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“It’s the size of my gun. Right off the bat, I show them my gun.”
“I tried that once,” Kate said, “but the guy I was talking to went to the men’s room and didn’t come back.”
Three cups of coffee and a long morning of dead ends later, Kate stumbled onto a lead. “Holy Love Boat! Set a course for adventure!” she sang out. She did a happy dance while she waited for the article to print, ripped it out of the machine, and ran down the hall to her boss, Agent in Charge Carl Jessup.
Jessup had positioned his desk so that he faced the window and had his back to the door, a furniture arrangement he’d been told was horrible feng shui and was probably responsible for his chronic constipation, mild gingivitis, and the unusually high number of birds that flew into the bulletproof glass. But he didn’t care. He liked to watch the traffic inching to and from the San Fernando Valley on the 405 freeway. He said it helped him think.
“I found Nick,” Kate declared, waving the paper.
Jessup swiveled in his seat to look at her. He was in his fifties and had a face like a photograph that someone had crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.
“Congratulations. Where is he?”
“Chicago.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I like long stories, particularly ones that end with big arrests.”
“Four months ago Jerry Bodie, a guy who made his fortune selling timeshares to people who couldn’t afford them, hired a high-end moving company to transport his classic car collection from Miami to his new home in Las Vegas. The cars never got there. The transport company was a fraud. It caught my attention because Bodie is just the kind of person Nick likes to swindle.”
“Rich?”
“And crooked, ruthless, and greedy. The man Bodie hired to move his cars was Tod Stiles. That’s the name of a character from the old TV series Route 66.”
“I loved that show. I don’t remember the names of the heroes, but I’ll never forget their car, a ’61 Corvette. I wanted one just like it. Hell, I still do.”
Kate tried out a mental image of Jessup in a ’61 Corvette and came up short. She could better see him in a ’54 Buick that was dragging a muffler and belching black exhaust.
“Yeah, well, anyway, I sent Bodie a photo of Nick and got a positive ID,” she told Jessup. “Nick was Stiles. He probably had the cars sold before Bodie gave him the keys.”
“How does a swindle that happened four months ago in Miami put Fox in Chicago today?”
“I checked out the passenger lists of every flight, train, boat, and bus out of Miami that left within twenty-four hours of Bodie giving Nick his cars. I ran those lists against the index of characters in The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows. It’s Fox’s MO. He picks his aliases from old TV series.”
“I knew that,” Jessup said.
“Anyway I got one hit. Lewis Erskine flew to Chicago.”
Jessup nodded. “Erskine was the hero of The FBI. Used to drive a new Ford around D.C. landmarks at the end of each episode.”
“Are cars the only thing you watch TV shows for?”
“I like cars,” Jessup said. “What else do you have?”
“Erskine never left Chicago. Mickey Mouse, Archie Bunker, Darrin Stephens never left. No television character left Chicago in that time frame.”
“So in your mind this means Fox is in Chicago?”
Kate presented him with the computer printout. “This means he’s in Chicago! For weeks I’ve sifted through Chicago papers for potential crimes, and I came up with zip, bupkis, nada, nothing. And then today while I was doing my usual fast scan I accidentally logged on to the Style section of one of the papers and this popped up on the first page.”
“ ‘Caroline Boyett to Wed Milton Royce’?”
“Look at the photo!”
“Lucky Milton,” Jessup said.
