systems.”
“I tried New Mill this morning. I called and asked for the personnel manager. Some guy came on, so I said I was from the New Hampshire Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I asked for a list of employees broken down by age, sex, and race.”
“Race?” said Walker. “I haven’t seen a pair of brown eyes since I got here, let alone brown skin.”
“What do you want from me? I asked the guy what he expected to hear. No dice. He said the company employs fewer than a hundred people, and has been certified exempt from reporting requirements.”
“Is that true?” asked Walker. “Are companies like that exempt from discrimination laws?”
“How the hell do I know what the law is in New Hampshire? It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to take him to court. The list I wanted would have been of people who didn’t do anything wrong.”
Walker’s eyes settled on the sidewalk as he contemplated the problem. “Thirty-eight men . . . .”
“We’ve been in New Hampshire for three days, and none of the devious ways has worked. What I think we’ve got to do is start taking some chances.”
“Start?”
“Yeah. Risk drawing attention to ourselves. Ask direct questions of anybody who will talk to us. ‘Do you know James Scully? Who does he hang out with?’ ”
“I think you’re right,” said Walker. “It would probably go faster if we split up and talked to as many—”
“Maybe not,” said Stillman.
Walker looked up and stared at him. His eyes were squinting ahead. “But you just said—”
“Look,” said Stillman.
Walker turned his eyes to follow Stillman’s gaze. Far up the street, two men were getting out of a car parked along Main Street across from the coffee shop. Walker studied them, not quite daring to make a decision yet, straining his eyes and waiting for them to turn their heads so he could see their faces.
Stillman tugged his arm lightly to divert him into an alcove that shaded the entrance to a clothing store, and the movement of Walker’s body made him come to his senses. Waiting in plain sight for them to turn around would be insane. What they appeared to be were the two men who had pretended to be cops in the alley in Pasadena, but he wasn’t sure. He was positive he knew their faces, their postures, and their walks. In his shock and alarm he had studied them, imprinted them on his memory that night.
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Stillman said. “Stand here.” Stillman nudged him near the corner of the display window where he could look up the street through both panes of glass. “You won’t stand out between those mannequins. Steady. Don’t move, just look.”
Walker obeyed. He stood absolutely still, staring, holding his breath. One of the men had moved out of sight along the side of the car, toward the front. The other was at the trunk. He leaned over, opened the trunk, and bent down to get something out. Then he stood erect again, slammed the lid, and turned. Walker could see the movement of the shoulders, then the dark hair. The man looked up the street to check for traffic before he stepped away from the car. Then he looked down toward Walker, and Walker saw the bushy mustache. The two men trotted across the street. Walker stepped back.
“It’s them,” said Walker. “They’re here.”
34
Stillman’s eyes were gleaming. “Well, now that is a real gift from above,” he murmured.
“Should we follow them?” asked Walker.
“I think we’d better concentrate on making sure we don’t bump into them. We have to assume their memory for faces is as good as ours.”
Stillman stepped to the edge of the alcove where Walker had stood, then slowly moved his body to the right to see more and more of the sidewalk along the row of old buildings. When he had one eye beyond the corner of the display window, he said, “They went into the coffee shop,” and stepped out.
They turned away from the place where they had seen the two men and strode briskly toward the end of the row of buildings. Stillman said, “Let’s get across the street down there by the bridge, then head along the river to the next street.”
Walker led the way to Washington Street, where Main narrowed to funnel traffic onto the bridge, then glanced back toward the coffee shop before he ventured across. He and Stillman reached the other side quickly, and it took them only a few more steps to reach the curb, cross the sidewalk, and slip out of sight behind the bulk of the big building on the corner. He waited for Stillman to catch up. “What are we doing—getting the car?”
“It’s parked on Main, remember? We can’t get to it without putting ourselves in sight of the coffee shop,” Stillman said. “But I guess I’m finally going to get to say something that you’ll be happy to hear. Those two, thanks to us, are already wanted for questioning in connection with a homicide investigation. Also for assault. We’re going to the police station to get their asses thrown in jail.”
Walker noticed that his heart must have been beating hard since he had seen the two men. It was beating hard now, and it didn’t slow, but it wasn’t preparing him to contend for his life. “I can hardly believe it,” he said.
“It’s almost over,” said Stillman. “Once we get the police to put down their coffee cups, our whole reason for being here is going to begin to fade. About all we’re going to have to do is say, ‘Yep, those are the ones.’ We’ll find out some real names, the cops here will hold them, and the authorities all over the place will have time to start dreaming up the charges that mean something.”
Walker was frowning. “Why do you suppose they’re here at all?”
“I’m not sure,” said Stillman. “If I needed a theory to keep me warm, I would guess it’s for the same reason we’re here. They want to get a good look at Jimmy Scully’s house, to see if he left anything lying around that leads to them.” They reached the corner of the first street parallel with Main, which was called Constitution Avenue. As they turned and started up the street, he said, “Come to think of it, I was forgetting about the other guy, the one who had similar DNA to Scully. There’s his house, too. We still don’t know who he was, but they do. We were under the impression that he might have lived around here, and it could be we were right.”
