“What are you doing about Michael Jaynes?”
“Two agents interviewed Lucy Vesuvius this morning. She insists she hasn’t seen him.”
“What about setting up a trace from that pay phone in Clarinda?”
“And have a man monitoring the line for the next few months, ready to jump on a phone conversation that might be too quick to trace?”
“How are you going to find him?”
“He’s disappeared for too many years. If he’s not dead, he doesn’t want to be found, and he’s been damned good at staying hidden. I can’t pull agents off other cases for some nut-cake manhunt, but I didn’t need to. I had you to chase that wild goose, Elstrom, and you got nowhere. Unless…”
He paused, baiting me.
I bit. “Unless?”
“Unless there was nowhere to get to. Maybe you were just trying to fool us all with this Michael Jaynes stuff.”
“It’s a wrong bet to concentrate only on Jaynes. But you can’t forget about him, not if your only other suspects are Chernek and me.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Start looking at everybody who has had access-”
“Manpower problems,” he said, cutting me off. “What other bright ideas have you been percolating?”
“Those computer-aging photos you said you were going to do.”
“You see those things work on T.V.?”
“And at the movies. I bone up on investigating technique in all kinds of places.”
“They never work, you know. Too many variables in a person’s appearance.”
“Why don’t you try?”
“They’re done. We used Michael Jaynes’s Army picture, added a bunch of years, then did four more with baldness, large weight gain, the beard the woman at Universal Electric said he had, and a mustache. I sent them to our branches yesterday.”
“And they’ll send them to electrical contractors?”
“When they can. Maybe you could get your rich friends at Crystal Waters to blanket electrical firms, too. There’s two hundred right now sitting in an envelope in our lobby with your name on it. Come pick them up.” He hung up.
Till was too twitchy for me to figure. He was firing blindly in all directions. I would have been all right with that, thinking it might shake something loose, except that one of the places he was aiming was at me.
I pulled out of the Bohemian’s parking lot, my eyes in the rearview mirror. Nobody followed me. Maybe Till was just jerking me around about being a suspect.
I drove east the few blocks into downtown, parked in the shortterm garage, and went into the A.T.F. offices. As Till had said, an envelope with my name on it was at the first-floor reception desk. I pulled one sheet out.
There were six images: an Army photo and five computer renderings created from it. When he’d enlisted in the Army, Michael Jaynes could have been anybody’s fresh-faced boy next door: big smile, round baby features under the Army buzz cut. The computer shots aged him, but in each he still looked harmless, like the guy down the block, in plaid shorts, who cuts his grass every Saturday afternoon before going inside to pop the tab on a brewski and watch the ball game. I slid the sheet back in the envelope, went back to the Jeep, and oozed into rush hour on the Eisenhower Expressway.
Just past Austin Boulevard, the outbound traffic loosened up and I spotted it hanging back, three cars behind, in the far outside lane. Another dark Crown Victoria, this one blue. I changed lanes;they did, too, maintaining the three-car gap. I sped up; they stayed with me. I slowed down; they backed off. They must have picked me up outside the A.T.F. offices.
I stayed in the outer lane until just before Harlem, then cut left through a hole in the left two lanes, shot up the inside exit, ran the red light at the top of the overpass, and swung right. They might have been rookies, but they were good enough behind the wheel. They swung left across all the traffic, too, and made the exit without drawing a single horn.
I went north, then west on Lake Street. A couple of times, I turned off onto the side streets, but that was just for sport. By then I was sure. They stayed with me all the way to the turret, not bothering to do much to conceal themselves. I got out of the Jeep and walked to the door. They parked a hundred yards down, just off Thompson.
I tried to not think about being under surveillance. I nuked three Lean Cuisines and watched crime shows on my mini T.V. I didn’t learn any useful investigative techniques, but at nine o’clock I did remember the piece of lime pie I’d gotten in Bodega Bay. I found the Styrofoam container nestled in my still-unpacked suitcase. The pie was warm and had congealed into a kind of lime mash embedded with sodden specks of crust that had become mostly indistinct, like the information in the Gateville investigation.
I ate the pie and went up to my cot. Before I turned out the lights, I looked out the window. The dark Crown Victoria was still there, in the shadows past the streetlamp.
Twenty-two
It rained the next morning, so hard the water streamed into the turret like the Devil himself was up dancing on my roof, aiming a pressure hose at the cracks in the tar. The five-gallon pickle buckets I’d scavenged from the deli couldn’t catch it all, and for three hours, I raced the rain, emptying old varnish cans, a plastic wastebasket, and the pickle buckets out of the top-floor windows like a third-world washerwoman. Each time, I was tempted to wave a long finger at the boys in the Crown Victoria.
Stanley called late in the afternoon. By then the rain had stopped, though water was still dripping in.
“Mr., Mr. Elstrom-” Stanley started, began again, stammering so badly I cut him off.
“Let me guess, Stanley. Ballsard thinks the matter is over.”
“He feels the A.T.F. will keep a close watch on things, and besides, we paid the demand and should be left alone now, anyway.”
I asked the question only to hear how he was going to dodge it: “He’s not going to evacuate Crystal Waters?”
“You wouldn’t believe the extra security we hired. More than when you were last here.”
“He’s taking a big chance.”
Stanley breathed heavily into the phone. “Like I said, with the A.T.F. hunting for Michael Jaynes and watching Mr. Chernek, Mr. Ballsard feels the matter is under control.”
I wondered if Stanley knew I’d been added to Till’s list. “And if it’s not Jaynes or Chernek?”
Stanley paused. “I agree with you about Mr. Chernek. But this Michael Jaynes…”
“What if somebody else is doing this? Somebody you’re not searching for?”
“Michael Jaynes is sending money to Nadine Reynolds from the same Chicago zip code as our bomb threats.”
“A ten- or a twenty-dollar bill?”
“It was all he could afford, Mr. Elstrom.”
“He could have sent more after he picked up the half million behind Ann Sather’s.”
He didn’t say anything. I was a broken recording, playing in an empty room.
“You’ve got to clear out Crystal Waters, Stanley.”
“Mr. Ballsard feels-”
I gave it up. “I got some computer-generated renderings from A.T.F., showing what Jaynes might look like now. At least see if you can send them out to electrical contractors.”
“I’ll pick them up.”
“I’ll drop them off. I’m going to be out there anyway. It’s too late today to call Amanda in Paris, but tomorrow I’m going to get her to authorize me to supervise the removal of her artwork. The bomber hasn’t gone away, Stanley, and she needs to get her stuff into a bonded storage house until things are safe again at Crystal Waters.”
I looked up at the water dripping from the ceiling. Just a drop every few seconds was all, now.
“Stanley?” I asked after a minute.
“Yes, Mr. Elstrom?” His voice sounded far away.
“I’ll let you know when I’ll be out with people to pick up her art.”
I didn’t hear him say good-bye but supposed I’d missed it. I clicked off my cell phone and looked at my Timex. It was just after four o’clock. I called Leo, got him at home. He gave me the name of a firm he used to transport and store valuable art. I called Amanda’s answering machine in Crystal Waters, knowing she checked every day for messages, and asked her to call me. Then I hung up the phone and told her I missed her.