for obvious reasons. You ran up to the ticket counter, knowing full
well that the next flight to Boston was in a scant twelve minutes.
You wanted out of the line of fire and to get where you were going
as quickly as you could. There was a flight from Dulles to
Boston leaving only forty-five minutes after you landed in Dulles,
but you turned it down. You didn’t have any checked luggage, too
big a risk with that, which was smart of you. The woman at the
check-in counter recognized your photo, said she realized you
might miss that plane, but you insisted even though she tried to talk
you out of it. She didn’t understand at the time, since there was another
flight so soon. She told you the chances were very high that
you’d miss the first plane to Boston.”
“I nearly did miss it. I had to run like mad to catch it. They’d already
closed the gate but I talked my head off until they opened it.”
“I know. I spoke to the flight attendant who greeted you at the
door when you came rushing onto the plane. She said you looked
somewhat desperate.”
She sighed, but didn’t say anything, just crossed her arms over
her chest and stared at him, still as a stone. “Come on, let’s hear the
rest of it.”
“It didn’t take long to find you on that flight to Portland. Your
fake ID was pretty amateur. I’ll bet they were really busy at the
check-in counters in New York and Dulles for you to get passed on
through. At least you were smart enough not to use that driver’s license
again to get yourself a rental car. You waited an hour for a
flight from Boston to Portland, then you took a taxi into Portland
–yes, one of my people found the driver and verified that it
was you–and went to Big Frank’s Previously Owned Cars on
Blake Street. You wanted your own car. That told me that you had
a definite destination in mind, a place where you were going to
burrow in for the long haul. I got all the particulars out of Big
Frank, including your license plate number, the make, model, and
color of your Toyota. I called a friend in the Portland PD to put out
an APB on you and it didn’t take more than a day and a half to net
you. Remember when you got gas at the Union 76 station when
you were first coming into town?”
She’d paid cash. No trail. No record. “I didn’t make any mistakes.”
“No, but it turns out that the guy who pumped your gas is a police
radio buff with an excellent memory for numbers. He heard
the APB, remembered your car and license plate, and phoned it in.
It got to me really fast. Don’t worry, I canceled the APB. Needless
to say, I owe a good-sized favor to Chief Aronson of the Portland
PD. Also I spoke to the kid who pumped your gas, told him it had
all been a mistake, thanked him, and slipped him a fifty. Oh yes, I
got a good laugh over the name on the fake ID–Martha Clinton
–a nice mix of presidential names.”
“I did, too,” Becca said, wondering why she’d bothered at all.
“At least Martha was young and had blondish hair. Did you buy
it off a street kid in New York?”
“Yes. I had to try six of them before I could find an ID that
looked anything remotely like me. I liked the name. When did you
get here to Riptide?”
“Two days ago. I went immediately to the only bed-and-breakfast
in town and of course you had stayed there for one night.
Scottie told me you’d taken the old Marley place.” He splayed his
fingers. “Nothing to it.”
“Why didn’t you come to see me right away?”
“I wanted to get the lay of the land, watch you awhile, see what
was happening, who you spoke to, things like that. It’s an approach
I’ve always used. I’ve never believed in rushing into things, if I have
a choice.”
“It was so easy for you.” She sighed, her arms still crossed over