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“Yeah,” Wohl agreed.
“This is, in case anyone can’t guess, the Reynolds summer house,” Leibowitz said. “And this gentleman is Mr. Bryan C. Chenowith,” he said, as a picture of a young man in sports clothing and wearing horn-rimmed glasses getting out of the Ford appeared on the screen.
“Bingo!” Chief Coughlin said.
“On this occasion,” Leibowitz said, “Mr. Chenowith was accompanied by Miss Ollwood.”
The screen now showed Jennifer Ollwood, wearing a tweed skirt and a sweater, standing on the porch of the Reynolds cabin. She was being embraced by Susan Reynolds.
Jesus Christ! Matt thought. There’s no question about it now. Susan is in with these lunatics up to her cute little ass.
“Obviously,” Chief Coughlin said, “you didn’t get this in time to do anything about it, and the sheriff’s deputy?”
“We asked the local authorities to locate and identify, not apprehend,” Leibowitz said. “We want the Chenowith Group alive, taken into custody without the firing of a shot. The last thing we want to do is kill one of them and make a martyr out of him,” Leibowitz said, “or, especially, one of the females.”
“But aren’t these photographs enough to pick up the Reynolds girl?” Denny Coughlin asked. “Charge her with aiding and abetting? Accessory after the fact? Lean on her hard?”
“After we get the Chenowith Group, Chief,” Leibowitz said, “I’m sure the U.S. Attorney will go after her. But the priority is the apprehension of the Chenowith Group.”
“I understand,” Coughlin said.
“Once we had these pictures, and identified Chenowith and Ollwood, we put the premises under surveillance, of course,” Leibowitz said. “And the to-be-expected result of that, of course, was that they never went back to the Poconos.”
“They spotted the surveillance?” Peter Wohl asked,
“That’s possible, of course,” Leibowitz replied. “But we think it’s equally possible that they simply suspected they had been using that rendezvous point too often. Whatever the reason, they never went back to the Reynolds summer house.”
“What’s the purpose of the rendezvous?” Matt asked.
“I was about to get to that,” Leibowitz said. “First of all, we think it has to do with money. We believe that since we have been looking for them, the Chenowith Group has been involved in as many as four bank robberies. We have surveillance-camera proof that Chenowith and Ollwood have been involved in two bank robberies. A total of $140,000, in round figures, has been taken. One of them was a very recent case.”
The lights went out and several surveillance-camera images of a female with a kerchief on her head wearing a raincoat and large dangling earrings appeared on the screen.
“That’s Ollwood?” Detective Wee Willy Malone asked doubtfully.
Leibowitz chuckled. “That’s Mr. Chenowith,” he said.
“My God, the very ugly white woman with hairy legs,” Wohl said, laughing. “The Girard Bank job in—where was it?”
“Bucks County. Riegelsville,” Leibowitz furnished.
“I’m missing the point of the humor here,” Chief Coughlin said.
“Mickey O’Hara wrote a hilarious story about it,” Matt said. “The guy in the bank described the bandit as a very ugly white woman with hairy legs.”
“That woman is Chenowith?” Coughlin asked.
“The lab did some interesting stuff, comparing the nose, hands, ears, and so on, of the ‘woman’ with Chenowith’s features. That’s him, Chief.”
The news did not seem to please Coughlin.
“So they’re wanted on bank-robbery charges, too?” he asked.
“In a sense, Chief,” Leibowitz said. “We have not charged any of them with bank robbery. We don’t want them to know we know they’re involved. Our thinking here—the thinking of the attorney general—is that once we apprehend them, we can quickly bring them to trial in Federal Court and get a conviction, using the surveillance-camera footage as proof. There is very little sympathy for bank robbers, and the evidence for the two bank jobs where we have surveillance-camera footage is not circumstantial. Their defense cannot bring up the morality of using animals in medical research, et cetera. And once they are convicted, then we can try them on the University of Pittsburgh bombing charges.”
“Public relations, huh?” Coughlin said in disgust.
“Unfortunately, that has to be considered,” Davis said.
