by Thomas Perry
She left him and went down the hall to the main office. As she came in the receptionist said, “Miss Waring, this is just in for you over the line from Washington.” It was a computer printout. Elizabeth accepted it without bothering to look. She had seen Padgett’s airline summaries too many times. “Is there a place I can spread these out?” she asked.
The receptionist glanced at the sheaf, appearing to calculate its length and apply it to all available spaces. “The best place is the conference room,” she said, indicating the room where Elizabeth had been the night before.
Elizabeth stepped into the room and considered closing the door, but didn’t. It wasn’t that the airline reports didn’t require concentration, but that the concentration probably wouldn’t produce any useful results anyway. She unfurled the long, continuous scroll on the conference table and then walked back to the head of the table where it began.
FLT 205 UNITED. DENVER CHICAGO: DEP: 0503. ARR: 0647. Underneath were the names and addresses of the passengers. She wasn’t sure what to do with them. Padgett used the reports to spot the particular two or three hundred names he referred to as his “friends.” All that took was programming the computer to remember the names, addresses, credit card numbers, and usual aliases. It was done in a second a day. But this was different, and would have to be done by elimination.
The murderer worked alone—one set of marks on the window, a single person sneaking around in the darkness trying not to wake up a sleeping victim—it had to be one person. But would the person travel alone? It would be less suspicious to travel with someone else: a family, children and all. No, that couldn’t be. If he traveled with someone else his companion would know. The camouflage wasn’t worth the risk. So it had to be a single reservation. And it was probably a man, most likely between twenty and forty. The marks on the window were too high for any but the tallest women, and the climbing around on the balconies in the cold would require the kind of flexibility and stamina that began to disappear early even in athletes.
She went through the passenger list of Flight 205, crossing out all the obviously female names and the men who traveled with them, all the half-fare children’s seats, all the men who were traveling in pairs on one reservation. That part worried her, so she thought it through again: who would the second man be? A partner? But if it were a partner, he would have to be responsible for doing something that was worth a share of the money, if there were money involved. But if the murder was political, there wouldn’t be any distrust, and no money: he might be a contact, a controller, a spymaster. No, that was unlikely too. There was no reason for any organization to risk a second agent where he had no particular function. Then she remembered that there was still the Senator’s briefcase. If something were missing from the briefcase the second man would be the one to take the handoff. If that were it, though, they wouldn’t be on the same plane. They’d be on two different planes going in different directions, or no plane at all. The handoff would take place before anybody left town, and probably very soon after the murder. So he had to be alone. A young man alone. Elizabeth moved down the long conference table, crossing off the names on each flight. She lost track of the time it took, and when she reached the foot of the table and straightened up, her back was stiff. She noted it and forgot it as she walked back to the top of the list.
The next thing had to be the times. The Senator hadn’t gone to bed until after 11:30 Monday night. That meant nobody could have come in until midnight at the earliest. If everything went supernaturally well he could have been out by 12:30 and caught a 1:00 A.M. flight out of Denver. She sat down on the nearest chair and worked out the rest of it: a 2:00 A.M. flight from Cheyenne, a 3:00 A.M. from Pueblo, a 3:30 from Laramie, a 2:30 from Boulder, and nothing earlier than 6:00 from Salt Lake City. There was something else about times, but she couldn’t quite identify it yet. It was too vague, just a feeling that she was missing something important. She opened her mind but it wouldn’t come, so she stood up and walked down the list again, this time crossing out the flights that were too early.
Elizabeth studied the list and thought for a minute—of course, the addresses. If somebody had killed a senator and gotten on an airplane afterward, it meant he didn’t live in Denver. That let out about half the remaining names, which she spent the next half hour crossing off. The list was getting short now, and she was able to tear out whole sheets and set them aside.
