Checked the time. Smiled. Felt better. Thought some more. Checked
his watch again. He nodded to himself. Now he could tell McGrath
where Holly Johnson had gone at twelve o’clock yesterday.
Seventeen hundred and two miles away panic had set in. Numb shock had
carried the carpenter through the first hours. It had made him weak
and aquiescent. He had let the employer hustle him up the stairs and
into the room. Then numb shock had made him waste his first hours,
just sitting and staring. Then he had started up with a crazy optimism
that this whole thing was some kind of a bad Halloween joke. That made
him waste his next hours convinced nothing was going to happen. But
then, like prisoners everywhere locked up alone in the cold small hours
of the night, all his defenses stripped away and left him shaking and
desperate with panic.
With half his time gone, he burst into frantic action. But he knew it
was hopeless. The irony was crushing him. They had worked hard on
this room. They had built it right. Dollar signs had danced in front
of their eyes. They had cut no corners. They had left out all their
usual shoddy carpenters’ tricks. Every single board was straight and
tight. Every single nail was punched way down below the grain. There
were no windows. The door was solid. It was hopeless. He spent an
hour running around the room like a madman. He ran his rough palms
over every square inch of every surface. Floor, ceiling, walls. It
was the best job they had ever done. He ended up crouched in a corner,
staring at his hands, crying.
The dry-cleaner’s,” McGrath said. That’s where she went.”
He was in the third-floor conference room. Head of the table, seven
o’clock, Tuesday morning. Opening a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“She did?” Brogan said. The dry-cleaner’s?”
McGrath nodded.
Tell him, Milo,” he said.
Milosevic smiled.
“I just remembered,” he said. “I’ve worked with her five weeks, right?
Since she bust up her knee? Every Monday lunchtime, she takes in her
cleaning. Picks up last week’s stuff. No reason for it to be any
different yesterday.”
“OK,” Brogan said. “Which cleaners?”
Milosevic shook his head.
“Don’t know,” he said. “She always went on her own. I always offered
to do it for her, but she said no, every time, five straight Mondays.
OK if I helped her out on Bureau business, but she wasn’t about to have
me running around after her cleaning. She’s a very independent type of
a woman.”
“But she walked there, right?” McGrath said.
“Right,” Milosevic said. “She always walked. With maybe eight or nine
things on hangers. So we’re safe to conclude the place she used is
fairly near here.”
Brogan nodded. Smiled. They had some kind of a lead. He pulled the
Yellow Pages over and opened it up to D. “What sort of a radius are we
giving it?” he said.
McGrath shrugged.
Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” he said. That would be
about the max, right? With that crutch, I can’t see her doing more
than a quarter-mile in twenty minutes. Limping like that? Call it a
square, a half-mile on a side, this building in the center. What does
that give us?”
Brogan used the AAA street map. He made a crude compass with his thumb
and forefinger. Adjusted it to a half-mile according to the scale in
the margin. Drew a square across the thicket of streets. Then he
flipped back and forth between the map and the Yellow Pages. Ticked
off names with his pencil. Counted them up.
Twenty-one establishments,” he said.
McGrath stared at him.
Twenty-one?” he said. “Are you sure?”
Brogan nodded. Slid the phone book across the shiny hardwood.
Twenty-one,” he said. “Obviously people in this town like to keep
their clothes real clean.”
“OK,” McGrath said. Twenty-one places. Hit the road, guys.”
Brogan took ten addresses and Milosevic took eleven. McGrath issued
them both with large color blow-ups of Holly Johnson’s file photograph.
Then he nodded them out and waited in his chair at the head of the
conference-room table, next to the telephones, slumped, staring into