The two of them came over to the side of the bed and pulled up the only two chairs in the room. Donleavy said, “How you feeling?”
“Better.”
“This is Ted Reese, my partner.”
“Hello,” I said.
Reese nodded curtly.
I asked, “Anything new about the boy?”
“No,” Donleavy answered. “No calls, no word at all.”
Reese said, “We thought you might have remembered something since you talked to Harry last night.” His voice was crisp and well-modulated, and had that ring of authority that the younger ones like to affect. I remembered when my own voice had sounded that way, after I had come out of the Police Academy.
I said, “No, I’m sorry.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“We’re not getting anywhere at all,” Donleavy said. “We’ve got to go back and double over everything again.”
“What did you find out about the dead guy?”
“His name is Lockridge, like I told you this morning. Home address in Cleveland, wallet with a hundred and twenty-three dollars in it, no credit cards, not much of anything, really, except an Ohio driver’s license. No known residence in California, no known next of kin. There was a suitcase in the car we found at the bottom of the slope, but the contents were no help at all; off-the-rack stuff, medium-priced.”
“Was he the one who went to Sandhurst and took the boy?”
“Yeah. The headmaster identified a photo of him.”
“Did Lockridge have any kind of record?”
“We haven’t gotten a report on him yet from the Cleveland police, or from the FBI.”
“What about the car?”
“Rental job. The agency couldn’t tell us anything about him.”
“Prints?”
“Some of Lockridge’s, a few others that could belong to anybody, from one of the firm’s mechanics to the last renter. We’re checking.”
“Nothing that could help where it all happened? Footprints, something dropped, like that?”
Donleavy shook his head. “Too many leaves and twigs for footprints. We sifted through the area, but there wasn’t anything we could work with.”
“Are you going on the assumption that it was somebody in the kidnapping with Lockridge who killed him?”
“We’re going on a lot of assumptions right now,” he said carefully.
“Okay,” I said. “How did Martinetti take the news of what happened?”
“He doesn’t blame you for anything, if that was worrying you,” Reese said.
“No, it wasn’t worrying me.” I gave my attention to Donleavy. “Have you let the story out to the papers?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Martinetti okayed it this morning. They’re going to run a school photo of the boy, and one of Lockridge under a ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ banner. It’ll come out in today’s afternoon editions.”
“Can you keep the reporters away from me?”
“We’ve taken care of that. We’re not letting them get at the Martinettis either.”
“I should think you’d welcome the publicity,” Reese said to me, “in your line of work.”
“I don’t like talking to reporters.”
“Let him alone, Reese,” Donleavy said mildly. He sighed and got up on his feet. To me: “The doctor tells us you can probably go home tonight, if you take it easy.”
“The sooner, the better.”
“You’ll have to figure out some kind of transportation. We had your car towed into the Harwick Garage in San Bruno, and it’ll be there a couple of days at least.”
“How bad was the damage?”
“Most of the left side bunged in,” Donleavy said. “And you’ve got a bent A-frame.”
I stared down at the foot of the bed. “I guess I’m pretty lucky, all right.”
“Yeah, I guess you are.”
Reese said pettishly, “You’ll be home after you leave here, won’t you? In case we want to talk to you again.”
“I’ll be home.”
“And you’ll be sure to let us know if you remember something.”
“Of course.”
Donleavy nodded, and Reese pursed his lips, and they went out.
I lay back and tried to sleep, to keep from thinking about where I was and to make the time pass that much more quickly. But my mind was alert now, and I could not seem to turn it off.
I thought about what had happened at the drop site, and the theory of the double-cross. I could see a flaw in it. Why would Lockridge’s partner have chosen to kill him at that particular spot? Why wouldn’t he have waited until some later time, when they had the money and were safely away from there? Still, itwas an isolated location and a body might not be found for some time; it would not be such a bad place to dispose of someone.
Another flaw: why wouldn’t he have waited until I was safely gone before using his knife? I had an answer for that one, too, such as it was: he could have gotten excited, thinking about all the money in the suitcase, and decided I was far enough away not to hear anything. He would not have expected to miss a vital spot with that first thrust, and if he had done it right, Lockridge would not have made any sound for me to hear.
But then there was the fact that everything previously had pointed to a single man having engineered the kidnapping of Gary Martinetti. Lockridge was the one who had pulled off the actual abduction of the boy from the Sandhurst Military Academy, and from the voice mannerisms Martinetti had told me about, it seemed as if Lockridge had been the one to make the calls too. The only possible evidence of another party involved in the thing was the warning to Martinetti with the drop instructions: if he, the kidnapper, did not return to a certain place at a certain time, there was someone with the boy who had instructions to get rid of him. But that could have merely been bluff, to insure Martinetti’s keeping his end of the bargain.
I could think of one other explanation for last night.
A hijacking.
I touched my tongue to my lips. Well, all right. Somebody who was perhaps not connected with the kidnapping at all, who had found out where the money was to be dropped. Somebody who had waited in the fog and darkness near that flat sandstone rock, watched me deliver the suitcase, seen Lockridge come for it after I had gone, and then gone after him with the knife.
The question there was: how could that somebody have known the exact location of the money exchange? There were two possibilities, one on either end of the spectrum-victim or perpetrator. From Lockridge’s side, there existed the chance that he had let the information slip to a girl friend, a relative, a close acquaintance, and that person had taken full advantage of the knowledge. But that did not seem likely; if you’re pulling off a capital-offense crime like a kidnapping, you do not talk about it to anyone-and you especially do not reveal the location of the spot where you’re getting the ransom money. Lockridge had proven himself very shrewd, very cool in handling the rest of things; a lapse of this kind appeared to be out of character.
From Martinetti’s side, only he and I and Proxmire seemingly knew the location of the drop site-but it was likely, even probable, that Karyn Martinetti and Allan Channing and perhaps even the maid, Cassy, could have been told or overheard it. Could one of them have left after I did, taken a shortcut of some kind to get to the hills before I arrived, hidden out by the sandstone rock …?
I did not care for that presumption at all. If one of them had left Hillsborough, the police would have that information by now; that person would be immediately suspect, and would have surely known he would be almost from the beginning; it would be a safe supposition, then, that all of them had been waiting with Martinetti for my return, for the hoped-for telephone call from the kidnapper telling them where the boy could be found.
The only other possibility I could envision along those lines was that one of them had somehow gotten word out of the house to a confederate, relaying to him the drop location. Three hundred thousand dollars was more than sufficient motivation-but were any of them cold enough, corrupt enough, to have jeopardized the life of a nine-year-old boy who was personally close to them to get it? And even if so, that person would obviously have known my mission and the route I would take to reach the drop site; why hadn’t his confederate hijacked mesomewhere along the way instead of waiting for me to deliver the money and leave?