“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“How many expatriate Brits do you suppose live on this island?”
“I don’t know; hundreds, maybe a few thousand.”
“And how many of them do you think might have perfectly ordinary paper trails floating in their wakes?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say that ninety-five percent of them are who they say they are, and an investigation would back them up, and the other five percent are fleeing criminals with false passports.”
“What’s your point?”
“That would mean that the ninety-five percent-hundreds, perhaps thousands-would satisfy your criteria for thinking that they are Teddy Fay. Do you see where I’m going here?”
“The ninety-five percent don’t live next door to Irene Foster.”
“All right, I’ll give you that. Now you’ve isolated one criterion that doesn’t apply to the great mass. But it’s not an incriminating criterion, and it hardly resonates like, say, a DNA match.”
“Stone, Teddy through maybe years of careful preparation has ensured that we are never going to get a match of anything-DNA, fingerprint, photo, anything-because he has erased all those things from every computer that might harbor them.”
“Well, then, we’re left with kidnapping the three of them, locking them up somewhere and torturing them until one of them admits he’s Teddy-the George W. Bush method of extracting admissions from people we hate. And, of course, under torture, anybody will admit to anything, so all three of them might admit to being Teddy.”
“No, no, we’re going to have to rely on deduction to make the identification.”
“Ah, detective work!” Dino interjected.
“Well, yes.”
“Well, a tiny problem: we have no evidence to work with to deduce that any of the three of them is Teddy. You see the difficulty?” Dino spread his hands and looked sorrowful.
“Let’s get some evidence, then.”
Stone sighed. “We could break into their houses and ransack them, in the hope that if one of them is Teddy, he’s stupid enough to leave his old birth certificate or passport lying around.”
“Stone…”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that Teddy has made it virtually impossible for us ever to identify him by any means known to criminal investigation.”
“How about eyewitnesses?” Genevieve interjected.
“Eyewitness to what?” Holly asked.
“To Teddy. He worked at the CIA all those years; there must be dozens, maybe hundreds of people who knew him, who could identify him if they saw him. Photograph all three of them and send the pictures to Lance. Let him circulate them and see if he gets a bite.”
Dino looked at his girlfriend with admiration. “I think we might have a spot for you at the NYPD,” he said.
Holly looked at her watch. “I have to call in,” she said.
29
Holly first called Bill Pepper.
“I’m here.”
“Me too.”
“Scramble.”
“Scrambled.”
Pepper came back with his voice-from-a-barrel. “What’s up?”
“When a foreigner applies to buy a house in St. Marks, does he have to attach a photograph to his application?”
“Yes, a passport photograph.”
“Can you hack into the government computers and get me the photographs of Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“How long will it take?”
“A few minutes.”
“Can you e-mail them to me in, say, an hour?”
“Probably. Is this about Teddy Fay?”
“The idea is, I’ll look at them, and if one of them could conceivably be Teddy, I’ll send them to Lance, and he can show them to Teddy’s former coworkers for ID.”
“Makes sense to me.”
She gave him her e-mail address. “I’ll be standing by.”
“Later.” He broke the connection.
Holly called Lance.
“Lance Cabot.”
She explained about the photographs she was going to send.
“Excellent,” Lance replied. “How soon?”
“Maybe an hour or so; check your e-mail.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Yes; I think we’re about done here.”
“You’re giving up?”
“Our stay is nearing its end, and we have not been able to identify Teddy. Our best shot is that he’s Robertson, Pemberton or Weatherby; if we can’t get an ID from these photos, then we have nowhere else to go. Our well is dry.”
“That’s discouraging.”
“Well, we’re discouraged. I want to have one more dinner with Irene Foster, though. Maybe we’ll glean something from her.”
“And her boyfriend? Pitts?”
“I think he may have already sailed for home.”
“You’re satisfied that he’s not Teddy?”
“He isn’t, unless Teddy knows how to grow hair on a bald scalp. Pitts doesn’t wear a toupee.”
“All right, call tomorrow. I’ll send the jet for you at, say, noon the day after.”
“Good.” She hung up and called Irene.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Irene, it’s Ginny; how are you?”
“Very well, thanks; are you still on the island?”
“We leave on Saturday. I was hoping that you could join us for dinner tonight at the inn.”
“Love to; is Harry invited, as well?”
“Is he still here?”
“He seems to like the island.”
“Of course; bring him along. Seven-thirty?”
“That’s grand; we’ll look forward to it.”
Holly hung up, went into the house, got her laptop and took it out to the patio, where lunch was just being served.
“What’s with the computer?” Stone asked.
Holly glanced at the butler, who finished serving and went back inside. “Pepper is going to e-mail me the photographs of Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby that were attached to their applications to buy a house here, and then I’m going to take Genevieve’s brilliant suggestion and e-mail them to Lance, if I think one of them might be Teddy.”
“Good.”
“By the way, the jet is picking us up at noon the day after tomorrow.”
“Regardless of what we learn?”
“These photos are our last gasp; if none of them is Teddy, we’re out of here. If one of them is Teddy, we’re out of here, too. Dealing with him is somebody else’s job.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Me too,” Dino said. “The sight of that shark off our beach nixed the place for me. I’m not going back in the water past knee-deep.”
“Oh, Dino,” Genevieve said, “the shark was just doing what sharks do. We’ve only seen him once, and he probably won’t be back.”
“I’m not going in the same ocean with him,” Dino said, digging into his seafood salad. He held up a forkful. “I’m happy to eat his lunch, but I’m not going to be his lunch.”
They ate in a leisurely fashion, and after an hour had passed, Holly checked her e-mail.
There was an e-mail from Ham: “Are you coming by here on your way back to D.C.?”
“I’ll see if we can stop by and pick up Daisy on the way back,” she responded, “but I won’t be able to stay. Give my love to Ginny.” She signed it and sent the mail.
“Nothing from Pepper?” Stone asked.
“Nope.”
“How long was it supposed to take?”
“He said a few minutes to hack into the government computer, and he’d have them to me in an hour.”
Stone checked his watch. “It’s been an hour and a half.”
“Maybe he got busy at work.”
Another hour passed, then two hours, and still nothing had arrived from Pepper. Late in the afternoon, Holly called Lance.
“Lance Cabot.”
“It’s your humble servant; something’s wrong.”
“What?”
“Pepper was supposed to e-mail me the photos within an hour after we talked. It’s been five hours, and I’ve heard nothing.”