so much as with the sameness of driving. He had been confined in a car for at least a couple of days now, and the act of simply keeping a vehicle aimed in the right direction with the wheels between a pair of painted lines was not enough to occupy him. Prescott drove steadily, staying well back and keeping his own speed constant. After all of the young man’s maneuvering, he would invariably find himself stuck behind a truck that was slowly inching ahead of the one beside it, and Prescott would make up the difference, still hidden in a pack of other cars that made his invisible.
In St. Louis, there were two stops at jewelry stores, and then a stop at a big bar called Nolan’s Paddock Club, which Prescott judged must live off a small stage with a walkway that was pictured on the sign outside that said LIVE NUDE GIRLS. This was the first building where the two men had led him that had no windows through which he could watch them, so Prescott waited until they had gone inside, then followed to see who would meet them. When he entered, they were just passing through a lounge toward the right side of the stage. A big, bespectacled man behind the bar seemed not to acknowledge or even notice them, but he lifted a hinged section of the bar and stepped off, and didn’t seem to be surprised when the two followed him. The three disappeared through a door near the stage.
Prescott heard a sudden deep, repetitive sound like the thumping of a big engine, and realized after a moment that it was recorded music with the bass turned up too high. A few men in the poolroom drifted into the lounge, and then a blond woman who could not recently have been described as a girl, but who was arguably live, stepped out onto the stage and began to remove parts of a sequined costume, fulfilling the promise of the sign outside. She seemed monumentally uninterested in the whole empty ceremony, and had the expression of a woman alone in her room removing the clothes she’d worn to do some gardening. Prescott bought a beer and went to the men’s room. When he returned, the woman looked about ready to get into a shower and pick up the kids from soccer practice. He put a tip on the bar for the bartender, tossed a bill to the woman, and went outside again to wait.
A short time later, the two men emerged, and began to drive north on the interstate highway again. They drove the 246 miles to Indianapolis. Prescott now had a clear sense of the way the two men worked. There was nothing about any of the stops they had made to indicate that they had not made them all fifty times before. In each city, the people they met all had been expecting them and were ready to transact business. No stop ever took longer than a half hour, and some took as little as five minutes.
They went to jewelry stores, Prescott guessed, primarily to sell jewelry stolen in another town. Most could be safely resold as estate jewelry. If it was too distinctive, a jeweler could break it up and reset it as new. But in each city they also drove to some blighted neighborhood to stop in a different kind of business: a pawnshop, a bail-bond office, a used-appliance store. In Indianapolis it was a barber shop and an agency that specialized in placing domestic help. None of those places sold jewelry, but all of them were places where it was possible that people who came into possession of valuables of suspicious provenance might turn up. Those were the pickup points, where fresh supplies of stolen jewelry came from.
From Indianapolis, the men drove the 110 miles to Cincinnati and stopped in the evening at a small office building. Prescott saw them go inside and up a staircase, carrying their titanium cases. He waited for the usual half hour, and then saw them come outside again. He had expected them to find a hotel, but they did not. The older man drove the younger to an apartment complex, waited until his partner had gone to an upstairs walkway and opened his door with a key, and then drove on. Prescott followed him another fifteen minutes to a small suburban tract, where he turned into a driveway and put his car in the garage. Cincinnati wasn’t a stop on the route. It was home.
Prescott drove back to the center of town and spent the evening watching the small office building where the men had made their final stop. He had coffee down the street at a table near the window in a coffee shop, then browsed at the front window of a bookstore, looked at clothes in two different stores, and went for an evening walk that took him up the streets to the sides and back of the building. By ten o’clock the pedestrian traffic had become too thin to hide him, so he returned to his car and drove off.
By then he had seen everything that interested him. No customers or clients had come to the small office building during that time. The only arrivals had been two more pairs of men, and that told him this had to be a far- flung operation. The two he had followed had traveled to Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, and Indianapolis—five major cities in four states—and returned to their home base in a fifth state in under three days. He checked the odometer of his car and added the figure to the one from his last car: a bit over eleven hundred miles. If the other two-man teams did anything like as much traveling, the network would include cities in twelve states.
There would be no trouble selling merchandise in cities where it wasn’t hot. The best part was that there was no need for any of the jewelers who were buying stolen merchandise to know which city it had come from, who had owned it, who had stolen it, how long it had been missing. There was no need for them to know much about the people in Cincinnati who ran this business, or even that they were in Cincinnati. All they needed to know was that they were buying goods at prices that meant they couldn’t be anything but stolen, and that two men would show up now and then to sell them some more.
Prescott was careful not to assume he knew more than he did. It was possible that the office in Cincinnati was not the tip of the pyramid. This might be one of three or twenty-three regional syndicates that all paid into some larger, uglier national confederation. It might be a franchise that paid a percentage to the Mafia. It might be a secondary invention for the convenience of a silent partner who was washing cash by converting it into jewelry and back. Prescott could not be sure of the exact structure of the business, but that did not, for the moment, matter.
Prescott was sure he had found a route that Rowland the jeweler might have used to hire a killer. During the time when he had watched and studied Rowland, he had found no other way in which Rowland could have met or spoken with serious criminals. Rowland had probably had a difficult time getting himself to make the request out loud. He was a rich, established businessman. Even if there were people who knew he wasn’t quite respectable, they didn’t know anything specific enough to harm him. It was a risk. He had probably started to speak on a couple of occasions, and changed his mind, or maybe made a joke out of it. Then he had said something like, “I’ve got a problem, and I wondered if you knew anybody I could hire who might be able to help me.” They would have made him say it more plainly, because it wasn’t the sort of request that could be acted on without clear understandings. Then the word had traveled upward from the two jewelry couriers, and eventually made it to the killer.
Prescott decided to spend the night in a good hotel, then turn in his rental car in the morning at the airport and get a midday flight. After some consideration, he altered his plan and headed straight toward the airport. It would be better to get out of here now. He already knew the place where he would have to get his request into the system, and it would take time.
24
Varney awoke and his arm moved quickly but silently, his hand sliding into the space between the mattress and springs where his gun was hidden. As his fingers touched the grip, he already knew it had been another mistake. The soft, rustling sound he had heard was only Mae’s small bare feet padding across the floor to the bathroom. He turned his eyes in that direction just as the door closed softly.
In a moment he heard the shower running. He rolled over and stared up at the old light fixture on the ceiling, slowly reversing the perspective of his thought so that he was up with the half globe looking down on the bed at himself. Was Varney happy? This seemed to be what other people referred to as being happy. He tried to feel it, to feel anything, but he caught himself calculating again, enumerating the things he now had, and insisting to himself, “That is good. And that is at least okay. And that is something I sort of like . . .”
He had never lived with a person who was female since he had left his mother’s house, eleven years ago. At the moment it was not as bad as he knew it would have been if the woman had been confident enough to let her true nature show. Since she had come here, Mae had been on tiptoe, just like this morning, slipping lightly and quietly from one place to another, always on the periphery, where she wouldn’t be too obtrusive and get on his nerves.
She almost lived out of the black overnight bag, taking a few of her belongings out of it, putting them back when she was finished, and pushing the bag under the bed. She kept the apartment neat and clean without ever
