“Any blood stains or signs of violence?”
“Roger’s at the scene now. I thought you might want to take a look for yourself.”
“Sure. Have you been in touch with the company that owns the carrier?”
“Not yet. It’s Saturday afternoon, so all I get is an answering machine. But the cargo manifest in the cab tells a pretty complete story. I talked to two car dealers here in town. Smythe delivered four new cars to each of them yesterday.”
“You said a nine-car carrier?”
“Right. There’s nothing in the manifest about a ninth car. The last one to come off the rig would be the one over the cab, but neither of the dealers can remember what was up there yesterday. If anything.”
Ashleigh looked up from the book in which she had seemingly been wholly immersed. “I bet it’s a red sport coupe with Minnesota license number XPHMA-49.”
Mary was gradually getting used to such startling revelations of Ashleigh’s rapidly maturing genius, but this was a little too much. The lieutenant, who remembered Ashleigh as a very small child and often wished she had stayed that way, asked her if she was going in for black magic now.
“No, really. I see this same car every Friday morning. Precalc is so boring I look out the window a lot. From where I sit I can’t see down into the street, only the tops of some trucks going through the intersection. Or stopped for a red light. And this car goes by on top of one every week.”
Doyle’s response was indulgent rather than diplomatic. “Ashleigh, the same car wouldn’t be on the carrier week after week. And a car on a carrier wouldn’t have a license plate. They slap on a magnetic one at the dealer’s, till the car is sold.”
“But it is always the same car. XPHMA-49. From Minnesota.”
Lieutenant Doyle wrote it down in his notebook. “How can you be so sure of the number?”
“Because it means ‘money’ in Greek.”
“This is a word? How would you say it?”
“You say ‘ckrema.’ In Greek, what looks like X is really CH, and the P is really an R, and the H—”
“—Is eta, like an E,” said Doyle. “As in the slogan of Fownes’s Bakery — ‘Eta Beta Pi.’ ”
“And,” Ashleigh finished her explanation, “ ’Forty-nine is the year Grandma Cooper was born.”
Mary Deventer bristled placidly. “Let’s not be broadcasting vital statistics quite so freely, sweet.”
“I went deaf right after all that Greek stuff,” Doyle assured her. He phoned a description of Ashleigh’s red sport coupe and the registration number to the dispatcher at headquarters. “I’m going along with you on this,” he told her, “because there are a couple of things here that don’t add up. Such as why was Smythe delivering cars from Canada to dealers in the States? Ford and GM both have Canadian divisions, not to mention Chrysler, but cars manufactured up there aren’t routinely marketed here.”
The dispatcher called back almost immediately to report that Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services had never issued plates with such a registration number.
Partly to assuage Ashleigh’s disappointment, Mary let her ride along as she followed Doyle to the site where Smythe’s nine-car carrier had turned up. This was the parking lot, gradually degenerating into a sea of chipped concrete, of a projected business district that had never quite made it off the drawing board.
Roger Tredwyn, finding the cab locked, had opened it with one of the keys on Smythe’s ring. Apart from the cargo manifest the cab contained nothing of interest: no blood, no firearm, no shells.
“Something wrong?” A man in a leather apron, with a sweater thrown around his shoulders against the cold, was standing just outside the back door of a shop about twenty yards away, squinting at them as if they’d been trying the doors of parked cars.
Doyle walked across to him, the others following. “Do you know anything about that carrier?” asked Doyle.
“Belongs to a distributor from Canada. They park it here on weekends.”
“Do you own this lot?”
“I do. Come on inside. I’ve got asthma.”
They all trailed into the workroom of AAA Upholstery, where tools, hardware, fabrics, stuffing, and miscellaneous rubbish lay in chaos confounded.
“Your name, sir?”
“Bogenrife, Mack Bogenrife.” He was about fifty, pudgy, swarthy, whiny. “I bought that parking lot from Chik-Kwik next door when they went out. I rent parking space by the month for campers, limos, tree service trucks, boats—” He paused for a moment to cough and wheeze, eyeing Tredwyn and the two women incuriously. “They’ve been parking that rig out there most weekends since last summer. Problem?”
“Do you know a driver named Smythe?”
He nodded through another coughing spell. “He’s the only driver I do know.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Three, four weeks ago.”
“You didn’t see him park the rig here yesterday?”
“I hardly ever do. No windows back here. The rig was there when I went to lunch yesterday.”
“Any cars on it?”
Bogenrife took so long to answer that they thought he wasn’t going to. “Don’t think so.”
Doyle took a call on his cell phone, responded noncommittally, and rang off. After recording Bogenrife’s name and address he led the others back outside.
“Osterwald just found a red car with the Minnesota registration XPHMA-49,” he said, gazing speculatively at a cloud bank to the north.
Ashleigh pounced. “I thought you said—”
“The plates are fake. Plastic, not even a close imitation of Minnesota’s colors. Made by a company that does personalized front plates for people who live in states that require only a rear plate.”
“So where’s the car?” asked Roger.
“Parked at the carpool lot near the Interstate.” Doyle unlocked his cruiser and slid in behind the wheel. “This reminds me of one of those scavenger hunts.”
“Aye, but with the backside foremost,” said Roger in his distinctive drawl, as if he were talking while gnawing his way through a steakburger with all the extras. “I mean, we’ve already found the grand prize, haven’t we?”
“Can I ride with Roger?” Ashleigh asked her mother.
“Not unless you’re prepared to be at the epicenter of cataclysmic divorce proceedings.”
“Dad’ll never know.”
“Ashleigh, have you already forgotten those TV cameras last fall at the power substation? You ride with me, and if there’s a TV truck anywhere in sight when we get there, you stay in the car.”
They formed a three-car procession with Doyle in the lead. During the past four or five years the area surrounding the carpool parking lot had gradually evolved from a plot of waste ground out in the sticks to an outpost of civilization, with a gas station, a bar, a laundromat, and a full-service convenience store selling newspapers, magazines, tobacco, alcohol, and lottery tickets.
On a weekday afternoon at this hour the lot would have been crowded to overflowing, but today it was nearly empty, and the car they were looking for stood out like a rose in a weedpatch. At first glance the fake plates in front and back looked thoroughly convincing.
Tredwyn dusted the door handles for prints and found none. All four doors were unlocked, which was fortunate, since none of keys on the late Archer Smythe’s ring fitted. While he proceeded with a systematic search for prints, Doyle called in the manufacturer’s ID number to headquarters.
“Somebody wearing canvas work gloves adjusted the rearview mirror,” reported Tredwyn. “And opened or closed the trunk. Probably both.”
He released the trunk lid from inside the car to reveal obvious blood stains on the rumpled deck mat. The spare tire well contained a stack of empty black vinyl bags but no tire. A scent like yesterday’s sauerkraut haunted the trunk.