Schenk scowled at me. “Look, I’m busy. I don’t have time to play twenty questions. Why don’t you go bother somebody else?”
I showed him Pendergast’s smiling face. “Ring a bell?”
There was a long pause as Schenk looked at me, realizing I was not about to let him go until he cooperated. With an angry, exasperated sigh, he snatched the photo from my hand and glared at it. “Okay, I remember him. Satisfied?”
“What was his name?”
His mouth dropped open. “How the hell do I know? Dewdrop or Acidhead or Groovy or who the fuck cares. Nobody had real names back then. He was just a guy.”
“Traveling with this man.” I handed him Fuller’s picture.
This time, he looked more carefully, taken aback by the calculated sureness in my voice. “Yeah. I remember them.”
“And a girl.”
He looked peeved again. “Look, if you know all this, why waste my time?”
“They keep mostly to themselves?”
“The girl and this one did”-he tapped Fuller’s photo-”but the big guy got into everybody’s business. Real pain in the ass. I was happy to see them go.”
“Were you there when Fred Coyner blew out the bus windows with a shotgun?”
Schenk paused. “Man, that is ancient history.”
“How did the big guy react to it?”
He scratched his head, for once giving the issue some thought. “He was really into it, wondering why the old dude did it. They all split pretty soon after that.”
“Did they ever talk about where they came from?”
“Nope-they mostly hung together.”
“They ever flash any big bills?”
Schenk laughed. “Oh, right-we all had loads of that. Look, I gotta get back to work.”
He moved toward the back door.
“One last thing.” I stopped him.
“What?”
“There were only three of them, right? Nobody else?”
“Not that I ever saw.”
“Was the girl particularly fond of one or the other of the two men?”
“Jesus-you guys. She was hitched to the quiet one. The big guy was too wrapped up in himself.”
On the drive back into town, I took advantage of the peace and quiet to mull over how the pieces were beginning to slip together. What Gary Schenk had told me amounted to the last sighting of a ship before it drifted off into the fog forever-bearing a mismatched trio with blood in their past and death in their future. My concern now was how to intervene before the fate of two of them extended to the third.
I closed the door to my office when I got back and dialed Gail’s number. “How’re you holding up?”
She let out a small laugh. “Fine, I guess. I keep thinking about this story I read as a girl, where some hunters staked a fawn in a clearing and then waited in the underbrush for the tiger to appear.”
“How did it end?”
“You don’t want to know. You having any luck?”
“It’s early yet-we’re making progress. You comfortable with the setup there?”
Her voice was cheerful, artificially so, I thought. “Oh yes-Marshall Smith is keeping me company in the house, looking like a one-man army; the others are somewhere outside. I can’t see any of them, which I suppose is good.”
“We can pull the plug on this, Gail.”
Harriet Fritter poked her head into my office and whispered, “Line two. Norm Runnion.”
I nodded silently. Gail’s voice on the other end had resumed its firm footing. “I’m fine, Joe. You do your end; I’ll do mine.”
I let out a small sigh. “See you tonight?”
“There may not be room.” She chuckled. “Give me a call.”
I said good-bye and punched the blinking button at the base of the phone.
“You get your ass in a crack back home?” Norm’s voice was comforting at the other end.
“I told you what Vermonters think of the big city. They welcomed me back with open arms. You been fired yet?”
“Not hardly. They didn’t pin a medal on me, though. I dug around a little on the University of Illinois angle for you. Pendergast shows up, all right, but the one you call Fuller doesn’t show up anywhere. I looked at the yearbooks, then I went to the admissions records to check on students who dropped or flunked out. There was nothing that fits, Joe.”
I pondered that for a few seconds.
“Maybe the old lady in Marquette got it wrong,” he suggested.
“Could be.”
“Want me to chase down anything else?”
“No, Norm-you’ve stuck your neck out enough. Thanks.”
“No sweat. Tell me how it turns out.”
I put the phone down and looked up, to see Willy Kunkle, wearing a satisfied expression as he leaned against my doorjamb, his withered arm stuffed in his pocket like some odd piece of cloth the tailor had forgotten to remove from his jacket. “You look pleased with yourself.”
“Shattuck’s in town.”
My heart skipped a beat, and I sat back in my chair, feigning casualness. “Do tell.”
“One of my snitches was approached at the Sky View trailer park by some guy wanting information on you. Apparently, he’s been making the rounds with a lot of questions and a lot of money. It’s a definite match with Shattuck’s picture, all the way down to the ponytail. From what I was told, he’s not being real friendly.”
“Is it worth it to check out the Sky View?”
Kunkle shook his head. “He’s long gone.” He hesitated, a rare flicker of compassion crossing his face. “The guy’ll screw up sooner or later. Someone’ll tell us where he’s hanging out.”
I glanced at the wall clock, frustration and urgency mingling deep inside me. I thought back to Gail’s cheerful farewell on the phone and realized only then how much I’d been hoping that for some reason Shattuck wouldn’t appear. “Thanks, Willy. Keep me updated.”
Fifteen minutes before our scheduled afternoon meeting, Tony Brandt walked into my office and placed a single fax sheet on my desk. “As promised. I asked my contact to get me every birth within twelve hours on either side of the time on the chart, just to be on the safe side. I’m afraid there’re quite a few.”
I glanced quickly at the list, running my finger along it to see if any of the entries jumped out at me. Halfway down, I stopped at the one name that instantly made complete sense of much that had been baffling us-including why no one had been able to connect Abraham Fuller to David Pendergast. “Did you look these over?”
Tony shook his head. “You find something?”
I twisted the list around so he could read it from where he stood by the side of my desk. I pointed out the name with my fingertip. “I’d been focusing almost exclusively on David. He’d been the natural leader of the three-the one best remembered, the only one with a record, the only link to Bob Shattuck. It was even his metal knee that got the ball rolling for us. I should’ve known to look more carefully into his background.”
Tony read the name aloud. “Susan Pendergast?”
I was moving toward the door, seized by the importance of this discovery-and by the urgency to act on it quickly. “His sister, who ran away from home and was never heard from again. She was the only family he had left after his parents died. I should’ve wondered about that.”
I pulled open the door and shouted into the squad room. “Sammie?”
She popped up from behind one of the soundproof room dividers. I gestured for her to join us, then closed the door behind her.
“You checked out Abraham Fuller earlier, right?”
She nodded, looking uneasy.
I showed her Brandt’s list of names. “Susan Pendergast is David Pendergast’s sister. She’s got to be the connection between Fuller and her brother. She must have linked up with Fuller in Alaska, which would explain why he never cropped up when we were checking into David’s activities in Chicago.”
“What about the picture of them together in Marquette?” Brandt asked.
“My guess is Susan brought Fuller with her to Chicago shortly before 1969, where they hooked up with David. And David must’ve brought Fuller up to Marquette for a visit, maybe treating him kind of like a brother-in-law.” I turned to Sammie. “Did you find anything at all relating to Fuller in your digging-documents, bank records, credit companies, anything at all?”