She sat there and thought it out again from the beginning. There were still around five hundred names, too many to do anything with. But there was something else—it was all too neat, too logical, and she was getting farther and farther along, each step depending on the others, and if one step was wrong he could slip through the mesh. It all depended on his being logical too, setting everything up just as Elizabeth would herself. All he had to do to escape her logic was to do something foolish—have a companion he trusted enough to travel with—something of that sort. But there was still something else and she was near it now. She could feel it. He wasn’t foolish. He’d done too much too carefully already, taken too many steps to get to the Senator and get out without faltering or wasting time. He made all the right choices, and some of them were crazy. They were crazy, but they were logical.
Elizabeth looked at the list and it was suddenly clear. She was looking at the wrong list. What she needed was the reservations list. She knew now that she understood him. He was a man who made choices. He hadn’t climbed into the hotel room of a U.S. senator knowing he was going to poison his dentures. That was what had bothered her from the beginning. It was too absurd. It was just that he carried with him a range of options in case he needed them. He wouldn’t take a chance on not getting out, missing a flight or having it cancelled, and he couldn’t be sure he’d succeed on the first try. If it was the first try. He’d be double-booked. He might have reservations on a flight every hour for several days. And there would probably be a car, and a bus ticket too. It didn’t matter which one he finally used, whether he’d gotten on a plane or driven out or disappeared into thin air or stayed put. The point was, he’d have given himself all the options. Whatever he’d finally done didn’t matter at all, and there was no sure way to resurrect it now anyway. The only thing she was sure of was that he’d be on more than one list. Elizabeth snatched up her printouts and walked out of the conference room.
“Where’s your computer terminal?” she asked the receptionist.
“Room twenty-one seventeen,” said the receptionist.
Lang, the FBI man she’d met last night, was in the terminal talking to one of the programmers when Elizabeth arrived. He listened carefully as she tried to explain what she wanted. The programmer saw her theory immediately. He said, “What’s the flag?”
“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.
“What do we ask the computer to look for to establish a match?”
“Names, addresses, credit card numbers if there are any. Anything that comes up more than once. The idea is, he’d want to use several airlines, probably several nearby points of departure, and certainly several times, beginning with Monday night and ending when the Senator was scheduled to leave Denver. When was that, Mike?”
“This Friday night,” Lang said.
“Okay,” said the programmer. “I’ll begin with the airlines. You want car rentals, buses, Amtrak. Anything else?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “If that doesn’t produce at least a double, then I’m wrong in the first place.”
“Right,” agreed the programmer, and began to type in codes with rapid, jittery fingers as though Elizabeth and Lang had ceased to exist or had somehow been switched to another circuit that had nothing to do with him.
An electric voice that Elizabeth recognized as the ghost of the receptionist said, “White phone, Agent Lang,” through the intercom. He went to the wall and picked up the telephone. Then he listened for a moment, said “Understood,” and hung up.
He headed for the door before turning to Elizabeth. “We c
an get started on the papers now, if you’d like to be in on that.”
“I suppose I would,” said Elizabeth. “The reservations lists will probably take most of the day.”
In the laboratory Elizabeth expected to see the others already peering into the briefcases, but when she and Lang arrived the room was empty. “Where is everybody?” she asked.
Lang said, “Hart’s on the poison with the forensics people. They’re taking the samples to the Air Force’s toxicology lab today and then hanging in for a theory on where it came from. Mistretta’s investigating the people who stayed in the Constellation Hotel. The theory now is that whoever it was must have checked in, but not necessarily while the Senator was there. Anybody who would want to kill the Senator would have known enough about him to know that’s where he’d stay when he came to town. Hobson’s sweating through the police reports for all the precincts in Denver beginning last Friday. Davis is doing the same for state police. MacDonald—I don’t think you’ve met him—is coordinating all the inquiries to other agencies, trying to get them to squeeze their informants—Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco; Narcotics, CIA, and so on. I’ve got other people collecting hotel and motel registrations all over the city, watching airports and train stations for old faces, and others transmitting everything to Washington for interpretation. So we’re stretched damn near the limit around here. Within a couple of days we’re going to have about all the raw data we’re going to get. If we don’t get a break or an inspiration pretty soon, somebody’s going to have an uncomfortable time in the Senate.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s bound to be a special committee of inquiry set up to find out what happened. Somebody from the Bureau—probably the director himself—is going to have to go in there with whatever we can give him. If he doesn’t have a culprit, he’s going to have to prove there’s such a thing as a perfect crime.”
