“Yeah. Don’t worry. I’ll find you if I need you.”
The line went dead. Pace expelled a long, low whistle as he finished his notes, and Schaeffer waited impatiently to learn what the conversation had been about. Pace didn’t waste words getting to the point.
“The head of the minority staff of the Senate Transportation Committee, a Marshall appointee, drives a brand-new silver-gray Thunderbird.”
“Holy shit!”
The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
“Who was that?” Schaeffer asked, nodding toward the phone.
“He wouldn’t say, but I recognized the voice. George Ridley.”
For a second the name didn’t mean anything to Schaeffer; then he pointed his finger at Pace in realization. “He’s the one who told you Marshall was pressing the NTSB.”
“Right,” said Pace. “He’s the majority chief of staff on the same committee.”
“Do I gather they don’t like each other?” Schaeffer asked.
“Not necessarily,” said Pace. “Oh, they’re totally different types. Ridley’s white, solidly middle-class, blustering, profane, and out of shape. The only exercise he gets is flapping his lips, bending his elbow, and chewing. Chappy’s almost the exact opposite: black, from a blue-collar family, an ex-college basketball player who still runs every day. I like him, a lot more than I like George Ridley, as a matter of fact.”
“A black Republican?”
Pace shrugged. “It happens.”
“Did whoever that was know if it was Davis who picked up Elliott Parkhall?”
“He said he didn’t, which kind of leaves me up a creek, with an interesting clue but no smoking gun.”
Schaeffer laughed. “That’s a maimed metaphor if I ever heard one.”
Pace laughed, too. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Clay Helm asked without surprise. Pace expected surprise. It’s not every day a reporter gives a cop a tip that could break open a case of multiple homicide.
“I can’t tell you where I heard it,” Pace said.
“What if I told you I had to know?”
“I still couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you if you swore me in and put me on the witness stand. The caller wouldn’t give his name.”
Pace could almost hear Helm thinking it over. “You recognized the voice, though, didn’t you?” Helm asked.
“What makes you think so?”
“You’re taking it as serious information without checking it out. That’s not like you. If you didn’t have a fair idea who your tipster was, you’d have checked it out and then called me.”
“I do think I recognized the voice,” Pace conceded. “But I’m not absolutely certain, and if I were, I still couldn’t tell you. You know that. Did you already know about Davis?”
“No, I didn’t,” Helm said. “And I’m sure Marty Lanier doesn’t know either, or he’d have called me. Did you tell him?”
“He doesn’t return my calls.”
“Smart man. The less he says to the media, the less chance he’ll get his butt kicked by the redoubtable Stanley Eastman Travis.”
“The third.”
“The third. I wonder what the first two were like.”
“One of them was the real Darth Vader.”
Helm laughed. “He does sound a little like that, doesn’t he? George Lucas should sue. So anyhow, what are you going to do with the T-Bird info?”
“I don’t know, to be honest,” Pace said. “It’s not something I can write.”
“If it were me, I’d get a court order and search the car for evidence. Obviously, you can’t do that. You could try asking.”
“Oh, right, the direct approach,” Pace scoffed. “ ‘Chappy, how’d you like to implicate yourself in a felony murder?’”
“You’re off base right away,” Helm chided. “We don’t know there’s been a commission of a felony, or even a misdemeanor, for that matter. Elliott Parkhall simply can’t be found at the moment. Maybe he felt the need to get away for a while. He wasn’t under orders not to leave town. Even if I got my court order and found Parkhall’s fingerprints in Davis’s car, that would only prove that at some time or other, Parkhall was in the car. Not that he was driven to his death in the car, or even that he was in the car on the night of his disappearance.”
“Are you going to look at the car?”
“You bet. I’m going to get that subpoena as soon as I get you off the telephone.”
“But you said that wouldn’t prove anything.”
“Not on the face of it, but if we find evidence Parkhall was ever in Davis’s car, we’ll sweat the hell out of Davis and break him.”
“Break him on the basis of evidence you yourself called circumstantial?”
“I might have a little something more up my sleeve.”
“Want to share? I just gave you something good,” Pace said.
“Not for publication.”
“I won’t quote you.”
“I don’t mean not for attribution. I mean not for publication. At all. Ever.”
“What?”
“Well, maybe sometime. But not until I say specifically it’s all right. We don’t have many ways left to go with this, Steve. Off the record, I think Parkhall’s probably dead, and I think his death likely came at the hand of whoever drove him away from his apartment last Monday night. But if you report that, or if you report we’ve got a lead on the suspect, the suspect will go to ground, and his car probably will, too.”
“You mean he’d hide the car,” Pace said.
“No,” said Helm. “I mean he’d destroy the car. We think that’s what happened to your blue Ford van.”
Pace hadn’t thought of the van in days. “You lost me,” he said.
“Look, your reporter, what’s her name, the one who spotted the van on the Hill—”
“Jill Hughes.”
“Jill, right. She found the van parked outside the same building where Chappy Davis’s office is. We tell Davis that. Then we tell him an FBI informant says a late-model blue Ford van matching the description of the one Hughes saw, damage and all, was driven into a junkyard outside Baltimore. It was brought in by two men who fit the descriptions you gave us of the two who assaulted you. The driver, who was the owner, paid to have the van destroyed, compacted in one of those hydraulic presses that turns a two-ton vehicle into a two-ton block of steel. The junkyard owner remembered the case because the van was in good condition overall and he wanted to buy it for parts. But the owner wouldn’t hear of it. The FBI’s trying to find that block of steel now. We could still reconstruct some evidence if we could pull the mess apart. But it’s not in the junkyard anymore.”
“And you don’t want the same thing happening to the T-Bird,” Pace concluded.
“That’s it. Do you know where this Chapman Davis lives?”
“Uh, Maryland, I think, but I’m not sure. Maybe I can find him in the Congressional Staff Directory. Let me look.”
Pace thumbed through the thick volume. “Here it is,” he said and gave Helm an address in Silver Spring. “What if you don’t find Parkhall’s prints?”
“A lot would depend on the circumstances. If it appears the car’s been wiped, then that’s suspicious in itself. If there are a lot of prints all over the place and none of them is Parkhall’s, we go off to look for another silver Thunderbird.”
Helm paused for a moment. “I’ve given you enough information to keep you in exclusive stories for a week. But your gain could be our loss forever, if you get my drift.”
“I’ve never gone back on my word in my life.”
“I’ll let you have it all as soon as I can.”
47