Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

34

“The area code’s five-one-five,” Dot said, squinting at the slip of paper. “That’s Des Moines? And you’ve been carrying this around for months and never dialed it?”

“Why would I dial it?”

“I see your point. If it’s the number they gave you, it’s not going to lead anywhere. Dial it anyway.”

“Why?”

“So we can rule it out, and you’ll have more room in your wallet for all the money you’ve got in the Caymans.”

He took out his cell phone, opened it, closed it again. “If it’s a live number, and I call it—”

“Is that the phone you called me on in Sedona? The one where not even you can say what the number is?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Dial the number,” she said, “and if the guy with the hair in his ears picks up, we’ll throw the phone out the window.”

Coo-wheeeet!

“That’s what I thought,” she said, “but now we know for sure. What else do we know? I talked to Al a couple of times on the phone. Not for very long, and he didn’t say much, but I might recognize his voice. Enough to pick him out of an auditory lineup, if there was such a thing.”

“I just wish we had a place to start.”

“So do I. He called me out of the clear blue sky, you know. Never a word about how he heard of me, who gave him the number. But he had to have heard from somewhere, and he didn’t just dial numbers at random. He knew my number and he knew my address. The first FedEx envelope full of money, he didn’t have to ask me where to send it. He just sent it.”

“So somebody who knows you also knows him.”

“We don’t know that, Keller. Somebody who knows me talked to somebody who knows him, and we don’t know how many extra somebodies may have gotten into the act. And the old man was running that show a long time, and never changed his phone number once in all those years.”

“So there are a lot of people out there who could have had the number.”

“And there could be a long chain between the first one and Al, and all you’d need is one broken link along the way and you wouldn’t get anywhere.” She frowned. “Still, if I ask enough people, somebody might know something. You think it’s a different name every time he picks up the phone? Call me Al, call me Bill, call me Carlos?”

“Or he’s a creature of habit and never got past Al.”

“That would make it easier for him to remember who he was supposed to be. One of the few things I brought along from White Plains was my phone book, and there are a lot of numbers I could call. The more people I talk to, the better the chance that one of them will know what I’m talking about. Of course that’s only the half of it.”

“The more people you talk to, the more likely it is he’ll know somebody’s looking for him.”

“That’s the other half, all right. And I’ll have to talk to these people without letting them know who I am, because I died in a fire in White Plains, as you may recall.”

“Now that you mention it, it seems to me I heard something along those lines.”

“I don’t know who else did. It would have been a pretty small story outside of the New York area. But I can’t be alive with one person and dead with another. It’s too small a world for that.” She shrugged. “I’ll figure something out. Maybe I’ll use one of those gizmos you clamp on the phone and it changes your voice. If there was anyplace else to start…”

“Well, there might be.”

“Oh?”

“They gave me a phone,” he said. “The guy with the ears gave it to me when he took me to the motel they picked out for me.”

“The Laurel Inn, or something like that.”

“That was it. The Laurel Inn. Gave me this phone, told me to use it to call in. Well, I wasn’t going to use that phone any more than I was going to stay in that room.”

“You were suspicious from the jump.”

“There are certain precautions that are automatic, and yes, it felt a little hinky, but it was my last job and it was going to feel that way no matter what. I wasn’t going to stay at the Laurel Inn, and I wasn’t going to make any calls on that phone, and I wasn’t even going to carry it around with me, because I figured they could locate it whether or not it was turned on.”

“They can do that?”

“My rule of thumb is anybody can do anything. So if they tried to locate the phone, all it would do was lead them to the Laurel Inn, because that’s where I left it.”

“In your room.”

“Room two-oh-four.”

“You remember the number. I’m impressed, Keller. It’s almost as impressive as your trick with the presidents. Who was our fourteenth president, do you happen to remember?”

“Franklin Pierce.”

“That’s my boy. Now for the bonus round, what color stamp was he on?”

“Blue.”

“Blue, Franklin Pierce, and room two-oh-four. That’s some memory, but—”

“But so what? Dot, it’s possible that they bought that phone the same way I bought this one, and never made a call with it before Hairy Ears handed it to me.”

She was right on it. “But if not,” she said, “you could press a button and get a list of the last eight or ten numbers called.”

“Right.”

“And you might even be able to trace it, find out who bought it and when.”

“It’s possible.”

