She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she nodded. Leaned down and unzipped her carry-on. Took out the phone and handed it to him.
‘Good luck,’ she said.
He nodded and put the phone in his pocket.
‘I never used to need luck,’ he said.
Nash Newman did not wait until nine o’clock in the morning to start the search. He was a meticulous man, attentive to tiny detail as much in his ethics as in his professional speciality. This was an unofficial search, undertaken out of compassion for a troubled friend, so it couldn’t be done on company time. A private matter had to be settled privately.
So he got out of bed at six, watching the faint red glow of tropical dawn starting beyond the mountains. He made coffee and dressed. By six-thirty he was in his office. He figured he would give it two hours. Then he would have breakfast in the mess and start his proper work on time at nine.
He rolled open a desk drawer and lifted out Victor Hobie’s medical records. Leon Garber had assembled them after patient enquiries in doctors’ and dentists’ offices in Putnam County. He had bundled them into an old military police folder and secured it shut with an old canvas strap. The strap had been red, but age had faded it to dusty pink. There was a fiddly metal buckle.
He undid the buckle. Opened the folder. The top
sheet was a release signed by both the Hobie parents in April. Underneath it was ancient history. He had scanned thousands of files similar to this one, and he could effortlessly place the boys they referred to in terms of their age, their geographic location, their parents’ income, their ability at sports, all the numerous factors that affect a medical history. Age and location worked together. A new dental treatment might start out in California and sweep the country like a fashion, so the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Des Moines had to have been born five years later than the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Los Angeles. Their parents’ income dictated whether they got it at all. The high school football stars had treatment for torn shoulders, the softball players had cracked wrists, the swimmers had chronic ear infections.
Victor Truman Hobie had very little at all. Newman read between the lines and pictured a healthy boy, properly fed, conscientiously cared for by dutiful parents. His health had been good. There had been colds and flu, and a bout of bronchitis at the age of eight. No accidents. No broken bones. Dental treatment had been very thorough. The boy had grown up through the era of aggressive dentistry. In Newman’s experience, it was absolutely typical of any he had seen from the New York metropolitan area in the Fifties and early Sixties. Dentistry through that era consisted of a war on cavities. Cavities had to be hunted down. They were hunted with powerful X-rays, and when they were found they were enlarged with the drill and filled with amalgam. The result was a lot of trips to the dentist’s office, which no doubt had been miserable for the young Victor Hobie, but from Newman’s point of view the process had left him with a thick sheaf of
films of the boy’s mouth. They were good enough and clear enough and numerous enough to be potentially definitive.
He stacked the films and carried them out into the corridor. Unlocked the plain door in the cinder-block wall and walked past the aluminium caskets to the alcove at the far end. There was a computer terminal on a wide shelf, out of sight around a corner. He booted it up and clicked on the search menu. The screen scrolled down and revealed a detailed questionnaire.
Filling out the questionnaire was a matter of simple logic. He clicked on all bones and entered no
CHILDHOOD BREAKS, POTENTIAL ADULT BREAKS. The
kid didn’t break his leg playing football at high school, but he might have broken it later in a training accident. Service medical records were sometimes lost. He spent a lot of time on the dental section of the questionnaire. He entered a full description of each tooth as last recorded. He marked the filled cavities, and against each good toqth he entered potential cavity. It was the only way to prevent mistakes. Simple logic. A good tooth can go bad later and need treatment, but a filled cavity can’t ever disappear. He stared at the X-rays and against spacing he entered even, and against size he entered even again. The rest of the questionnaire he left blank. Some diseases showed up in the skeleton, but not colds and flu and bronchitis.