"At least I think it belongs to one of their kids, they've got a boy and a girl in college, or just out of it, I'm not sure-we don't talk that much. I've never actually seen anybody in the car."
"You mean it just sits there all the time?"
"No, somebody drives it. It's not always parked in the same place, so somebody moves it around. I've just never seen them do it."
"Can you tell us why you're listed as a driver of that car on the insurance policy?"
"Chief, it beats the shit out of me. I've never so much as sat in the car in my life."
"It just moves back and forth in front of your house and you don't know anything about it?"
"It's not in front of my house. Does that look like it's in front of my house? It's closer to Emro's driveway than it is to mine. Sometimes it's on the other side of his driveway. It could even belong to the Canils, I don't know."
"Who are the Canils?"
Schilling pointed to the third house that shared the end of the road.
All three houses were set well back from the road, the Emros' and the Canils' partially obscured by intervening woods. "You mean that car's been there for two years and you never reported it to the police?"
"Report what? Call the police on my neighbors because their kid — keeps his car on the street? That would make me pretty popular."
"And you know nothing about a firm called Lovely Works?"
"Nothing at all. What do they do, what do they make?
What kind of firm are they?"
"We were hoping you could tell us."
"Chief, I think you've come to the wrong house."
"You really screwed his feet to the floor," Becker said, as they moved toward the Emro house.
"What did you want me to do, use my truncheon?' "Do you still have one? You almost never see a good truncheon anymore."
"I didn't notice you doing any cleverly incisive FBI questioning there."
"That's because I didn't want to."
"Reason enough. Let me just stand there repeating myself. 'Is that your car? No, it isn't. Is that your car? No, it isn't."
"I believe him," Becker said. "I'd check him out, but I believe him. I don't think he had any idea what you were talking about."
"I hate to say it, but I think you're right."
"What's more," Becker said, "I'll bet you that Emro has always thought that the car belonged to Schilling or Canil, and that…"
"Canil thinks it belongs to Emro. I hate it when we think alike."
"But… how about the fact that Mr. Schilling's name is on the insurance?" Metzger asked.
"All you need for the registration or the insurance is a name with a good driving record. You don't need the body, you just need the name and the driver's-license number to put down on the application. The insurance company checks to be sure this is a driver who is insurable, and that's it. Whoever actually owns this car, whoever Lovely Works is, just needed Schilling's driver's-license ID number."
"And anyone who ever asked to see his driver's license when cashing a check for him would have access to his ID number," Becker added.
"Schilling could have been chosen for a reason or he could — have been picked at random. Mr. Lovely Works parked the car in front of Schilling's house-or approximately in front of Schilling's houseclose enough that if the police ever bothered to check out the plates for whatever reason, they would see that it was driven by Schilling, and leave it alone."
"So somebody just parks it here and uses it when…"
"Whenever he's up to no good. Whenever he doesn't want to use his real car. Whenever he's digging holes in the woods. He comes at night apparently, or someone would have noticed him, and the car has tinted windows so no one is going to see who's driving. If he comes through the woods, that means he's exposed to public view for no more than five or six steps. And that's at night."
"You think this car belongs to Johnny Appleseed?" asked Metzger.
"If we're lucky, if we're very lucky," said Tee.
"Metzger, who else did you tell about this car?"
"No one, Agent Becker."
"You don't have to call me 'Agent." You're sure you mentioned it to no one?"
"Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. I think I should have told the chief sooner."
"Did you tell McNeil?" Tee asked.
"Well, no, I didn't, Chief."
"Did you talk about it in his presence? Was he around when you talked about it over the telephone?"
"No, like I said, I didn't tell anybody until I told you."
"How about when you used the computer to trace the plates? Was he around then?"
"Chief, if I let McNeil know what I told you, about going into the woods and then looking for cars and not mentioning it… frankly, he'd give me a terrible time about it. "
"I know he would," Tee said. "Well, don't tell him, don't mention it at all, to anyone, in any way."
"Okay. Do you want me to start working the car over?"
"We're not going to touch it," Tee said. "If Emro and Canil tell us the same story as Schilling, we're going to leave the car exactly the way it is and see who comes to collect it." He turned to Becker. "Right?"
"Right. But we don't have to hide in the bushes for three days until he shows up. We have electronics for that."
"Not in Clamden we don't."
"I believe I can arrange a loan," Becker said.
That night, after dark so that neither the Schillings, the Emros, nor the Canils would see, Becker affixed a motionactivated radio transmitter to the beige Chevy Caprice. When it moved, if it moved, for however long it moved, it would send out a signal allowing others to follow it. Tee put receivers for the radio signal in his own home and in his office, keeping it separate from the normal police business so that McNeil would not know of its existence.
Becker assigned another Bureau agent to work with Schilling on the tedious job of going through all of his canceled checks for as many years back as Schilling saved them. The theory was that most people who required a driver's license to cash a check would note the ID number on the face of the check, thereby giving Schilling some record of who had access to his number. The flaws in the theory were many. Schilling was an efficient man; he saved only those checks that were relevant to his taxes, and as allowable deductions had shrunk in recent years, so had the number of checks saved. After three years, when the IRS statute of limitations expired and he no longer had to fear an audit for any given year, he disposed of all of his records except those having to do with long-term depreciation. There was also the possibility that his license number had been purloined by any number of other means, including someone just looking in his wallet in a locker room. Still, a lead was a lead and the glacially slow process of investigation had begun, breaking boulders into stones and stones into rocks and rocks into sand, the better to sift it all again and again and again.
Becker and Tee went to work on the maps together. Assuming Schilling's house on Ledgewood to be the center of their circle of search, they cataloged every house within a radius of thirty minutes by foot through the woods. The process was revealing in the number of houses it brought into play. The labyrinthine nature of the Clamden roads distorted true distances, sometimes separating points that were nearly contiguous by miles of winding road. Becker saw how the coyote-if it was the same coyote-had so easily outdistanced him on his bicycle.
" I had no idea," Tee said. "There are eighty-nine square miles in Clamden and you can still start in the middle and walk out of town in any direction in less than a couple of hours. "
"If you stay off the roads," Becker added.
"We've got half the town on this list," Tee said.
"Including your house."
"And McNeil's."
"Said to the sound of licking chops," Becker said.