The super emerged from his apartment. “Please take these people up to Mr. Foreman’s apartment,” she said to him.
The super handed her the key, and she handed it to another agent. “You take the group up there and go over the place with a fine-toothed comb. I’m calling this in.” She turned to William. “How was Mr. Foreman dressed?”
“He was wearing a dark business suit, a topcoat and a gray hat, a fedora,” William replied.
The agents headed for the elevator, and Martin called Lance.
“Cabot”
“Lance. It’s Martin. We’re at the building, and Foreman left twenty-five minutes ago for Kennedy Airport. Said he was taking a ten o’clock flight to London.”
“Then he’ll be arriving there in ten or fifteen minutes, with decent traffic,” Lance said. “I’m on it. You and your people do the apartment”
“We’ve already started.” She gave Lance Foreman’s description.
LANCE TURNED to Kerry Smith. “This guy, Foreman, who sounds like Teddy, is going to be at Kennedy airport shortly. How many people do you have there?”
“Half a dozen agents,” Kerry replied, “but we can mobilize the NYPD unit out there, plus airport security.”
“Good. Have them go directly to the departing-passenger set-down and the departure lounge for every airline with a London flight tonight. He’s traveling as Albert Foreman, and he’s wearing a dark suit, a topcoat and a fedora. Go!”
AT KENNEDY, Teddy got out of the car, paid the driver and carried his own luggage into the terminal. He took the escalator down one floor and emerged at the curb where passengers from arriving flights waited for taxis. Upstairs, unknown to him, FBI, the police and airport security were flooding the departure areas, looking for him.
Teddy waited in line patiently for a cab, and ten minutes later, he was headed back to the city. He gave the driver the address of his Lexington Avenue shop. He didn’t feel like carrying his luggage anymore.
“Where you in from?” the driver asked.
“London,” Teddy said without thinking.
“London flights don’t arrive this time of night,” the man said. “They get in during the afternoon.”
“We had the mother of all flight delays,” Teddy said.
FIFTY-FOUR
LANCE AND HOLLY WALKED into the Foreman apartment on Park Avenue and looked around. “Looks like nobody lives here,” Holly said. An agent came up to them.
“Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Not so much as a partial on any surface.”
“Then Foreman is Teddy,” Lance said. “Get a sketch artist up here and put him with the doorman and the super. Maybe well at least get a better sketch.”
“You know,” the agent said. “When we were canvassing realtors last week I interviewed the woman whose office is the rental agent for this building, and she denied having rented anything in any building to a single man during the past couple of months.” He handed Lance a rental agreement. “We found this in the desk drawer, wiped clean, of course. Her signature is on it. The woman lied to me.”
“Find out why,” Lance said. “Maybe she’s an old acquaintance of Teddy; maybe she knows something else that could help. Pick her up, scare the shit out of her and milk her dry. Print her and do a background check, too. See if her path has crossed Teddy’s at some time in the past.”
The man left.
“He’s not going to be at Kennedy,” Holly said.
“Maybe not,” Lance replied.
“Certainly not,” Holly said. “Teddy’s not going to tell a doorman where he’s going, then go there.”
“We checked the car service; it dropped Teddy at Kennedy fifteen minutes ago.”
“Then he’s not there anymore. My guess is, he’s on the way to LaGuardia-if he’s running-and he’s on the way back into the city, if he’s not.”
Lance called Kerry. “He may be headed to LaGuardia or back into the city,” he said. “Turn out as many people as you can at the other airport; I’ll deal with the rest.” He closed his phone and shouted, “Everybody listen up!”
Everybody stopped talking and moving around the apartment.
“Teddy may be headed back into the city,” Lance said. “I want you to divide into three groups and cover the Triborough Bridge, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and the Midtown Tunnel. Call the bridge and tunnel authority and have them squeeze traffic down to as many lanes as you can manage. Check the occupants of every cab that goes through.”
“Lance,” Holly said. “I know it’s a stretch, but shouldn’t we check the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, too?”
“Oh, all right,” Lance said, and gave the instructions.
TEDDY’S CAB WAS on the Van Wyck Expressway now. “Tell you what,” he said to the driver. “Let’s go to Brooklyn on the way. I’ve never been over the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Whatever you say, Mister,” the driver said. “It’s your meter. I’ll take you over the Verrazano Bridge, if you feel the urge to visit Staten Island.”
“Why not?” Teddy said. “We’ll take the ferry back. It’ll be fun.”
“Tourists,” the driver chuckled to himself, shaking his head.
BACK AT THE BARN, Lance, Holly and Kerry took the phone reports from the teams on the bridges and tunnel.
“Zip,” Kerry said. “We didn’t move fast enough.”
“Yes, we did,” Lance said.
“Maybe he did a costume change, and he’s still at Kennedy or LaGuardia, waiting for a plane.”
“Every gate agent was alerted,” Lance said. “Anyway, we have a confirmation from the cab starter at Kennedy; Teddy definitely got into a cab. He must have left his car and gone directly to the arrivals area.”
“Then where the hell is he?” Holly asked plaintively.
“I think you were right, Holly,” Lance said. “I think he’s back in the city. He’s not done yet; he’s going to kill somebody else.”
“But where is he?”
“He’s got another place, a workshop; has to have. There was no sign that he’d done any work in the Park Avenue apartment. He didn’t move any equipment out when he left.”
“Then that workshop has got to be near the apartment,” Holly said. “You can’t have a workshop on Park, Madison or Fifth Avenues; that kind of industrial space just isn’t available.”
“Lexington Avenue would be the nearest place,” Kerry said. “There’s all sorts of shops there, and semi-industrial places like dry cleaners and shoe repair shops. He could rent a room on Lex.”
“All right,” Lance said, “we’ll canvas every building on Lexington from, say, Seventy-second to Fifty-seventh Streets, and if we don’t come up with anything there, we’ll start on Third Avenue, but we’re going to need manpower.” He picked up the phone. “Get me Lieutenant Dino Bacchetti at the One-Nine,” he said. “That part of town is on Dino’s patch; let’s let him earn his consulting fee. He’s going to have to work without warrants, so tell him to tell his men to tread lightly and get permission from supers.”
TEDDY ARRIVED back at his Lexington Avenue workshop at midnight. He had bought the cab driver dinner on Staten Island, paid a two-hundred-dollar cab fare and tipped the driver a hundred, making his day.
He had just gotten his luggage up the stairs when his cell phone rang.
“Yes?”
“It’s Irene.”
“Hi, there. You okay?”
“Well, you scared the shit out of me this morning.”
“What did I do this morning?”
“When I got to work, Hugh English was poring over a memo from Payroll about the absence of time sheets for one Charles Lockwood. Sound familiar?”
“Uh-oh.”
“Don’t worry, I squared it. I told Payroll that Lockwood was out of town on assignment for another month or six weeks and couldn’t be reached.”
“What did you tell English?”
“That Lockwood works in Intelligence, and Payroll had sent the memo in error. You need to do some more work on Lockwood’s background; there was no transcript from Groton. I also told Hugh I’m retiring, and he recommended St. Barts. So did Lance Cabot, for that matter.”