“You don’t really have much hope for it, do you?” she asked.
Lang turned to study her for a moment. A look of tired amusement seemed to flicker across his face, but he stifled it, took off his glasses, and peered closely at the lenses before taking out his handkerchief to clean them. “No, I don’t. I didn’t at the start. Somebody who pulls off something like this and manages to get himself out of sight afterward without leaving a print or a witness is practically home free. He doesn’t look any different from anybody else.” He put on his glasses again, as though illustrating his point, and added, “What it amounts to is a burglar who didn’t take anything.”
Elizabeth thought about it and sighed. It really was a lot like that. She was beginning to feel tired again, and it wasn’t even noon yet. “So we’re just covering now, trying to look thorough, is that it?”
“Oh, no,” said Lang, suddenly flustered. “We’re not dogging it and neither is Washington. They’re doing a real number on that end; looking for a motive, sending out their own people to follow every lead. I just meant we’ve got two things to worry about—doing our job and preparing to prove we’ve done it. So let’s get going on that briefcase.” He went to the corner of the lab and picked up the briefcase. He stopped at a desk and pulled a printed form out of the top drawer and brought that back with him to the table.
“Here’s how it goes,” he said. “We take down an itemized list of what’s in here, and then each of us signs it. Just a standard procedure when the owner isn’t around to sign the slip, but let’s be sure we don’t make any mistakes on this one. A year from now I don’t want a man from the National Security Agency to show up with this in his hand asking me how some document the Senator once initialed turned up for sale in Berlin or Hong Kong or Zurich.”
Lang took out the first thick sheaf of printed matter. He said, “I’d say this is a copy of the Congressional Record, pages 1098 through 2013, twelve January through one February. With—let’s see—penciled corrections and notes. Agreed?”
Elizabeth glanced at it, and nodded as she wrote down the description.
Next there were an address book, a set of airline schedules, an issue of Time magazine, a draft of a speech on income taxes. It felt uncomfortable and strange, not because she was going through a dead man’s belongings, but because they didn’t feel as if they belonged to a dead man at all. Everything was half finished, cut short: the magazine fresh and still smelling of printer’s ink, the speech still lacking a conclusion as though someone had just stopped talking to answer the telephone in the middle of a sentence. But then she remembered that was all murder was, once you got beyond the blood and the pain and the momentary unpleasantness.
She wrote rapidly as Lang formulated the descriptions. They seemed overly precise, silly almost if you allowed yourself to think about them that way: “Spiral-bound notebook. Quantity, one. Blue. Gem Corporation. Eight and a half by eleven, numbered pages to two hundred. Pages eight, nineteen, seventy-three, and one hundred and six missing. One, no, two packs of cigarettes, Sobranie, unfiltered. Wrappers unopened. Memorandum, dated February third, addressed to All Senatorial Offices from Mr. Deering of the General Services Administration, Re: Unnecessary Use of Electricity.”
As she scribbled the word “electricity” she was saying, “Got it.”
“That’s it,” said Lang. “Oh yeah … briefcase, brown leather with brass fittings. Initials MRC.”
They both signed the list and Lang held onto it. “I’ll go call this in to Washington now,” he said. “They can reassure the White House that we’re not sitting here looking for fingerprints on the plans for a new ICBM.”
“Can I get started on these papers?” asked Elizabeth.
“Sure thing,” he said. “The only things that look promising are the address book and the notebook, but you might as well get started.” He went out and closed the door behind him.
