4
Terry Mulcany couldn’t believe his good luck. He’d been in the right place at the right time, that’s all, and now look. Here he was in the exact center of the manhunt, hobnobbing with the major headhunters. Well, not exactly hobnobbing, but still.
Mulcany knew he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t at this level. A young freelancer from Concord, New Hampshire, he had two trade paperback true-crime books to his credit, both to very minor houses and both milking, to be honest, very minor crimes. A few magazine sales, a whole drawerful of rejections, and that was his career so far.
But not any more. This is where it all would change, and he could feel it in the air. He was an insider now, and he was going to stay inside.
If only he could remember where exactly he’d run into that robber and his moll. Outside some B and B around here, that’s all he could bring to mind. A white-railed porch, greenery all around; hell, that described half the buildings in the county.
But even if he could never finally pinpoint where he and the robber had met, what he did remember was enough. He had come to this temporary police HQ just in time to end a disagreement between two of the top brass, and since it was the top top brass his evidence supported, he was in.
Apparently, it had been the local honcho, Chief Inspector William Davies, who believed one of the men they were looking for had left this area, pulled another robbery in New York State, and then come back here with the cash to finance the gang while they were hiding out. The other honcho, Captain Robert Modale from upstate New York, had insisted the robber, having safely gotten away from this area, would never dare come back into it. It was Mulcany’s positive identification of the man that proved the chief inspector right.
Fortunately, Captain Modale didn’t get sore about it, but just accepted the new reality. And accepted Terry Mulcany along with it. As did all of them.
The woman artist had left now, to have many copies made of the new wanted poster, and the others had moved into that office. Chief Inspector Davies sat at the desk where the artist had done her drawing, while Captain Modale and Detective Gwen Reversa — there’s a picture for the book jacket! — pulled up chairs to face him, and Terry Mulcany, with no objection from the others, stood to one side, leaning back into the angle between the wall and the filing cabinet. The fly on the wall.
At first, the three law officers discussed the meaning of the robber’s return, and the meaning of the woman who’d been seen with him, and the possibility the man was actually bold enough to be staying at one of the B and Bs nearby.
But what the sighting of the robber mostly did was put new emphasis on the whereabouts of the stolen money. “We probably should have done this before,” Inspector Davies said, “but we’re sure going to do it now. We’ll mobilize every police force in the area, and we will search every empty house, every empty barn, every empty garage and shed and chicken coop in a one-hundred-mile radius. We will find that money.”
“And with it, with any luck,” Captain Modale said, “the thieves.”
“God willing.”
“Inspector,” Mulcany said from his corner, “excuse me, not to second-guess, but why wasn’t that kind of search done before now?” He asked the question with deference and apparent self-confidence, but inside he was quaking, afraid that by drawing attention to himself he was merely reminding them that he didn’t really belong here, and they would rise up as one man (and woman) and cast him into outer darkness.
But that didn’t happen. Treating it as a legitimate question from an acceptable questioner, the inspector said, “We were concentrating on the men. We were working on the assumption that, if we found the men, they’d lead us to the money. Now we realize the money will lead us to the men.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Detective Reversa said, “Captain, I don’t understand what happened last weekend over in your territory. What was he doing there? Did he have confederates?”
Captain Modale took a long breath, a man severely tested but carrying on, “It really looks,” he said, “as though the fella did the whole thing by the seat of his pants. If he ever had any previous connection with Tom Lindahl, we have not been able to find it. Of course, we can’t find Tom Lindahl either, and unfortunately he’s the only one who would know most of the answers we need.”
Detective Reversa asked, “Tom Lindahl? Who’s he?”
“A loner,” Modale said, “just about a hermit, living by himself in a little town over there. For years he was a manager in charge of upkeep, buildings, all that, at a racetrack near there. He got fired for some reason, had some kind of grudge. When this fellow Ed Smith came along, I guess it was Tom’s opportunity at last to get revenge. They robbed the track together.”
Detective Reversa said, “But they’re not still together. You don’t think Lindahl came over here.”
“To tell you the truth,” Modale said, “I thought we’d pick up Lindahl within just two or three days. He has no criminal record, no history of this sort of thing, you’d expect him to make nothing but mistakes.”
“Maybe,” Detective Reversa said, “our robber gave him a few good tips for hiding out. Unless, of course, he killed Lindahl once the robbery was done.”
“It doesn’t look that way,” Modale said. “They went in late last Sunday night, overpowered the guards, and made off with nearly two hundred thousand dollars in cash. None of it traceable, I’m sorry to say.”
Inspector Davies said, “One hundred thousand dollars would be a good motive for the pro to kill this Lindahl.”
“Except,” Modale said, “his car was found Tuesday night in Lexington, Kentucky, two blocks from the bus depot there. People who travel by bus use more cash and fewer credit cards than most people, so he won’t stand out. If he’s traveling by bus and staying in cheap hotels in cities, spending only cash, he can pretty well stay out of sight.”
Detective Reversa said, “How long can he go on like that?”
“I’d say,” Modale told her, “he’s already got where he wants to go. Anywhere from Texas to Oregon. Settle down, get a small job, rent a little place to stay, he can gradually build up a new identity, good enough to get along with. As long as he never commits another crime, never attracts the law’s attention, I don’t see why he can’t live the rest of his life completely undisturbed.”
“With one hundred thousand cash dollars,” Inspector Davies said, sounding disgusted. “Not bad.”
Oh, Terry Mulcany thought, if only that could be my story. Tom Lindahl and the perfect crime. But where is he? Where are the interviews? Where are the pictures of him in his new life? Where is the ultimate triumph of the law at the very end of the day?
No, Tom Lindahl was safe from Terry Mulcany as well. He would stay with the true crime he had, the armored car robbery, with bazookas and unusable cash and three professional desperados, one of them now an escaped cop killer. Not so bad, really.
THE LAND PIRATES; working title.
5
Oscar Sidd’s car was so anonymous you forgot it while you were looking at it. A small and unremarkable four-door sedan, it was the color of the liquid in a jar of pitted black olives; dark but weak, bruised but undramatic.
Oscar sat in this car up the block from McW after his meeting with Nelson McWhitney. Some time today the man would set out on his journey to get the Massachusetts money. Oscar would trail him in this invisible car, and McWhitney would never know it. Out from beside the bar would come McWhitney’s red pickup truck, and Oscar would slide in right behind.