“Same question, Keller. So what? I never stayed at the Laurel Inn, and maybe the maids there aren’t in the same league with your average Dutch housewife, but do you really think the phone’s going to be there after all this time?”

“It might be.”

“Seriously?”

“They gave me a room with a king-size bed,” he said.

“Which is nice, I suppose, but since you were never going to sleep in it—”

“And when I left the phone, I didn’t want anybody using it. So I lifted up the mattress and stuck the thing all the way in the middle of the bed.”

“Can you imagine the way the cops must have tossed that room?”

“After a high-profile political assassination? Yes, I think I can.”

“All they had to do was take the mattress completely off the bed.”

“They might have done that.”

“But maybe not?”

“Maybe not.”

“Assuming it’s still there, would it even work? Wouldn’t the battery be dead by now?”

“Most likely.”

“But I suppose they sell batteries.”

“Even in the middle of Iowa,” he said.

“The Laurel Inn. You wouldn’t happen to remember their phone number, do you? No, of course not. They never put it on a stamp.”

He went over to the window and looked out at the city while she used the phone and spoke first to an information operator, then to the reservations person at the Laurel Inn. She hung up and said, “Well, there’s a woman who’s convinced I’m completely out of my mind.”

“But it worked.”

“‘We have to be on the second floor, because my husband can’t bear to have footsteps overhead. And I don’t want traffic noise, and I’m sensitive to light, and we both need to be near the stairs, but not right on top of the stairs, and I looked at a diagram on the Web and you know what room would suit us perfectly?’”

“It sounds nuts,” he agreed, “but when you were talking to the clerk, you sounded perfectly reasonable.”

“We’ve got two-oh-four for three nights starting tomorrow. What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know. That seems like a long time to share a room.”

“One night would be a long time for the two of us to share a room, Keller. You’re not going to be spending even one night at the Laurel Inn, and neither am I. The only reason to book us in there is so that we can get the key. You didn’t happen to keep your key all these months, did you? Along with that phone number?”

“No, and it wouldn’t be good anyway. They use key cards and they reset the system every time they turn the room over.”

“You have to pity all the guys who spent years learning to pick locks, and woke up one morning in an electronic world. They must feel like linotype operators in the age of computerized type-setting, with these sophisticated skills that turned out to be completely useless. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Never mind. I had to book three nights because I couldn’t go through all that song and dance about how only two-oh-four would do, not if I was only going to keep the room for a single night. I wonder if they’ve even got a diagram of the layout on their website.”

“I wonder if they’ve even got a website.”

“Everybody does, Keller. Even I have a website.”

“It’s under construction.”

“And it may stay that way for quite a while. I’ll book us a couple of tickets, or do you want to drive? How far is it?”

“It’s got to be a thousand miles, or close to it.”

“And our reservation’s for tomorrow night, so I guess we fly. Do you still have a gun?”

“The SIG Sauer I picked up in Indiana. I can’t take it on a plane.”

“Not even in checked luggage?”

“There’s probably a regulation against it, and even if there isn’t, it’s too good a way to draw attention. Some clown sees the outline of a gun in your bag and you’re in for a long day.”

“You want to drive? I’ll fly up and pick up the room key and you can hit the road in your dusty pickup. Des Moines’s north of here, right?”

“Like most of the country.”

“But pretty much due north? Right there on the Mississippi, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “West of it.”

“Weren’t you in Iowa, that time the client did a number on us—”

“That other time a client did a number on us.”

“The Mercenary Times case. Wasn’t that Iowa, and didn’t you throw something into the Mississippi?”

“That was Muscatine.”

“That’s the name of the damn place. I was trying to think of it earlier and I kept getting Muscatel, and I knew that wasn’t it. Des Moines is west of there, not on the Mississippi?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“Unless I get on Jeopardy! I don’t know why I need to fill my head with all this crap. You want to do that, drive up while I fly?”

“Just so I can bring a gun? No, the hell with it. Anyway, I don’t want to be there in a vehicle that somebody could trace back to New Orleans.”

“I didn’t even think of that. We’ll both fly.” She picked up her phone. “I’ll book our flight. Tell me your name again, will you? I don’t know why I can’t remember it. What they need to do, Keller, is put your picture on a stamp.”

35

They flew Delta to Des Moines, with a change of planes in Atlanta. Both legs of the flight were routine, except that they had to sit three rows apart from Atlanta to Des Moines, and Dot was sure the man next to her was an air marshal. “I kept telling myself not to do anything suspicious,” she said. “It was nerve-racking and reassuring at the same time.”

