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She sat in a chair, put her briefcase on her lap and opened it. “I can fill in the blank form for you. You sign it, give me a check for one month’s rent and a security deposit, and I’ll mail it to the owners for their signatures.”
“I’d like to move in right away,” Teddy said.
“Let me call them and see if that’s satisfactory. My office will run a credit check, as well.” She handed him a form. “Please fill this out.”
Teddy entered the information he had assembled for his new identity, including the social security number he had implanted in that agency’s computers, then he walked around the house again while she made her calls. He came back, and she handed him the lease.
“Everything’s fine,” she said.
“I don’t have a local bank account yet,” Teddy said. “Will you take American dollars?”
She laughed. “Of course.”
Teddy opened his briefcase and counted out some of the cash he had obtained on a recent trip from the Bahamas to the Caymans, then closed it again.
“Here’s your lease,” she said, handing it to him. “I’d better run.”
“Could you drop me in town?” he asked.
“Of course.”
She drove him back into Vero Beach and he pointed at a Toyota dealership. “Just over there will be fine,” he said.
He got out of the car and stood at her open window. “Thank you so much for finding me just the right place.”
“It was my pleasure.”
“By way of thanks, I’d like to take you to dinner.”
“I’d like that.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“What time?”
“Seven o’clock?”
“I’ll come and get you,” she said, “since you don’t know your way around yet.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” he said as she drove away.
It took Teddy half an hour to find and assess a four-year-old, low-mileage Camry and buy it, after which he returned to the airport, unloaded the airplane and began putting everything into the car. As he was doing so, a Beech Bonanza taxied onto the ramp and parked a couple of spaces down from his airplane. Two women got out.
Teddy’s heart began to beat faster. He knew one of them; she had taken a shot at him once, but, of course, she wouldn’t know him now, with his balding head covered with a clever gray hairpiece and his eyes hidden behind aviator glasses. They walked past him with hardly a glance and went into the little flying school beside the ramp.
Teddy got into his car, took a few deep breaths and let his pulse return to normal as he drove away. That woman, Holly Barker, worked for the Agency, for Lance Cabot; what the hell was she doing in this beach town that he had so carefully selected?
All the way to his new house, he made turns and checked his rearview mirror, and he didn’t turn into his drive until he knew there was no one following him.
18
Holly sat in her living room with Hurd Wallace and Lauren Cade. She laid her file on Jim Bruno’s juvenile record and the stories from the New Jersey newspaper on the coffee table and sipped a Diet Coke while they read it.
“Well,” Hurd said finally, “this is all very interesting, but there’s nothing here that ties him to the recent rapes and murders locally.”
“Not in an evidentiary sense,” Holly admitted, “but all this shows a past which gives him a predisposition to that sort of crime.”
“None of this could ever be presented in court,” Hurd said. “You haven’t even tied him to the New Jersey murder when he was still a young man.”
