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“Now, our thinking is that they are thinking that since we are not searching for them on the bank-robbery charges we may not know about the bank robberies. Consequently, if we should get lucky and get them into custody, they don’t want to be found in possession of a large sum of money that even the none-too-bright FBI might decide came from unsolved bank robberies.”
“You mean you think Reynolds is holding the bank loot for them?” Matt asked.
“Yeah,” Leibowitz said. “And dispensing it as needed to pay their expenses. Being a fugitive is expensive.”
“I thought she might be getting money to them,” Matt said. “Not the other way around.”
“In a sense, she is, Payne,” Davis said. “But I see what you mean.”
“And even if you could get a search warrant,” Wohl said, “the question would be where would you search?”
“Precisely, Inspector,” Leibowitz said. “If we’d tumbled onto the Reynolds woman’s connection to the Chenowith Group earlier, maybe we could have done something. And, of course, the minute we would serve a search warrant on her, that would be the end of any meetings with any of them.”
“Yeah,” Wohl said thoughtfully.
“So what we have to do is find out where the Reynolds woman is going to meet with the Chenowith Group, or Chenowith individually, in sufficient time to set up an arrest that can’t possibly go sour. We don’t, to repeat, want to have to shoot any of these individuals and turn them into martyrs.”
“If we winged one of them in the arm,” Jernigan said. “Their defense counsel would wheel them into the courtroom in a wheelchair, in a body cast, with intravenous tubes feeding him blood, an innocent college student showing his—even worse, her—grievous injuries suffered at the hands of the American Gestapo.”
“That bad?” Coughlin asked.
“We think that’s exactly what would happen. We want to take these people without giving them a bruise,” Davis said. “So that, Payne, is where you come in. Get close to the Reynolds woman; make that happen.”
“When I call ‘the Reynolds woman,’ ” Matt said, “she’s liable to tell me the same thing she told me when I t
ried to get her out of the Nesbitt party. ‘I told you once, fuck off!’ ”
“Did she really say that?” Davis asked.
“What she said was, ‘I’m sure you’re a very nice fellow, but I’m just not interested.’ ”
“I still think it’s worth a try,” Davis said. “Two or three tries. She’s our best shot at the Chenowith Group.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “I’ll give it a shot.”
“We don’t expect her to lead you to the rendezvous, Payne,” Leibowitz said. “We don’t even expect you to find out where she’s meeting these people. All we want from you is to call us—which means Special Agent Matthews—when you have reason to believe she is going to meet them. Just tell us where she is at that moment. We’ll take it from there.”
Matt’s mouth ran away with him.
“Tail her, you mean? The way you tailed me? If she spots you as quickly as I did—and I suspect she’d be looking for a tail, and I wasn’t—this is all going to be an exercise in futility.”
Davis glowered at him. Wohl looked amused.
“We will have assets in place, Detective Payne,” Leibowitz said, “that will permit us—providing you give us enough time to deploy those assets—to keep the Reynolds woman under surveillance without being detected.”
“I hope so,” Matt said.
“Matty,” Chief Coughlin said. “I hope you heard what Mr. Davis and Leibowitz said about how they want to arrest these people?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They don’t want to run any risk of these people being injured, or their resisting arrest,” Coughlin went on. “You understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Consider that an order from me,” Coughlin said. “If you should run into this Chenowith fellow and the other man and the two women skipping down North Broad Street at high noon, all you are to do about it is tell the FBI. You take my meaning?”
“Yes, sir.”