She’d booked her ticket in her new name, Wilma Ann Corder. She’d found the name years ago, the same way Keller had found Nicholas Edwards, and had assembled a whole identity kit, passport and driver’s license and Social Security, along with half a dozen credit cards. She’d rented a post office box in that name and even subscribed to a needlepoint magazine, which she tossed every month when she checked her box. “Then for three years,” she said, “they sent me these plaintive requests to renew my subscription. But what the hell do I care about needlepoint?”

As Wilma Ann Corder, she picked up a rental car in Des Moines. It wasn’t from Hertz and it wasn’t a Sentra, and Keller thought that was all to the good. On the way to the Laurel Inn she said, “You were lucky, Keller. Nick Edwards suits you, especially with the new haircut and glasses. And Edwards is common as dirt. Corder’s pretty rare, but there are just enough of them around so that I keep getting asked if I’m related to this one or that one. I tell them it was my ex-husband’s name and I don’t know anything about his family. As for Wilma, don’t get me started.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I can’t stand it. I’ve got just about everybody trained out of calling me that.”

“What do they call you?”

“Dot.”

“How did Dot get to be short for Wilma?”

“I made an executive decision, Keller. Tell me you haven’t got a problem with that.”

“No, but—”

“‘People call me Dot,’ I say, and that’s generally enough. If anybody asks, I just say it’s a long story. Tell people something’s a long story and they’re usually happy to let you get away without telling it.”

Keller waited in the car while Dot went to the front desk to register, wishing she’d parked in back, or at least somewhere other than the waiting area opposite the front door, wishing he’d remembered to bring his Saints baseball cap. He felt more visible than he wanted to be, and tried to remind himself that no one at the Laurel Inn had ever laid eyes on him.

She came out brandishing two key cards. “One for each of us,” she said, “just in case we get separated between here and the room. The girl who checked me in must have been a Chatty Cathy doll in a previous life. ‘Oh, I see we’ve got you in two-oh-four, Ms. Corder. That’s sort of a celebrity suite for us, you know. The man who shot the governor of Ohio stayed in that very room.’”

“Oh, Christ. She said that?”

“No, of course not, Keller. Help me out here, will you? Where do I park?”

Something made him knock on the door of Room 204. The knock went unanswered. He slid the key into the slot and opened the door.

Dot asked him if it looked familiar.

“I don’t know. It’s been a while. I think the layout’s the same.”

“That’s a comfort. Well?”

For answer he tugged the spread off the bed, lifted a corner of the mattress, and burrowed in between the mattress and the box spring. He couldn’t see what he was doing, but he didn’t have to see anything, and at first his hand encountered nothing at all. Well, that figures, he thought, after all this time, and —

Oh.

His hand touched something, and the contact shifted the object out of reach. He wriggled forward, his feet kicking like a swimmer’s, and he heard Dot asking him what the hell he thought he was doing, but that didn’t matter because he’d moved the extra few inches and his fingers closed on the thing.

It took an effort to get out again.

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Dot said. “It looked for a minute as though some creature in there had a hold of you and was dragging you under, like something out of a Stephen King novel. By God, I don’t believe it. Is that it?”

He opened his hand. “That’s it,” he said.

“All this time, and nobody found it.”

“Well, look what I had to go through just now.”

“That’s a point, Keller. I don’t suppose too many people go mattress diving as a sport, like all those idiots walking around in the woods with metal detectors. ‘Look, Edna, a bottle cap!’ How many people do you suppose slept right on top of that gizmo and never had a clue?”

“No idea.”

“I just hope one of them wasn’t a real princess,” she said, “or the poor darling wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep. But I don’t suppose the Laurel Inn’s a must-see for European royalty. Well? Aren’t you going to see if it works?”

He flipped the phone open.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Suppose it’s booby-trapped.”

He looked at her. “You think someone came here, found the phone, fixed it so it would explode, and then put it back?”

“No, of course not. Suppose it was booby-trapped when they gave it to you?”

“I was supposed to use it to call them.”

“And when you did – boom!” She frowned. “No, that makes no sense. You’d be dead days before Longford even got to town. Go ahead, open the phone.”

He did, and pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. They got back in the car and found a store that sold batteries, and now the phone powered up just the way it was supposed to.

“It still works,” she said.

“The battery was dead, that’s all.”

