“Yes,” he said. “I knew that.”
In the morning they had breakfast at the airport while they waited for their flight for Denver, where they ate again before the flight to Portland. The rental car there was booked in his name, and he showed his driver’s license and paid with his credit card. He didn’t have to worry about either of them, or any of the pieces of ID he was carrying, including the passport he’d shown at check-in. They were legitimate and authentic, even if the name they carried was not the one he’d been born with.
It was easy to locate Belle Mead Lane on the street map Keller bought, but not so easy to find it when you were driving. The development it was in, on the western edge of Beaverton, seemed to specialize in thoroughfares that twisted this way and that, often winding up more or less back where they’d started. Add in a rich complement of dead-end streets, plus some fantasy roads that existed only in the mind of the cartographer, and the whole business got tricky.
“That’s supposed to be Frontenac,” he said, glowering at a street sign, “but it says Shoshone. How do you suppose Taggert finds his way home at night?”
“He must leave a trail of bread crumbs. What’s that off to the left?”
“I can’t see the sign from here. Whatever it is, maybe it goes somewhere.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“Here we go,” he said a few minutes later. “Belle Mead Lane. Number seventy-one, wasn’t it?”
“Seventy-one.”
“So it’ll be on the left. Okay, that’s it.”
He slowed for a moment across from a red-brick ranch with white trim, set back on a spacious and well-landscaped lot.
“Nice,” Dot said. “Be a showplace when the trees get some size to them. I call it a positive sign, Keller. He’s got to be more than an errand boy to afford a place like this.”
“Unless he married money.”
“There you go. What heiress could resist a small-time crook with hair growing out of his ears?”
“Well,” he said.
“Well, indeed. Now what?”
“Now we find a motel.”
“And wait until tomorrow?”
“At the earliest,” he said. “This may take a while. He doesn’t live here all by himself. But we want to get him when he’s alone, and when he can’t see it coming.”
“It’s like when you work, isn’t it? You go out and have a look around and plan your approach.”
“I don’t know any better way to do it.”
“No, it makes sense. I guess I expected it to be more straightforward, the way it was yesterday in Des Moines. Go there, get what we came for, and leave.”
“We were just picking up a phone,” he pointed out. “Our task here is a little more complicated.”
“Just finding the damn house was more complicated than anything we did in Des Moines. Will you be able to find it again tomorrow?”
It wasn’t hard to find, not once he’d been there and knew when to disregard the map. When he turned onto Belle Mead Lane the next morning, he half-expected to see Marlin Taggert out in front of his house, watering his lawn. But that was Gregory Dowling who’d been watering his lawn, and who might be watering it still, never knowing what a close brush with death he’d had. No one was watering Marlin Taggert’s lawn.
“And no one ever has to,” Dot said, “because we’re in Oregon, where God waters everybody’s lawn. How come the sun’s out, Keller? Isn’t it supposed to rain here all the time? Or is that just a rumor they started to keep Californians from moving in?”
He parked two doors down on the other side of the street. That gave him a good view of Taggert’s house, but put them where he wouldn’t spot them unless he decided to take a good look around.
Still, they couldn’t park here long enough to sink roots. Taggert might not be expecting trouble, but his was a line of work where trouble was never entirely out of the question. Even if there was no one with a reason to wish him ill, he almost had to be a person of interest to law enforcement officers of all descriptions, local and state and federal. He and his boss might have gotten away clean in Des Moines, but Taggert couldn’t have lived this long without getting tied into something somewhere. Keller, who’d met the man, was willing to bet he’d done time, though he couldn’t have said where or for what.
So he’d be cautious out of habit, whether or not he had anything specific to be cautious about. Which made surveillance complicated. You couldn’t park on the block for too long, or come back too often.
That afternoon they returned to the airport, where Dot went to a different rental car counter and rented a car for herself, paying extra for an SUV so that it would be recognizably different from the sedan Keller had rented. With two cars, Keller figured they were that much less likely to be spotted. But even with a whole fleet, they had to be circumspect in their surveillance, or Taggert would simply conclude that he was being watched by a government agency with a whole motor pool at its disposal.
A couple of times a day they took one of the two vehicles and found their way back to Belle Mead Lane. They’d do a couple of drive-bys, park at curbside for five or ten minutes, circle the block a time or two, and then return to the motel. They were staying nearby at the Comfort Inn, and there was a shopping mall with a multiplex theater just half a mile from the motel, and plenty of places to eat. But most of the time they sat in their separate rooms and read the paper or watched television.
“If we had a gun,” Dot said, “we could speed things up a little. Just walk up to the front door and ring the bell. He answers, we shoot him and go home.”
“And if someone else answers?”
“‘Hi, is your daddy home?’ Bang. But even if you drove from New Orleans to Des Moines with the gun in the car, we still couldn’t have brought it to Portland. Not without driving across the whole damn country. You think it would be impossible to buy a gun here?”
“Probably not.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“No. Anyway, how can we shoot him dead and then expect him to talk?”
Saturday morning they had breakfast across the street from the motel. Over coffee they went over what they’d learned in several days of intermittent surveillance:
— A couple of sightings had confirmed that Marlin Taggert, if that was the name of the man residing at 71 Belle Mead Lane, was definitely the man who’d been Keller’s contact in Des Moines. The same fleshy face, the same big nose, the same loose mouth, and the same characteristic walk, not quite shambling but not far from it. And, of course, the same Dumbo ears, though they were too far away to see if his barber had done anything to make them more presentable.
— The rest of the family included a woman, presumably Mrs. Taggert, who was younger than her husband and a lot better-looking. There were three children, a boy and two girls, ranging in age from ten to fourteen. The dog was a Welsh corgi, its puppyhood barely a memory. Once they’d seen Taggert and one of his children take it for an agonizingly slow walk around the block.
— There were two cars housed in the Taggert garage, a brown Lexus SUV and a black Cadillac. When Mrs. Taggert left the house, with or without her children, she took the Lexus. Except for the single excursion with the dog, Taggert barely left the house and never ventured off the property, and the Cadillac stayed put in the garage.
“Monday morning,” Keller said. “Until then I don’t want either of us to go anywhere near Belle Mead Lane. We’re not going to catch him alone over the weekend, and just in case he noticed our cars parked on the block or driving by, he’ll have a couple of days not to notice them. Then Monday morning we’ll take him.”
Later he asked Dot if she felt like a visit to the mall, but she’d found something she liked on television. He went to a hardware store and picked up a few things, including a heavy steel pry bar with its end bent into a U, a roll of wire for hanging pictures, a roll of heavy-gauge duct tape, and a pair of wire-cutting pliers. He put his purchases in the trunk and drove around to the theater entrance. He watched a movie, and when it ended he stopped at the men’s room, then bought popcorn before sneaking into one of the other theaters to watch another movie.