Andy said, “I’d know him, Mr. Fellows. You put him in a line-up, and I’ll pick him out. But it’s like what Mr. Watly says. I don’t know nothing about art. I never drew a picture in my life. This thing looks a little like the guy but not an awful lot and I don’t know what she ought to do with it.”
“I should throw it away,” she complained.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Fellows told her. “But maybe you could help them out a little by making changes here and there. Experiment and maybe by accident you’ll put it together.”
The girl said she felt useless, but she tried, and Fellows and Wilks left them together awhile longer.
The picture that finally developed was a pretty good charcoal sketch of a dark-haired man, a little younger looking, perhaps, than thirty-five, with a slender, not unpleasant face. Artistically it was commendable, but the three creators of it weren’t well satisfied. Shirley Whitlock was glum and dispirited. Watly shrugged about it and said it might bear some resemblance, but he wasn’t willing to commit himself. Andy was a little more optimistic. “It don’t look too much like the guy,” he said, “but I don’t know. There’s something about it. I could maybe recognize him from it.” Fellows saw them off with his thanks and put the picture, slightly yellowed by the application of a fixative, on the counter for Wilks and Sergeant Unger to study. “Look like anybody you know?” The two men shook their heads. “Not around here,” Unger said.
Wilks handed back the picture. “I think it’s going to be a bust, Fred. You really want to give it to the papers?”
“Like Hilders and the house. What’s to lose?”
CHAPTER XIV
Monday, March 2
It snowed on Monday the second of March. The first flakes fell at five in the morning and by eight o’clock, there was an inch on the ground, the sky was slate and dark and the weather cold and clammy. It was a dull and depressing start of a new week, but Chief of Police Fred Fellows had hopes. The regional morning papers were publicizing the case again, putting it back on the front pages. Shirley Whitlock’s charcoal sketch was given a prominent position in the Stamford editions and the fact that the dead girl’s steamer trunk was shipped from Townsend by a man and girl in a pick-up truck got all the play the chief had asked for. People in Townsend read the Stamford papers since they had none of their own and he hoped that before the morning was out there would be a call.
It was this morning too that the report from the Motor Vehicle Department arrived. Of the 873,000 passenger cars registered in the state, 43,000 were 1957 Fords and well over two thousand were tan, two-door sedans.
The information, too lengthy to come over the teletype, arrived by registered mail and when Wilks pulled out the sheaf of papers with names and addresses, he took them in to Fellows and tossed them on his desk and said, “I quit.”
Fellows, poring over the roster with an eye to sending more men on the filling-station detail, picked up the lists and tilted his chair back. “What’s the matter, Sid?”
“Look at those addresses. Read the letter—873,000 cars in a population of two million. Over two thousand of them match the one we’re after. Why couldn’t Campbell own a Cord or something? Do you know how long it’ll take to check every one of these people?”
“Not long enough for Campbell to die of old age, Sid.” He sorted through the thick mess of papers on his desk, hunting until he came up with the Erie police report, the names of the six former employees of Gary Hardware who lived in the area. Then he went through the alphabetical list of Ford owners. At the third Connecticut name he whistled. “Richard Lester at 440 Fair Street, Stamford, owns one of our cars. What do you know about that?”
“Stamford?” Wilks sat down beside him.
“Richard Lester. He worked for Gary Hardware, so he knows about Campbell, he drives the tan Ford, and he lives in Stamford.” He finished the sorting and said, “He’s the only one, but that’s better than I would have thought.”
“And the next question,” Wilks added, beginning to grin, “is did he know a girl with the initials J.S. I think we’re onto something.”
“Yeah, but don’t let it go to your head. It proves nothing.”
“But at least it’s a place to look. We haven’t even had that before.” He got up. “You want me to go down there?”
“I’ll send Ed down. The Stamford police are investigating him, but we’ll see what Ed can dig up. I want you to go back to Townsend and work on the girl’s angle.”
“Ed gets all the fun.”
“I know it, but you’re the better detective. You get the harder job. Try to locate that girl, Sid. And keep in touch by phone in case someone calls in about her.”
Ed Lewis was summoned and dispatched in his own car. “It doesn’t matter if Lester’s got a bent fender or not,” Fellows told him. “And if he’s not clean, bring him back and we’ll show him to Watly or that grocer boy.”
Lewis went off eagerly and Wilks went, a little less eagerly, on his assignment in Townsend. His was the harder job, all right, and he didn’t have many ideas how to tackle it.
Sidney Wilks was the first to call back. “I tried the employment agency here,” he told Fellows. “No luck and no ideas.”
“Try the contractors in town. Concentrate on the truck.”
“I don’t suppose there’ve been any calls.”
“Not about the girl, but there’ve been three about the picture we ran. They’re being checked out now.”
John Hilders came in around noon,
