1

And so, again because of an unsolved murder, I flew back to Millhaven, carried the same two bags out again into the bright, science-fictional spaces of its airport, and again met the embrace of an old friend with my own. A twinge, no more, blossomed and faded in my shoulder. I had removed the blue cast shortly after putting down the telephone the night before. Tom snatched my hanging bag and stepped back to grin at me. He looked revived, younger, and more vital than when he had visited me in the hospital. Everything about him seemed fresh, and the freshness was more than an aura of soap, shampoo, and clear blue eyes: it was the result of an awakened excitement, a readiness to join the fray.

Tom asked about my shoulder and said, "This might be crazy—it's so little evidence, to bring you all the way back here."

We were walking through the long gray tube, lined with windows on the runway side, that led from the gate into the center of the terminal.

"I don't care how little it is." I felt the truth of it as soon as I had spoken—the size of the evidence didn't matter when the evidence was right. If we could apply pressure in the right place, a dead woman in a small town in Ohio would let us pry open the door to the past. Tom and I had worked out a way to do that on the telephone last night. "I liked Paul Fontaine, and even though I had what looked like proof, I never—"

"I could never quite believe it, either," Tom said. "It all fit together so neatly, but it still felt wrong."

"But this old queen in Tangent, Hubbel, pointed right at him. He couldn't see very well, but he wasn't blind."

"So he made a mistake," Tom said. "Or we're making one. We'll find out, soon enough."

The glass doors opened before us, and we walked outside. Across the curving access road, hard bright sunlight fell onto the miles of pale concrete of the short-term parking lot. I stepped down off the curb, and Tom said, "No, I parked up this way."

He gestured toward the far end of the passenger loading zone, where a shiny blue Jaguar Vanden Plas sat in the shade of the terminal just below a NO PARKING sign. "I didn't know you had a car," I said.

"It mainly lives in my garage." He opened the trunk and put my bags inside, then lowered the lid again. The trunk made a sound like the closing of a bank vault. "Something came over me, I guess. I saw it in a showroom window, and I had to have it. That was ten years ago. Guess how many miles it has on it."

"Fifty thousand," I said, thinking I was being conservative. In ten years, you could put fifty thousand miles on your car just by driving once a week to the grocery store.

"Eight," he said. "I don't get out much."

The interior of the car looked like the cockpit of a private jet. When Tom turned the key, the car made the noise of an enormous, extremely self-satisfied cat being stroked in a pool of sunlight. "Lots of times, when I can't stand being in the house anymore, when I'm stuck or when there's something I know I'm not seeing, I go out into the garage and take the car apart. I don't just clean the spark plugs, I clean the engine." We rolled down the access road and slipped without pausing into the light traffic on the expressway. "I guess it isn't transport, it's a hobby, like fly fishing." He smiled at the picture he had just evoked, Tom Pasmore in one of his dandy's suits sitting on the floor of his garage in the middle of the night, polishing up the exhaust manifold. Probably his garage floor sparkled; I thought the entire garage probably resembled an operating theater.

He brought me out of this reverie with a question. "If we're not wasting our time and Fontaine was innocent, who else could it be? Who is Fee Bandolier?"

This was what I had been considering during the flight. "He has to be one of the men who used Billy Ritz as an informant. According to Glenroy, that means he's either Hogan, Monroe, or McCandless."

"Do you have a favorite?"

I shook my head. "I think we can rule out McCandless on grounds of age."

Tom asked me how old I thought McCandless was, and I said about fifty-seven or fifty-eight, maybe sixty.

"Guess again. He's no older than fifty. He just looks that way."

"Good Lord," I said, realizing that the intimidating figure who had questioned me in the hospital was about my own age. He instantly became my favorite candidate.

"How about you?" I asked. "Who do you think he could be?"

"Well, I managed to get into the city's personnel files, and I went through most of the police department, looking for their hiring dates."

"And?"

"And Ross McCandless, Joseph Monroe, and Michael Hogan were all hired from other police departments within a few months of each other in 1979. So was Paul Fontaine. Andy Belin hired all four of them."

"I don't suppose one of them came from Allerton?"

"None of them came from anywhere in Ohio—McCandless claims to be from Massachusetts, Monroe says he's from California, and Hogan's file says he's from Delaware."

"Well, at least we each have the same list," I said.

"Now all we have to do is figure out what to do with it," Tom said, and for the rest of the drive to Eastern Shore Road we talked about that—what to do with the people on our list.