“Would it still retain information, though? With the battery dead?”

“Let’s find out,” he said, and pressed buttons until he got the list of outgoing calls. Ten of them, with the most recent one at the top of the list.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dot said. “Keller, you’re a genius.”

He shook his head. “It’s Julia,” he said.

“Julia?”

“Her idea.”

“Julia? In New Orleans?”

“Suppose the phone’s still where you left it, she said, and suppose it still works.”

“And it was and it does.”

“Right.”

“Keller,” she said, “you keep this one, you hear me? Don’t send her off to walk the dog. Hang on to her.”

36

They sat in the car, and he read the phone numbers out loud while she copied them down. “In case the phone goes ker-blooey,” she said. “First thing we can do is toss all the numbers with a five-one-five area code. You think there’s a chance on earth Al lives in Des Moines?”

“No.”

“What about Harry?”

“Harry? Oh, you mean the guy with hair in his ears.”

“If you’d rather,” she said, “I suppose we could call him Eerie. You think he was local?”

“He seemed to know the city. He found the Laurel Inn without any trouble.”

“So did I, Keller, and the closest I’ve ever been to Des Moines before was thirty thousand feet, and I was in a plane at the time.”

“He knew enough to recommend the patty melt at the Denny’s.”

“So he lives in a city that has a Denny’s. That sure narrows it down.”

He thought about it. “He knew his way around,” he said, “but maybe he was just well prepared. I don’t think it matters. Either way we can forget the five-one-five numbers. If Hairy Ears was local, then he was way down on the totem pole. They wouldn’t pick up someone locally and let him know much.”

“Point.”

“In fact,” he said, “if he was local, he’s probably dead.”

“Because they’d clean up after themselves.”

“If Al would send a team of men to White Plains to kill you and burn your house down—”

“Keller, that was me. Remember? I was the one who did that.”

“Oh, right.”

“But I take your point. We’ll concentrate on the out-of-towners.”

The most promising number, with three calls to it, had a 702 area code, and turned out to be a Las Vegas tip line for sports bettors. Another was a hotel in San Diego. Dot said the third time was the charm, and tried the third number, and got coo-wheeeet for her troubles.

“The only way to look at it,” she said, “is it’s enough of a miracle that the phone was still there, and we’d be asking too much if we expected it to do us any good. I’ve got one more number to try, and then we can go back to the Laurel Inn and stick this damn thing under the mattress where it belongs.”

He watched as she dialed, held the phone to her ear, raised her eyebrows as the call went through. Someone answered it, and she promptly pressed a button to put the call on speakerphone.

“Hello?”

She looked at Keller, and he hand-gestured Come on, wanting to hear more. In a voice a little higher than her own, she said, “Arnie? You sound like you got a cold.”

“You sound like you got a wrong number,” the man said, “not to mention the brains of a gerbil.”

“Oh, come on, Arnie,” she cooed. “Be nice. You know who this is?”

The phone clicked.

“Arnie doesn’t want to play,” she said. “Well?”

He nodded. It was the man with the Hairy Ears.

“Well, no wonder he hung up,” Dot said. “It turns out his name’s not Arnie after all.”

“There’s a surprise.”

“It’s Marlin Taggert. That’s Marlin like the fish, not Marlon like Brando. And he lives at seventy-one Belle Mead Lane in Beaverton, Oregon.”

“There was an Oregon map in the car.”

“This car? Just now?”

“The Sentra.”

“You think he left it there?”

“No, how could he? And it wasn’t the car I rented, it was the one I switched plates with at the airport. Never mind, it’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s an actual coincidence.”

“And a real interesting one, too, Keller. Brightens my whole day.”

“Sorry. Where’s Beaverton? Is it near anything?”

“Tell you in a second,” she said. “There you go. It’s just outside of Portland.”

And just like that they knew his name and where he lived. They were in a Kinko’s on Hickman Road, where they’d set her up at a PC for $5 an hour. He’d been watching over her shoulder, so he didn’t have to ask how she did it, but that didn’t render the performance any less remarkable. Google had led her to a site where all you had to do was enter a phone number and it would see if it could find it; once it determined that it was available, you had the option of buying it for $14.95. After a quick credit-card transaction, it coughed up the data.

“I knew the government could find out anything,” he said, “but what I didn’t realize was everybody else can, too. You’d think he’d have an unlisted number.”

