“Doug's office, please. If he's not in, put me through to Sharon. Tell them it's Pete Talbott and I need to talk to one of them.”
I heard a couple of minutes of what I guessed was a Mozart piano concerto. I didn't call in very often, and it was nice to see Doug had risen from his Grateful Dead phase to a higher intellectual plain. Finally, someone came on the line, but it wasn't Sharon.
“Pete? Hi, this is Jeanie Simpson in HR.” She sounded hesitant, almost unsure. “Doug isn't here. He didn't come in this morning and we're getting worried.”
“What about Sharon? Isn't she there?”
“She didn't come in either,” Jeanie paused, still not sure. “Look, I know you two are old friends or I wouldn't say this, but when Doug and Sharon's desks were
“Doug and Sharon? That didn't happen.”
“I didn't think so either, but it wasn't my place to question. However, he missed two appointments this morning and a conference call with the bankers.”
“Doug missed a call with his bankers? Have you called the police?”
“I called Ted McDermott, our attorney. He said the police won't touch it for forty-eight hours, so we had to sit tight.”
“Ted's right, Doug will probably come wandering in tomorrow morning with some lame excuse, so sit tight,” I told her, not believing a word I was saying, but I didn't want to get the office staff involved. “Jeanie, when you came on the line just now, you sounded surprised to hear from me.”
“You had several phone calls this morning. A man was asking if we knew where you were. He was polite enough, but my radar went up. First he tried the receptionist, then Programming, and then he tried working me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was calling from California, from your old office, and that he had to talk to you about some project the two of you had been working on. He was very, very persistent and he wanted to know if I knew how to reach you. But it just wasn't right.”
“What wasn't”
“Excuse me for being blunt, but I'm HR. I knew you had been out of work for quite some time in Los Angeles, so what could you possibly have been working on with this man? And he said he was calling from California.”
“California?”
“Yes, but we have Caller ID on all the incoming lines and the display showed the call was from a local Boston number. That's why it didn't seem right. And then the Boston Police started calling this afternoon, asking if we knew where you were.”
“You did the right thing,” I reassured her. “Tell the office staff, if they get any more calls from that guy, they should play dumb. You haven't heard from me, you haven't talked to me, and you don't have a clue where I am. But if you can, get them on tape.”
“Are you coming back? Can you help?”
“I'm going to try. I'm in Amarillo, Texas. If I can, I'll call you again tomorrow.”
After I hung up, I stayed in the phone booth for a long minute, playing the “what-ifs” back to myself. As usual, I came up with more questions, but not very many answers. What I did know was that we had to get to Boston and we had to be careful.
The rest of the drive across southern Michigan was uneventful. I took the wheel for the second half of the trip. We took it slow and stopped for coffee and a late lunch before we hit Toledo at 6:30 PM. There wasn't much traffic by that time. What there was, was all leaving town, not going in. That made it easy to find the train station. It was a big, neo-classic building named Union Station, like most other downtown train stations in the Midwest. It was south of the tall buildings, down on the river. We circled it twice, staying a full block away. All we saw was a cop car parked near a donut shop, no SWAT Teams or ugly sedans with black-walled tires were lurking nearby.
“Drop me at the front door,” Sandy said. “I'll look around the waiting room.” She could tell I didn't look very happy at that thought. “You're something else, Talbott.” She pulled the blond wig from her shoulder bag. In seconds the transformation was complete. “We need to know, and it's better to find out now than later. If I come running back out, you'll know it was a really bad idea.”
It did not take more than three minutes before she came strolling back out and hopped in the car, holding a newspaper in her hand. “Unless they're disguised as bored ticket agents, a very old black porter, or a couple of really gross homeless guys laying a bench in the back corner, nobody's home. Let's go.”
As I drove away, she opened the newspaper. It was the
I pulled over to the side of the street and read the story over her shoulder. It was inside, on Page 4, but they had the photo from my California driver's license next to the story. Nothing makes you look more like a perp than one of those.
TWO WANTED IN MIDWEST CRIME SPREE
Chicago. Chicago Police joined a three-state manhunt for a modern-day, Bonnie and Clyde. Following a high-speed chase through the south side this morning, two police officers were seriously injured when the pair shot their way through a roadblock at 35th Street creating havoc on the Dan Ryan Expressway. They escaped north on an El train and disappeared in the Chicago Loop. A large manhunt is continuing downtown and police sources consider both suspects armed and dangerous.
The pair are believed to have escaped with the help of the Disciples, a notorious south side street gang. CPD Gang Intelligence says the two white fugitives may be major players in an interstate drug trafficking syndicate from the west coast believed to be muscling its way into the Chicago rackets with the help of a Columbian cocaine cartel.
The man is identified by Chicago Police as Peter E. Talbott, a drifter from Los Angeles who faked his own death in Mexico last year. He is wanted for questioning regarding the death of a private security guard on the north side earlier this morning, and in Ohio for the murders of a county sheriff and two ambulance attendants.
His unnamed female accomplice has not yet been identified. She is described as a short, punk rocker with black hair and heavy make-up...
That got a rise out of my unnamed female accomplice. “A punk rocker with heavy make-up!” she exploded.
“And short.”
Her eyes became thin dark slits. “Don't let your mouth get your butt in trouble, Talbott, but what's this stuff about us shooting our way through a roadblock?”
“And “the death of a private security guard… major players in an interstate drug trafficking ring… a drifter who faked his own death in Mexico last year”? Tinkerton is losing it. Odd, though, there's no mention of the Feds. No “FBI sources”, only the Chicago cops.”
“Well, he's got you labeled as a cop-killer now. He wants you dead.”
“A girl can always shop. Let's go back to the Interstate and find a mall. I need some things and you could use a new look, too. Besides.” She gave me that look again. “The balcony of a dark movie theater is a good place to hide and kill some time.”
“They don't have balconies anymore.”
“Darn!”
We found a mall at an interchange in the suburbs and wandered through a large department store. I picked out a pair of dress jeans, a plum-patterned Polo shirt, and a dark blue casual blazer. Sandy bought a light blue top, a dark-blue skirt-shorts combination, and a jacket. We had the clerk cut off the tags, and we went to the fitting rooms to change. When she came back out, she took me by the arm and pulled me down the concourse. “There's something else I still need to do with you.”
“You've been trying hard enough,” I mumbled.
