“About a quarter to ten,” Leopold decided, “unless we spot him going in earlier.”
“Mind if I smoke?” Griswald took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not used to meeting murderers in bus stations.”
“It hits you a bit personally when you know the victims.”
He nodded. “Especially Monica. She worked with me on Stone’s first trial.”
“Molly said she’d left the firm. What happened there?”
“Just a better offer from Salomon. People change jobs all the time.”
Leopold watched a stout black woman approach the bright facade of the bus station and disappear inside. “Did she get along well with Casper Stone?”
“I guess she did. I never thought much about it. She probably only met him two or three times.” He smirked a bit. “It’s obvious now that she got on better with Rich Easton. Why do you ask?”
“Well, did Stone kill her for a reason or just because she was there?”
“I understand Monica and Easton were in bed together. If the room was dark he probably didn’t even recognize her.”
“That’s true.”
At twenty minutes to ten Leopold said, “Maybe you should start in now. Study the schedule or something. Act like you’re waiting for a bus.”
“What if he pulls a gun?”
“He won’t do that. You’re his lawyer.”
Tom Griswald opened the car door and exited with some reluctance. “I’ll try getting him to surrender. For God’s sake don’t do anything rash that’ll get me killed!”
Leopold smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “Molly would never forgive me.”
He watched Griswald walk quickly across the street and enter the bus station. The front windows were all glass and it was possible to see virtually everyone in the terminal. Right now there was only a slender gray-haired man at the ticket window. Two white women sat together against the back wall and the black woman sat alone near the front window. Leopold knew the next bus arrived at 9:55. Casper Stone had chosen the meeting time with care, when the station would be crowded with arriving passengers. Though the night had turned cool, Leopold opened the car windows to clear out the smoke from Griswald’s cigarette. He glanced down the side street for Connie and the others, but they were well out of sight. Finally he called her on the radio. “Connie, Griswald has gone into the bus station. No sign of our man yet.”
“We’ll be ready,” she responded.
The bus came almost on schedule, and for a few moments the station and the platform around the side were alive with people. He lost sight of the young lawyer, then spotted him again moving toward the men’s room. Something was wrong. He wouldn’t go in there at this crucial time, not unless he’d spotted Casper Stone.
“I’m going in, Connie,” he said over the radio.
“I’ve got Sergeant Marlowe in there already, Captain!”
“But Sergeant Marlowe’s a woman and Griswald just went into the men’s room.”
Connie was sprinting from her car by the time Leopold reached the bus station. The crowd had thinned out already but Griswald hadn’t emerged from the men’s room. Sergeant Marlowe, the black woman who’d been seated alone, was on her feet. “He went in there.”
“I know,” Leopold said. Connie was behind him with two detectives. Leopold pushed open the men’s room door and entered, one hand on his pistol.
Tom Griswald was standing in the doorway of one of the toilet stalls, holding a blue suit coat and pants. “He was here, Captain! He was here and now he’s gone.”
“Did you speak with him?”
He shook his head. “I saw this man at the ticket window wearing a blue suit but I couldn’t see his face and didn’t recognize him. He went into the men’s room just before the bus pulled in. There were lots of people coming and going but I didn’t see him come out. I went in after him and finally when the place cleared out I checked the stalls and found these.”
“Is this the suit you bought him for the trial?”
“That’s it. The store label’s still in it. He wore it at the first trial too.”
Leopold turned the material inside out, pausing to examine what looked like dried blood.
Connie Trent stood at the open door. “Was he here?”
“Here and gone, Connie.” He glanced around at the station, nearly empty now. The two Women were still there chatting, along with a gray-haired toothless man who stood by the door waiting to be picked up. “Let’s talk to that ticket clerk.”
The clerk was a woman behind thick glass who spoke through a crackling microphone. She studied the mug shot of Casper Stone that Leopold held up. “I don’t remember him.”
“We think he was at this window ten minutes ago.”
“Maybe. I never look at their faces, just their hands and the money through the slot.”
“Where’d he buy a ticket for?”
“Hartford, maybe. Only tickets I sold tonight were for Hartford. Bus just pulled out.”
“Is that the first stop?”
“Sure. It makes a stop out at the shopping mall to pick up more passengers but then it goes right to Hartford.”
Connie hesitated, looking to Leopold for a decision. “We could have it held at the mall, Captain.”
“No, he’s not on board. That would be too risky.”
“But he changed out of the blue suit. There must have been a reason for that.”
“A reason, yes.” And suddenly Leopold knew what it was. “What fools we’ve all been!” He turned back toward the waiting room and saw the gray-haired man just going out the door. “Stop him!” he shouted to the detectives.
The man was out the door, breaking into a run, when Sergeant Marlowe hit him from behind, knocking him sprawling to the sidewalk. Then Connie Trent was on him with pistol drawn. They wrestled him into submission and Connie cuffed his hands behind his back. She looked up at Leopold with some surprise and said, “Captain, this isn’t Casper Stone!”
“No, it’s Rich Easton, back from the dead and ready to start a new life. He just looks different without his teeth.”
All Easton would say on the way downtown was, “I want a lawyer.”
Connie Trent had much more to say, and ask, once they were back in the squad room. “If that’s Rich Easton, whose body was in the beach house?”
“Our escaped murderer, Casper Stone. Let’s get Easton into the interrogation room as soon as his lawyer shows up and I’ll go over the whole thing.”
The lawyer was a man named Rankovich who was working on Easton’s financial problems. He was obviously uncomfortable with the turn his client’s fortunes had taken. “I don’t believe he should make a statement tonight,” he told Leopold.
“Fine. I just want him to listen to what we have against him so far.”
When they were settled around the interrogation table, Leopold began talking. “Casper Stone escaped from the courthouse holding cell yesterday morning. He tracked you to your beach house, Mr. Easton, and went there last night to kill you. We don’t know exactly what happened then, but somehow you killed Stone with your gun. The whole plot must have come to you in that instant. You were in great financial difficulties with your business, facing several lawsuits over your handling of clients’ money. Staring down at the body, you must have realized that you and Casper Stone were the same size. I never knew him in life, but you told me yourself that you loaned him your clothes after he fell off your dock during a clambake. So you had to be around the same size.”
“What about the other victim, Monica Raines?” Connie asked.
“After he got the idea of substituting Stone’s body for his own, he had two reasons for killing Monica — to keep her quiet about the substitution and to heighten the illusion that the body was his. He arranged them in bed together as if they’d been sleeping or making love—”