had settled that part of it and was already launched into the next stage, whatever that might be, so before she got too far he’d better tell her. “Do you want to know what I found this morning in the union hall parking lot?”
She turned to him again and smiled. “Of course, Bob.” He wasn’t sure if she was humoring him or not, but he went on.
“A few bits of wire and a fragment of the jacket of a blasting cap. Both charred. So I guess we know that much, anyway.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “That much is for certain. Now if only we didn’t have to go on a side trip to Colorado. I wonder what it’s like there this time of year.”
“Cold, clear. Now and then some snow.”
“Terrific,” she said. “And all just so the Senate staff can look at a report in two months and see that two people from Washington were there.”
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s worse than that, Elizabeth. They won’t have to wait more than a day. There’ll be reporters, photographers, probably national television. Senator Claremont was a very important man. That’s the real reason why they sent us, I think. After tomorrow’s newspapers whoever’s there won’t be of much use in undercover stuff, and we’re home office.”
“Oh, God,” she said, and slumped back in the seat. She thought, wonderful. Elizabeth Waring on national news in her thin California clothes investigating a death by old age. On national television. While somewhere in Southern California there would be two clerks, both of them busy forgetting what the man looked like that bought the hundred-pound bags of fertilizer and the blasting caps last Friday around supper time. Probably they’d be watching television. And what they’d see was … Elizabeth Waring. In Denver, Colorado, there, by her official presence alone to reassure ninety-nine men over sixty that there was no such thing as a death by old age.
By now most of it had probably happened, he thought. Just after daylight somebody would have gone through the alley and seen the two of them lying there. Around 7:30 or so whoever owned the car would have come out expecting to drive it to work. And the Senator—hard to say what time a senator would get up in the morning, but it would be before now. There was no question he was already dead.
It had been a long, cold night, he thought. It wasn’t so bad now—almost a different world. But he was tired, and some of the aches and pains were beginning to feel as if they might be more than that. He went over it in his mind again. He had waited to get a couple of miles away before he’d even looked for a car to hotwire. He’d found a two-year-old Pontiac parked on the street and taken it north on Route 87 to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cheyenne had been the only choice, really, and that worried him a little—only two hours of driving time from Denver. But he’d have a long lead before anybody noticed it, where he’d left it. He was proud of that one, and it cancelled out the fact that Cheyenne was too obvious. It takes someone a day or so to decide that a car in a parking lot attached to a housing complex not only doesn’t belong to him, it doesn’t belong to anyone else either. Then it takes a day for somebody to get up the nerve to complain about it. The walk to the airport had taken some more time, but at least it had been too dark for anyone to see him.
HE HAD MANAGED to get on the 7:00 A.M. flight from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City, and now he was on the noon plane to Las Vegas. He’d phoned in a reservation to Caesar’s Palace from Brigham Young Airport. The warm, clean air of the plane was a foretaste of what would be waiting for him in Las Vegas. And then, he told himself, it would all be over. No more fear, no more cold, and a chance to rest and take care of his wounds. This had been the worst trip he’d ever made. A nightmare. But at least the worry was over now—that had been the worst—the hot, physical fear, and the other part that knew you were going too fast, probably making mistakes because you were scared. That was all over now. Right now there were probably policemen searching for one or two young men who looked as though they’d been in a fight, but if they were, they were looking in the poorer sections of Denver, Colorado. They might be looking for a stolen Pontiac Grand Prix, brown, with a white vinyl top. If they were, they probably weren’t looking for it in an apartment complex in Cheyenne, Wyoming. None of these things had anything to do with the man who would be checking into Caesar’s Palace this afternoon, limping a little, and wearing dark glasses that hid a few bruises and a cut or two. A man who had suffered for taking a chance on a ski slope that was beyond his capacity wouldn’t raise much comment in Las Vegas. The inexhaustible supply of people of that sort was what paid the rent.
THE ENGINES CUT BACK and the blunt nose of the giant airplane seemed to run head on into a more solid medium, slowing and falling at once. Hart looked over at Elizabeth, who was peering out the window over the craggy formations of the Rockies, her forehead pressed against the glass. There was something special, almost intoxicating, about being close to a beautiful woman. There was a space around her, a few inches, that belonged to her and seemed to be permeated with her smell and sound. And something else, like an electrical charge, that seemed to tug you closer to her, but set off a warning signal that reminded you not to let yourself drift any closer, because in a moment you would touch, brush a sleeve or a shoulder against a soft arm, and then it would be too late. You could never relax inside the charged zone that belonged to a beautiful woman unless there was some kind of prior understanding between you that made it all right to touch because you had touched before. He wondered if Elizabeth was aware of the tension too, sitting there thinking about it and wishing the plane would land so she wouldn’t be forced to think about it anymore, wouldn’t be held in enforced immobility while each of them hovered in suspension at the border of the other’s personal space.
Beautiful women like this one were a special problem. The big, almond-shaped green eyes, the tiny waist, the impossibly thin wrists and long, graceful fingers made her seem as though she belonged to a superior species, smaller and more delicate than ordinary mortals and yet quicker. The impression might have been of an insubstantial creature, but it wasn’t that at all—what he felt was astonishment, almost as he might for a small antelope or an ocelot, an animal, a miraculous thing unconscious of what it was. He sensed in himself an overwhelming desire to touch, to verify that she was real and had the feel, the surface, and weight that his eyes told him she had.
She turned her face to him. “I hope we can get through this quickly and get back to work.”
Hart said, “Do you think the case is the real thing? I mean, we know it was no accident, but we also know Veasy probably didn’t buy the fertilizer himself. It seems to me the theory that it was a pro hinges on his being able to work with whatever he found.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Yes, there is that. But we don’t really know what we’re looking for, so anything we find out is to the good. The fact that it took a day for the local police to come up with the theory that it was dynamite, and another day to figure out that it wasn’t, and then it took another day for us to prove that the explosion was planned seems to me to show that whoever it was knew what he was doing.”
“But that doesn’t make it much more likely that this is a case of the sort that your section would be interested in, does it?”
“No, but I’ve got a couple of other things I’m checking on. The method isn’t what’s worrying me right now. I’m satisfied that he’s good enough at what he does. What’s missing is a reason for anybody to hire him to do it. And I still think he was hired. There’s nothing about Veasy to give me an excuse to believe it, but I do. People who just get mad at each other use guns or knives.”
The airplane whistled down to meet the runway, then thumped to a stop before taxiing to the terminal. Elizabeth and Hart sat still while other passengers filed out, then slipped into the queue when there was an opening. As soon as they were in the carpeted tube that stretched from the airplane to the terminal Elizabeth spotted the man. He wasn’t obtrusive enough to come to the attention of the other passengers. He could have been an airline employee, but he wasn’t. He stood there beside a wall ignoring everyone who went by him, looking straight at Elizabeth. She said to Hart, “We’re being met.”
“What?”
She leaned into him so her face was close to his ear and said, “They’ve sent someone to meet us.”
Hart said, “I see him. It’s good. Maybe we’ll get this over fast.”
They walked up to him and he said, “Mr. Hart? Miss Waring? Come with me, please.” They followed him, and Elizabeth was surprised to see him open a side door at the end of the tube. Then they were in a small room with an entrance on the other side.