“He does. Unpublished, anyway. It said so, right there on the screen, at the same time it was offering to sell it to me for fifteen dollars.”

“Can’t argue with the price, can you?”

“There’s probably a way to get it for free,” she said, “if I’d wanted to devote the time to it. And no, you really can’t argue with the price. I figured the absolute minimum it would cost us was thirty pieces of silver. I wonder who flies to Portland?”

“I’ll go,” he said. “There’s no reason why you have to.”

She gave him a look.

“What?”

“We’re both going to Portland, Keller. That goes without saying.”

“You just said—”

“What airline, Keller. And I don’t have to wonder, not since God created Google.”

They spent the night at the Laurel Inn after all, but in separate rooms. It was Dot’s idea, after she’d gone to the United website and booked them on a flight the next morning. “We have to stay someplace,” she said, “and we’ve already got the one room.”

His room was on the ground floor in the front. He checked in and had a shower, then went up to 204. She was drinking a bottle of Snapple from the vending machine and making a face every time she took a sip. She asked if he knew a decent place for dinner, and he said the only place he could think of was the Denny’s across the street, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to go there.

“It’s probably not the only Denny’s in town,” she said, “but let’s not go to any of the others, either.” She found a steakhouse in the Yellow Pages that billed itself as Iowa’s best, and they agreed it was pretty good.

Back in his room, he watched cop show reruns on A&E. It seemed to him they were episodes he’d seen before, but that didn’t matter. He watched them anyway.

When he got home, he thought, he’d upgrade their TV, spring for a big flat-panel set like the one he’d left behind in New York. Get TiVo, too, and a decent DVD player. No reason not to, not if he had all that money in a bank in the Caymans.

He could think of a batch of reasons not to call Julia, but in the end he went ahead and called anyway. She said hello, and he said “It’s me,” and she said “Nicholas.” Just her voice saying his name, and he felt his chest swell up.

He said, “It worked. The thing was there, and it had what it was supposed to have, and she says you’re a genius.”

“All pronouns and nonspecific nouns. Because we’re on the phone?”

“The night has a thousand ears.”

“I thought it was eyes, but I suppose it could be ears, too. A thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred noses.”

“Because it worked,” he said, “I’ve got more places to go.”

“I know.”

“I won’t call until—”

“Until it’s over. I understand. You’ll be careful.”

“Yes.”

“I know you will. Give her my best.”

“I will. She says you’re a keeper.”

“But you knew that.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew that.”

In the morning they had breakfast at the airport while they waited for their flight for Denver, where they ate again before the flight to Portland. The rental car there was booked in his name, and he showed his driver’s license and paid with his credit card. He didn’t have to worry about either of them, or any of the pieces of ID he was carrying, including the passport he’d shown at check-in. They were legitimate and authentic, even if the name they carried was not the one he’d been born with.

It was easy to locate Belle Mead Lane on the street map Keller bought, but not so easy to find it when you were driving. The development it was in, on the western edge of Beaverton, seemed to specialize in thoroughfares that twisted this way and that, often winding up more or less back where they’d started. Add in a rich complement of dead-end streets, plus some fantasy roads that existed only in the mind of the cartographer, and the whole business got tricky.

“That’s supposed to be Frontenac,” he said, glowering at a street sign, “but it says Shoshone. How do you suppose Taggert finds his way home at night?”

“He must leave a trail of bread crumbs. What’s that off to the left?”

“I can’t see the sign from here. Whatever it is, maybe it goes somewhere.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Here we go,” he said a few minutes later. “Belle Mead Lane. Number seventy-one, wasn’t it?”

“Seventy-one.”

“So it’ll be on the left. Okay, that’s it.”

He slowed for a moment across from a red-brick ranch with white trim, set back on a spacious and well-landscaped lot.

“Nice,” Dot said. “Be a showplace when the trees get some size to them. I call it a positive sign, Keller. He’s got to be more than an errand boy to afford a place like this.”

“Unless he married money.”

“There you go. What heiress could resist a small-time crook with hair growing out of his ears?”

“Well,” he said.

“Well, indeed. Now what?”

“Now we find a motel.”

“And wait until tomorrow?”

“At the earliest,” he said. “This may take a while. He doesn’t live here all by himself. But we want to get him when he’s alone, and when he can’t see it coming.”

“It’s like when you work, isn’t it? You go out and have a look around and plan your approach.”

“I don’t know any better way to do it.”

