“No idea.”
“I just hope one of them wasn’t a real princess,” she said, “or the poor darling wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep. But I don’t suppose the Laurel Inn’s a must-see for European royalty. Well? Aren’t you going to see if it works?”
He flipped the phone open.
“Wait!”
“What?”
“Suppose it’s booby-trapped.”
He looked at her. “You think someone came here, found the phone, fixed it so it would explode, and then put it back?”
“No, of course not. Suppose it was booby-trapped when they gave it to you?”
“I was supposed to use it to call them.”
“And when you did — boom!” She frowned. “No, that makes no sense. You’d be dead days before Longford even got to town. Go ahead, open the phone.”
He did, and pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. They got back in the car and found a store that sold batteries, and now the phone powered up just the way it was supposed to.
“It still works,” she said.
“The battery was dead, that’s all.”
“Would it still retain information, though? With the battery dead?”
“Let’s find out,” he said, and pressed buttons until he got the list of outgoing calls. Ten of them, with the most recent one at the top of the list.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dot said. “Keller, you’re a genius.”
He shook his head. “It’s Julia,” he said.
“Julia?”
“Her idea.”
“Julia? In New Orleans?”
“Suppose the phone’s still where you left it, she said, and suppose it still works.”
“And it was and it does.”
“Right.”
“Keller,” she said, “you keep this one, you hear me? Don’t send her off to walk the dog. Hang on to her.”
36
They sat in the car, and he read the phone numbers out loud while she copied them down. “In case the phone goes ker-blooey,” she said. “First thing we can do is toss all the numbers with a five-one-five area code. You think there’s a chance on earth Al lives in Des Moines?”
“No.”
“What about Harry?”
“Harry? Oh, you mean the guy with hair in his ears.”
“If you’d rather,” she said, “I suppose we could call him Eerie. You think he was local?”
“He seemed to know the city. He found the Laurel Inn without any trouble.”
“So did I, Keller, and the closest I’ve ever been to Des Moines before was thirty thousand feet, and I was in a plane at the time.”
“He knew enough to recommend the patty melt at the Denny’s.”
“So he lives in a city that has a Denny’s. That sure narrows it down.”
He thought about it. “He knew his way around,” he said, “but maybe he was just well prepared. I don’t think it matters. Either way we can forget the five-one-five numbers. If Hairy Ears was local, then he was way down on the totem pole. They wouldn’t pick up someone locally and let him know much.”
“Point.”
“In fact,” he said, “if he was local, he’s probably dead.”
“Because they’d clean up after themselves.”
“If Al would send a team of men to White Plains to kill you and burn your house down—”
“Keller, that was me. Remember? I was the one who did that.”
“Oh, right.”
“But I take your point. We’ll concentrate on the out-of-towners.”
The most promising number, with three calls to it, had a 702 area code, and turned out to be a Las Vegas tip line for sports bettors. Another was a hotel in San Diego. Dot said the third time was the charm, and tried the third number, and got coo-wheeeet for her troubles.
“The only way to look at it,” she said, “is it’s enough of a miracle that the phone was still there, and we’d be asking too much if we expected it to do us any good. I’ve got one more number to try, and then we can go back to the Laurel Inn and stick this damn thing under the mattress where it belongs.”
He watched as she dialed, held the phone to her ear, raised her eyebrows as the call went through. Someone answered it, and she promptly pressed a button to put the call on speakerphone.
“Hello?”
She looked at Keller, and he hand-gestured Come on, wanting to hear more. In a voice a little higher than her own, she said, “Arnie? You sound like you got a cold.”
“You sound like you got a wrong number,” the man said, “not to mention the brains of a gerbil.”
“Oh, come on, Arnie,” she cooed. “Be nice. You know who this is?”
The phone clicked.
“Arnie doesn’t want to play,” she said. “Well?”
He nodded. It was the man with the Hairy Ears.
“Well, no wonder he hung up,” Dot said. “It turns out his name’s not Arnie after all.”
“There’s a surprise.”
“It’s Marlin Taggert. That’s Marlin like the fish, not Marlon like Brando. And he lives at seventy-one Belle Mead Lane in Beaverton, Oregon.”
“There was an Oregon map in the car.”
“This car? Just now?”
“The Sentra.”
“You think he left it there?”
“No, how could he? And it wasn’t the car I rented, it was the one I switched plates with at the airport. Never mind, it’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s an actual coincidence.”
“And a real interesting one, too, Keller. Brightens my whole day.”
“Sorry. Where’s Beaverton? Is it near anything?”
“Tell you in a second,” she said. “There you go. It’s just outside of Portland.”
And just like that they knew his name and where he lived. They were in a Kinko’s on Hickman Road, where they’d set her up at a PC for $5 an hour. He’d been watching over her shoulder, so he didn’t have to ask how she did it, but that didn’t render the performance any less remarkable. Google had led her to a site where all you had to do was enter a phone number and it would see if it could find it; once it determined that it was available, you had the option of buying it for $14.95. After a quick credit-card transaction, it coughed up the data.
“I knew the government could find out anything,” he said, “but what I didn’t realize was everybody else can, too. You’d think he’d have an unlisted number.”
“He does. Unpublished, anyway. It said so, right there on the screen, at the same time it was offering to sell it to me for fifteen dollars.”
“Can’t argue with the price, can you?”
“There’s probably a way to get it for free,” she said, “if I’d wanted to devote the time to it. And no, you really can’t argue with the price. I figured the absolute minimum it would cost us was thirty pieces of silver. I wonder who flies to Portland?”
“I’ll go,” he said. “There’s no reason why you have to.”
She gave him a look.
“What?”
“We’re both going to Portland, Keller. That goes without saying.”
“You just said—”
“What airline, Keller. And I don’t have to wonder, not since God created Google.”
They spent the night at the Laurel Inn after all, but in separate rooms. It was Dot’s idea, after she’d gone to the United website and booked them on a flight the next morning. “We have to stay someplace,” she said, “and we’ve already got the one room.”
His room was on the ground floor in the front. He checked in and had a shower, then went up to 204. She was drinking a bottle of Snapple from the vending machine and making a face every time she took a sip. She asked if he knew a decent place for dinner, and he said the only place he could think of was the Denny’s across the street, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to go there.