‘Carbone,’ she said.
Then-she spanned her hand and put her index finger on the
Columbia pin.
‘Brubaker,’ she said. ‘It’s a definite sequence.’
‘It’s a definite guess,’ I said.
207
She didn’t reply.
‘Do we know that Brubaker drove down from Raleigh?’ I said.
‘We can assume he did.’
‘We should check with Sanchez,’ I said. ‘See if they found his
car anywhere. See if his wife says he took it with him in the first
place.’
‘OK,’ she said. She went out to my sergeant’s desk to make
the call. Left me with the interminable personnel lists. She came
back in ten minutes later.
‘He took his car,’ she said. ‘His wife told Sanchez they had
two cars up at the hotel. His and hers. They always did it that
way because he was always rushing off somewhere and she was
always concerned about getting stuck.’
‘What kind of car?’ I said. I figured she would have asked.
‘Chevy Impala SS.’
‘Nice car.’
‘He left after dinner and his wife’s assumption was that he
was driving back here to Bird. That would have been normal.
But the car hasn’t turned up anyplace yet. At least not according
to the Columbia PD and the FBI.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Sanchez thinks they’re holding out on him, like they know
something we don’t.’
‘That would be normal, too.’
‘He’s pressing them. But it’s difficult.’
‘It always is.’
‘He’ll call us,’ she said. ‘As soon as he gets anywhere.’
We got a call thirty minutes later. But not from Sanchez. Not
about Brubaker or Carbone. The call was from Detective Clark,
in Green Valley, Virginia. It was about Mrs Kramer’s case.
‘Got something,’ he said.
He sounded very pleased with himself. He launched into a
blow-by-blow account of the moves he had made. They sounded
reasonably intelligent. He had used a map to figure out all
the likely approaches to Green Valley from as much as three
hundred miles away. Then he had used phone books to compile
a list of hardware sources that lay along those approaches. He
had started his guys calling them all, one by one, beginning
208
right in the centre of the spiderweb. He had figured that crowbar
sales would be slow in winter. Major remodelling happens
from springtime onward. Nobody wants their walls torn down
for kitchen extensions when the weather is cold. So he had
expected to get very few positive reports. After three hours he
had gotten none at all. People had spent the post-Christmas
period buying power drills and electric screwdrivers. Some had
bought chainsaws, to keep their woodburning stoves going.
Those with pioneer fantasies had bought axes. But nobody had
been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.
So he made a lateral jump and fired up his crime databases.
Originally he planned to look for reports of other crimes that
involved doors and crowbars. He thought that might narrow
down a location. He didn’t find anything that matched his
parameters. But instead, right there on his NCIC computer,
he found a burglary at a small hardware store in Sperryville,
Virginia. The store was a lonely place on a dead-end street.
According to the owner the front window had been kicked in
sometime in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Because it was
a holiday, there had been no money left in the register. As far
as the store owner could tell, the only thing that had been
stolen was a single crowbar.
Summer stepped back to the map on the wall and put a push
pin through the centre of Sperryville, Virginia. Sperryville was
a small place and the plastic barrel of the pin obscured it
completely. Then she put another pin through Green Valley.
The two pins finished up about a quarter-inch apart. ‘They
were almost touching. They represented about ten miles of
separation.
‘Look at this,’ Summer said.
I got up and stepped over. Looked at the map. Sperryville was
on the elbow of a crooked road that ran southwest to Green
Valley and beyond. In the other direction it didn’t really go
anywhere at all except Washington D.C. So Summer put a pin in
Washington D.C. She put the tip of her little finger on it. Put