“No, it makes sense. I guess I expected it to be more straightforward, the way it was yesterday in Des Moines. Go there, get what we came for, and leave.”

“We were just picking up a phone,” he pointed out. “Our task here is a little more complicated.”

“Just finding the damn house was more complicated than anything we did in Des Moines. Will you be able to find it again tomorrow?”

It wasn’t hard to find, not once he’d been there and knew when to disregard the map. When he turned onto Belle Mead Lane the next morning, he half-expected to see Marlin Taggert out in front of his house, watering his lawn. But that was Gregory Dowling who’d been watering his lawn, and who might be watering it still, never knowing what a close brush with death he’d had. No one was watering Marlin Taggert’s lawn.

“And no one ever has to,” Dot said, “because we’re in Oregon, where God waters everybody’s lawn. How come the sun’s out, Keller? Isn’t it supposed to rain here all the time? Or is that just a rumor they started to keep Californians from moving in?”

He parked two doors down on the other side of the street. That gave him a good view of Taggert’s house, but put them where he wouldn’t spot them unless he decided to take a good look around.

Still, they couldn’t park here long enough to sink roots. Taggert might not be expecting trouble, but his was a line of work where trouble was never entirely out of the question. Even if there was no one with a reason to wish him ill, he almost had to be a person of interest to law enforcement officers of all descriptions, local and state and federal. He and his boss might have gotten away clean in Des Moines, but Taggert couldn’t have lived this long without getting tied into something somewhere. Keller, who’d met the man, was willing to bet he’d done time, though he couldn’t have said where or for what.

So he’d be cautious out of habit, whether or not he had anything specific to be cautious about. Which made surveillance complicated. You couldn’t park on the block for too long, or come back too often.

That afternoon they returned to the airport, where Dot went to a different rental car counter and rented a car for herself, paying extra for an SUV so that it would be recognizably different from the sedan Keller had rented. With two cars, Keller figured they were that much less likely to be spotted. But even with a whole fleet, they had to be circumspect in their surveillance, or Taggert would simply conclude that he was being watched by a government agency with a whole motor pool at its disposal.

A couple of times a day they took one of the two vehicles and found their way back to Belle Mead Lane. They’d do a couple of drive-bys, park at curbside for five or ten minutes, circle the block a time or two, and then return to the motel. They were staying nearby at the Comfort Inn, and there was a shopping mall with a multiplex theater just half a mile from the motel, and plenty of places to eat. But most of the time they sat in their separate rooms and read the paper or watched television.

“If we had a gun,” Dot said, “we could speed things up a little. Just walk up to the front door and ring the bell. He answers, we shoot him and go home.”

“And if someone else answers?”

“‘Hi, is your daddy home?’ Bang. But even if you drove from New Orleans to Des Moines with the gun in the car, we still couldn’t have brought it to Portland. Not without driving across the whole damn country. You think it would be impossible to buy a gun here?”

“Probably not.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“No. Anyway, how can we shoot him dead and then expect him to talk?”

Saturday morning they had breakfast across the street from the motel. Over coffee they went over what they’d learned in several days of intermittent surveillance:

– A couple of sightings had confirmed that Marlin Taggert, if that was the name of the man residing at 71 Belle Mead Lane, was definitely the man who’d been Keller’s contact in Des Moines. The same fleshy face, the same big nose, the same loose mouth, and the same characteristic walk, not quite shambling but not far from it. And, of course, the same Dumbo ears, though they were too far away to see if his barber had done anything to make them more presentable.

– The rest of the family included a woman, presumably Mrs. Taggert, who was younger than her husband and a lot better-looking. There were three children, a boy and two girls, ranging in age from ten to fourteen. The dog was a Welsh corgi, its puppyhood barely a memory. Once they’d seen Taggert and one of his children take it for an agonizingly slow walk around the block.

– There were two cars housed in the Taggert garage, a brown Lexus SUV and a black Cadillac. When Mrs. Taggert left the house, with or without her children, she took the Lexus. Except for the single excursion with the dog, Taggert barely left the house and never ventured off the property, and the Cadillac stayed put in the garage.

“Monday morning,” Keller said. “Until then I don’t want either of us to go anywhere near Belle Mead Lane. We’re not going to catch him alone over the weekend, and just in case he noticed our cars parked on the block or driving by, he’ll have a couple of days not to notice them. Then Monday morning we’ll take him.”