The first few pages of the notebook were enough. She leafed through the hundred and seven other pages with writing on them, and they didn’t get any better. The notebook was a sedimentary deposit of all the things the old man had wanted to remember. Appointments with other senators and appointments with his doctor crowded lists of groceries and fragmentary cryptic memoranda. Bannerman Act—call N.G. Remind Carlson to invite d’Orsini et al. Sunday. She wondered if she had a clue when she saw the double exclamation on Clayburn!! until she saw the triple exclamation on Pretzels!!! There were phrases from what appeared to be political orations: The trouble is, they’re trying to run the country like a poker game—but there were no notations as to who had said it, where, why, or when.
ELIZABETH SAT AND THOUGHT. There would have to be some kind of systematic grid that could be constructed to unravel it. It was rather simple, actually. Since the reminders and appointments would have to be written in before they happened, the exact dates could be pinned down by checking with the other people involved. The notations on each page would have to be transcribed in thematic divisions—to start with, the categories could be appointments and reminders, political references, personal references, and miscellaneous. There had to be a miscellaneous. It might be possible to retrieve almost all of it—whom he saw or spoke to, what he was doing each day of the past two months, what he was thinking about. It would take some time, though, and might not be of any use. After all, if there had been anything there, wouldn’t the Senator have noticed it in time to save himself?
But there were shortcuts available. He’d had a staff, and they would be able to translate most of the notations, maybe all of them. There was the legislative assistant. What was his name? She leafed through the notebook again, and it was everywhere: Papers on Calloway Bill—Carlson. Have Carlson call N.G. Re: Oil Depl. Allow.
Elizabeth walked to the wall and snatched the white telephone. It rang immediately and then she noticed it had no dial. The voice that said “Yes” was that of the receptionist. My God, she thought, doesn’t anybody else work here? But she said, “This is Elizabeth Waring in the Forensic Lab. Can you get me an appointment with Mr. Carlson, the Senator’s aide, as soon as possible?�
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“I’m sorry, Miss Waring,” said the receptionist. “Mr. Carlson is on his way back to Washington. I’m sure we can put through a call to him this evening.”
“Damn!” said Elizabeth. “Who told him he could go and why in the world would he want to?” She regretted it instantly, but already the receptionist’s even, measured tones were answering, “Mr. Lang spoke with him on the telephone only a short time ago before he left the hotel.”
“So he may not be gone yet?” said Elizabeth.
“His plane leaves this afternoon at twelve thirty and arrives in Washington at seven fifteen Eastern time.”
Elizabeth glanced at her watch. It was just noon. “I’m sorry, but there’s no dial on this phone. Can you call the airline and ask them to get him to a phone? It could be important.” She was glad she’d said “could be.” Her control was coming back.
“Yes. If we locate him I’ll ring you in the lab.”
The telephone rang again in a few minutes and Elizabeth said, “Waring.”
“I have Mr. Carlson on the line,” said the receptionist.
“Mr. Carlson?”
“Yes, Miss Waring,” he said. Behind his voice there was a huge hollow where random noises echoed. He spoke tonelessly and loudly as though he had his free hand pressed to his ear.
“I have a number of questions that you seem to be the only one who can answer, and I—”
“Miss Waring, I’m sorry, but I have a flight to Washington that’s already boarding, and I’m about to miss it as it is. Can I call you back when I get home this evening?”
“I’m afraid that won’t do. You see, I have something you’d have to look at to be able to explain. If you could take a later flight, I’d—”
“I’ve already been interviewed and grilled and investigated for over twenty-four hours, and—oh. Just a second.” Elizabeth could hear that another male voice was droning just outside the range of understanding. Then Carlson said something too. It went on for a few seconds, and then she heard him sigh into the receiver. He said, “I’ve just missed my flight. I have to wait four hours for the next one.” He sounded sad.
