and leave it alone.'
'So somebody just parks it here and uses it when…'
'Whenever he's up to no good. Whenever he doesn't want to use his real car. Whenever he's digging holes in the woods. He comes at night apparently, or someone would have noticed him, and the car has tinted windows so no one is going to see who's driving. If he comes through the woods, that means he's exposed to public view for no more than five or six steps. And that's at night.'
'You think this car belongs to Johnny Appleseed?' asked Metzger.
'If we're lucky, if we're very lucky,' said Tee.
'Metzger, who else did you tell about this car?'
'No one, Agent Becker.'
'You don't have to call me 'Agent.' You're sure you mentioned it to no one?'
'Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. I think I should have told the chief sooner.'
'Did you tell McNeil?' Tee asked.
'Well, no, I didn't, Chief.'
'Did you talk about it in his presence? Was he around when you talked about it over the telephone?'
'No, like I said, I didn't tell anybody until I told you.'
'How about when you used the computer to trace the plates? Was he around then?'
'Chief, if I let McNeil know what I told you, about going into the woods and then looking for cars and not mentioning it… frankly, he'd give me a terrible time about it. '
'I know he would,' Tee said. 'Well, don't tell him, don't mention it at all, to anyone, in any way.'
'Okay. Do you want me to start working the car over?'
'We're not going to touch it,' Tee said. 'If Emro and Canil tell us the same story as Schilling, we're going to leave the car exactly the way it is and see who comes to collect it.' He turned to Becker. 'Right?'
'Right. But we don't have to hide in the bushes for three days until he shows up. We have electronics for that.'
'Not in Clamden we don't.'
'I believe I can arrange a loan,' Becker said.
That night, after dark so that neither the Schillings, the Emros, nor the Canils would see, Becker affixed a motionactivated radio transmitter to the beige Chevy Caprice. When it moved, if it moved, for however long it moved, it would send out a signal allowing others to follow it. Tee put receivers for the radio signal in his own home and in his office, keeping it separate from the normal police business so that McNeil would not know of its existence.
Becker assigned another Bureau agent to work with Schilling on the tedious job of going through all of his canceled checks for as many years back as Schilling saved them. The theory was that most people who required a driver's license to cash a check would note the ID number on the face of the check, thereby giving Schilling some record of who had access to his number. The flaws in the theory were many. Schilling was an efficient man; he saved only those checks that were relevant to his taxes, and as allowable deductions had shrunk in recent years, so had the number of checks saved. After three years, when the IRS statute of limitations expired and he no longer had to fear an audit for any given year, he disposed of all of his records except those having to do with long-term depreciation. There was also the possibility that his license number had been purloined by any number of other means, including someone just looking in his wallet in a locker room. Still, a lead was a lead and the glacially slow process of investigation had begun, breaking boulders into stones and stones into rocks and rocks into sand, the better to sift it all again and again and again.
Becker and Tee went to work on the maps together. Assuming Schilling's house on Ledgewood to be the center of their circle of search, they cataloged every house within a radius of thirty minutes by foot through the woods. The process was revealing in the number of houses it brought into play. The labyrinthine nature of the Clamden roads distorted true distances, sometimes separating points that were nearly contiguous by miles of winding road. Becker saw how the coyote-if it was the same coyote-had so easily outdistanced him on his bicycle.
' I had no idea,' Tee said. 'There are eighty-nine square miles in Clamden and you can still start in the middle and walk out of town in any direction in less than a couple of hours. '
'If you stay off the roads,' Becker added.
'We've got half the town on this list,' Tee said.
'Including your house.'
'And McNeil's.'
'Said to the sound of licking chops,' Becker said.
'What's the matter with McNeil as a suspect? He's too easy?'
'I would welcome easy, Tee, believe me. I would love just once for one of these guys to show up on the doorstep and confess. I just think we ought to check him out a bit more before you fit him for a noose.'
'Like what?'
'Like check his alibi for the night Inge Schrag went missing, for starters.'
'You mean… investigate?'
'Something like that.'
'I knew there was a reason I didn't like this job… He said he was in bed with his wife.'
'You asked him already?'
'Sure. I'm not as shy as I look.'
'So did you confirm that with his wife?'
'She thought he probably was. She was asleep.'
'Not the most inventive alibi in the world, but it might serve.'
'Serve, shit. He's going to have to do better than that. He's going to have to come up with a videotape of him sleeping before I buy it.'
'Do you have any evidence at all?'
'I knew I shouldn't have brought the Feds into this. I'm a small-town chief of police. I thought I got to railroad innocent men and women. I don't have evidence, I got a gut feeling. You work on gut feelings a lot, you told me so., I 'Yes, but I don't hate the man first. I use my instincts to try to understand or anticipate the suspect, I don't just look at somebody, decide I don't like the cut of his jib, then try to stack things against him.'
'You'd have a better arrest rate if you did.'
'You may have a point there. I wonder if I could convince Karen to let me work that way.'
'You must have some pull with r. Threaten to withhold your favors…
What, am I crazy? Withhold your favors from Karen, you lucky stif.'
'Scratch that idea.'
'Speaking of Karen, it's time for me to pick up Jac from play practice, then go home and cook dinner. Keep working, Chief, you're doing great.'
'We've narrowed this down to about a thousand houses. What am I supposed to do now?'
'See how many of them have able-bodied males between the ages of sixteen and sixty.' 'In Clamden? Just about all of them.'
'That should make your job easier, less eliminating to do.' Becker patted Tee on the shoulder and left the office. He walked through the parking lot and past the library and skirted the law offices on the corner beside one of Clamden's four stoplights. There were no crosswalks and Becker waited for traffic to clear before slicing diagonally across the road. He came to the tiny shopping center and was cutting through it, heading for the empty lot behind the shops and the slot in the hedge that led to his neighbor's backyard and eventually his own house, when he encountered Tovah Kom.
She stood with the leggy insouciance of the model she once was, one hand resting on a jutting hip, her eyes taunting and mocking him with the same superior expression Becker thought she reserved just for him, as if he were a species she had seen before, as if she had his number coming and going but, like an indulgent relative, was mildly fond of him nevertheless. The take-out pizza carton from the luncheonette that she held in one hand did nothing to detract from the look of amused condescension. 'Well, well, well.'
'You have me there. How are you, Tovah?'
'You look like you're in hot pursuit of someone. Head down, striding along, looking neither to the right nor to
