arrange for taps to be put on those as well; obtain telephone-company records of
all long-distance calls made from Dilworth’s home and office phones; bring in
extra men from the Los Angeles office to staff an around-the-clock surveillance
of Dilworth, starting within three hours.
While Cliff was attending to those things, Lem strolled around the boat docks in
the harbor, hoping the sounds of the sea and the calming sight of rolling water
would help clear his mind and focus his thoughts on his problems. God knew, he
needed desperately to get focused. Over six months had passed since the dog and
The Outsider had escaped from Banodyne, and Lem had lost almost fifteen pounds
in the pursuit. He had not slept well in months, had little interest in food,
and even his sex life had suffered.
There’s such a thing as trying too hard, he told himself. It causes constipation
of the mind.
But such admonishments did no good. He was still as blocked as a pipe full of
concrete.
For three months, since they found Cornell’s Airstream in the school parking lot
the day after Hockney’s murder, Lem had known that Cornell and the woman had
been returning, on that August night, from a trip to Vegas, Tahoe, and Monterey.
Nightclub table cards from Vegas, hotel stationery, matchbooks, and gasoline
credit-card receipts had been found in the trailer and pickup truck, pinpointing
every stop of their itinerary. He had not known
the woman’s identity, yet he had assumed she was a girlfriend, nothing more, but
of course he should never have assumed any such thing. Only a few days ago, when
one of his own agents went to Vegas to marry, Lem had finally realized that
Cornell and the woman could have gone to Vegas for that same purpose. Suddenly
their trip had looked like a honeymoon. Within hours, he confirmed that Cornell
had, in fact, been married in Clark County, Nevada, on August 11, to Nora Devon
of Santa Barbara.
Seeking the woman, he discovered that her house had been sold six weeks ago,
after she’d vanished with Cornell. Looking into the sale, he found she had been
represented by her attorney, Garrison Dilworth.
By freezing Cornell’s assets, Lem thought he had made it harder for the man to
continue a fugitive existence, but now he discovered that Dilworth had helped
slip twenty thousand out of Cornell’s bank and that all of the proceeds from the
sale of the woman’s house had been transferred to her somehow. Furthermore,
through Dilworth, she had closed out her local bank accounts four weeks ago, and
that money also was in her hands. She and her husband and the dog might now have
sufficient resources to remain in hiding for years.
Standing on the dock, Lem stared at the sun-spangled sea, which slapped
rhythmically against the pilings. The motion nauseated him.
He looked up at the soaring, cawing seagulls. Instead of being calmed by their
graceful flight, he grew edgy.
Garrison Dilworth was intelligent, clever, a born fighter. Now that the link had
been made between him and the Cornells, the attorney promised to take the NSA to
court to unfreeze Travis’s assets. “You’ve filed no charges against the man,”
Dilworth had said. “What toadying judge would grant the power to freeze his
accounts? Your manipulation of the legal system to hamper an innocent citizen is
unconscionable.”
Lem could have filed charges against Travis and Nora Cornell for the violation
of all sorts of laws designed to preserve the national security, and by doing so
he’d have made it impossible for Dilworth to continue lending assistance to the
fugitives. But filing charges meant attracting media attention. Then the
harebrained story about Cornell’s pet panther—and perhaps the NSA’s entire
cover-up—would come down like a paper house in a thunderstorm.
His only hope was that Dilworth would try to get in touch with the Cornells to
tell them that his association with them had been at last uncovered and that
contact between them would have to be far more circumspect in the future. Then,
with luck, Lem would pinpoint the Cornells through their telephone number. He
did not have much hope of everything working out that easily. Dilworth was no