heading for San Diego. Number 177 arriving at the main bus terminal at eleven-oh-six p.m.”
Will wrote down the information. “Thanks,” he said, then realized Nico had already cut off the call. In the back of his mind he wondered who the hell Nico really was and how someone as straightlaced as Hans Vigo had hooked up with him.
Will had no intention of waiting for the Greyhound bus to arrive in San Diego. He called in the information to Chief Causey to expedite putting together a SWAT team to apprehend the bus en route, then he told Mario what was going on.
He pulled Robin into a semiprivate corner behind one of her canvases.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, searching his face.
He rubbed her arms. “I have a lead on Glenn. I have to go.”
Her brows furrowed in worry. “Be careful.”
“Mario is going to take you home and stand guard until I get back.” He kissed her short and hard. “I love you.”
Will rode with the unmarked SWAT van east on I-8. It had begun to drizzle in San Diego, but as they drove the sky cleared up. Commander Tom Blade was on the radio in the back. “ETA twelve minutes,” he said.
“Do you have a visual?”
“The CHP is tracking the bus discreetly. We don’t want to alert Glenn or the other passengers that something is wrong. They have an unmarked pair of vehicles playing tag team with surveillance. Bus dispatch has ordered the driver to pull off at Exit 30 and feign illness. Protocol requires that all passengers disembark if the driver leaves the bus. We’re five minutes behind the bus.”
“Make sure the CHP knows how dangerous he is.”
“They’re aware.”
Something nagged Will. Why would Glenn get on a bus? He’d know he was trapped if anyone saw him. Bus terminals had similar security as airports. He wouldn’t be able to bring a gun on the bus, and Will didn’t see the bastard going anywhere unarmed.
Nico sounded confident that his information was correct, but he didn’t personally witness Glenn boarding the bus. Will was relying on information from an informant he hadn’t talked to.
“Where’s the passenger manifest?” he asked Blade.
“There’re nine adult males on board traveling alone, and four traveling with a companion.”
“I need names.”
“It’s on the computer.” Blade jerked his thumb.
Will scrolled down the list on the SWAT laptop. Nothing jumped out at him. He had Glenn’s fake names, the names Sara Lorenz had created for him. None were on the list, nothing even close.
“He’s not on the bus.”
“I don’t have time for this, Hooper. ETA is six minutes. The bus has just pulled off the road. CHP is in place. We’re going off your information, dammit.”
“He was there, I’m certain of it.” At least as certain as he could be based on his conversation with his mysterious informant. “But he got off somewhere. Did the driver stop anywhere after leaving Calexico?”
“Their dispatch said there were no scheduled stops between Calexico and San Diego.”
“What did the driver say?”
Blade instantly saw the potential problem. “We determined that the safest course was not to engage the driver in conversation but to get everyone off the bus as quickly and safely as possible.”
Will listened to Blade with growing dread. “Dammit, Blade, he got off the bus. Somehow, he got off and we don’t know where the hell he is.”
Bus passengers were detained outside the suburb of Alpine off I-8. A light drizzle rained down as the passengers hovered under a fast-food awning, but Will barely noticed.
Theodore Glenn was not on the bus. He was not among the passengers. And he stood listening to the old bus driver with fear.
“We was only on the road twenty minutes when the old man complained he was sick. I left him at the Motel Six right outside Calexico.”
“Do you normally stop the bus if someone is ill?”
“’Course not, we got a toilet on board. But he looked white as a sheet and said it was his heart. I didn’t want him croaking on my watch.”
“What time was that?”
The driver made a point to look at his log. Will grabbed it from him. There was no mention of a stop outside Calexico. The log indicated no stops until this one.
“Did you stop or not?”
“Look, if I make an unscheduled stop, I got this huge pile of paperwork to deal with, and the guy was sick and-”
“What did he look like?” Will interrupted, keeping his voice low and even.
“Old. Least sixty, sixty-five. White hair. Lots of it, but white as snow. He’d have been tall if he wasn’t so crouched over and walking with a limp. Coughed the entire time. No one wanted to sit near him. I was glad to dump him off.”
“Did you see him get on the bus?”
The driver shrugged. “Sure.”
“Are you certain?” Will asked, his voice rising.
“Yeah, I did,” the driver said, defiant.
Will strode over to the group of passengers waiting to continue their trip.
“Raise your hand if you remember the stop at Motel Six where a sixty-year-old white-haired man was let off the bus,” he asked them. Virtually all of them raised their hand.
“How many of you would be able to recognize that man?”
A couple people put their hands down, but most kept them up.
“How many of you saw that man board the bus?”
After some hesitation, one by one the hands went down. The only hand remaining was a young boy of about ten.
Will went over to him. “What’s your name?”
“Keith Gomez.”
“Are you traveling alone, son?”
He nodded. “My mom and dad got divorced. I come on the bus to visit my dad every other weekend. I’m going back home to my mom. She’s going to be worried if the bus is late.”
“We’ll explain it to her, Keith. You saw the white-haired man board the bus.?
He shook his head.
Will frowned. “You kept your hand up. I thought you understood that meant that I wanted only those people who saw him get on the bus.”
“He didn’t. See, there was this other man. He was sitting in the back, right next to the bathroom door. As soon as the bus started to go, he went in there. He was coughing a lot. He was in there a long time. Like ten minutes. When he came out he looked different. He had brown hair, then he had white hair. He saw me staring and winked at me.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“He was coughing a lot and told Fat Ernie-the bus driver-that his ticker wasn’t good. What’s a ticker?”
“It’s slang for heart,” Will said.
“So Fat Ernie dropped him off. Ernie said it was to sleep off a bender. What’s a bender?”
“When someone drinks a lot of alcohol in a short period of time. What did the white-haired man look like before he entered the bathroom?”
The kid shrugged. “Brown hair. Sort of old, like you.”
Will unfolded Glenn’s mug shot and put it on the table in front of the kid. It instantly grew moist in the drizzle. “Is this the man you saw?”
The kid nodded. “Yeah, but he looked a little different. I think that’s him.”
Will stood and walked over to Blade and the others. “He’s not going to be at the motel, but someone should
