Wolf watched the woman pull the little green car out of the parking lot and into position for a right turn onto the street. Even though there was nobody behind her, and nobody across from her, and anyone coming down the road could see that her only choices were to turn right or rise into the air like a dirigible, she had her turn signal blinking. She was E.V. Waring, without a doubt. There was no particular reason to switch the signal on, but no particular reason not to, and it made more sense to use up one ten-thousandth of the life of a forty-cent bulb than to surprise a pedestrian she hadn’t seen. The engraving should have said, “E. V. Waring, No Fool.”
As he pulled out after her, he wondered if she had fallen for the stationery after all. It could be a trap. She could lead him out into some spot in rural Maryland where forty FBI agents were waiting to drop on him like an avalanche. He had made sure the gift was something engraved with the name so that E. V. Waring couldn’t give it to his secretary, but he hadn’t considered the sophistication of logic that E. V. Waring might command; suppose she had figured out why he had sent it. But Waring—Miss or Mrs. Waring—was careful and methodical. If it was a setup, there would be at least one car behind him. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove, but no car stayed long enough to worry him. He concentrated on keeping one vehicle between her car and his so that she couldn’t get a clear view of him for long.
He followed her to a quiet street in Alexandria. There were tall trees and a lot of two-story houses built in the fifties by upscale couples with identical taste. He could have called hers the white one, except that he could have said the same about most of the houses on the street. All of them had some form of brick facing. When she pulled into the driveway, he considered lingering to get a closer look at her. But a glance up the street revealed cars in all the driveways and lights on in the front windows, so there was too much chance of being noticed. He drifted past.
Wolf turned at the next corner and cruised up the street behind hers. The houses there were almost the same. He tried to assess what he had gained from the time he had spent locating E. V. Waring. Well, for one thing, he had stayed out of sight and given the old men some time to think about the value of peace of mind. For another, he had probably forced the FBI to use up a lot of the money it was allocating to pay its grunts overtime to watch airport departure gates. But E. V. Waring herself was going to take more thought. Miss Waring wouldn’t pay the freight to live in a neighborhood like this, in one of these four-bedroom houses, but Mrs. Something would. Also, the car she had been driving had been Japanese, so it couldn’t have been issued by the United States government without starting a riot in Detroit. That meant it was registered in another name, probably her husband’s. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had fallen about as far as he was likely to go. He was probably going to be reduced to popping a suburban housewife with a deer rifle some morning when she opened the front door to pick up her paper in a pair of fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. The Sport of Kings.
Two days later Elizabeth gave up on the stationery. The paper was made by one of the largest manufacturers in the country, and the engraving, the manager of one of the stores told her, could have been done by anybody in the business, on the premises, in about an hour. The leather folder was impressive to his professional eye, but since it was stamped with a famous French trademark, it could hardly be traced without a great deal of difficulty. Elizabeth felt guilty using the folder, but since she had gone to so much trouble, she decided she had earned it.
On that same day she learned that she had a new neighbor. There was something annoying about having Maria be the one to tell her because a few months earlier she had told Elizabeth that the Bakers were having loud arguments. “They’re going to get the divorce,” she had pronounced with the air of a gypsy fortune-teller. Elizabeth had said she didn’t think so. Then, when the divorce was still in the stage where the opposing lawyers were bluffing each other about assets, Maria had said, “She’s going to take the house.” Elizabeth was more wary this time, and merely asked, “How do you know?” and Maria had answered, “The house is important to a woman,” as though her employer had just arrived from Jupiter. Sure enough, a few weeks later Brad Baker’s car was gone and Ellen was planting tulips in the front yard. Then, only a few days ago, Maria had announced that Ellen Baker would move out soon. “She was a fool and took the house,” she said. “The money was what she needed. Money doesn’t make you weep when you see it.”
Elizabeth never saw the rental sign go up, and never saw it go down. All she saw was the man. He wasn’t anybody she would have noticed except that he was living across the street from her, and therefore couldn’t be ignored. He was of average height and build, about five feet ten or eleven, in his late thirties or early forties, and he had light brown hair that she decided had probably been blond when he was a child. When she looked at him across the distance provided by the width of the street and their two little front lawns, she had to admit that he seemed unremarkable enough to share the general characteristics of a whole physical subgroup of men she’d known, including—there was no way to keep this thought from emerging—her own dead husband, Jim. He wore sport coats that seemed to fit him and ties with subdued patterns, didn’t carry his keys on his belt, have a wallet with a chain attached to it or wear shoes with noticeable heels, so he was probably all right. She was secretly pleased that he left for work every morning when she did because it meant that she didn’t have to rely on Maria for a description. She waited a few days for Maria to tell her he was taking drugs or bringing prostitutes into Ellen Baker’s house during his lunch hour, but he hadn’t stimulated Maria’s interest, and Elizabeth forgot about him.
* * *
Alexandria wasn’t a bad place to be while he waited for things to sort themselves out. It was important to stay away from the parts of the Washington area that were likely to be full of people who worked for Jerry Vico. Unless things had changed in ten years, they would be out in force looking for just about anybody who was alone, just in case they could take something from him or sell him something. But Alexandria didn’t seem to be that kind of place. He slept in a quiet residential neighborhood, then put on respectable clothes and left each morning at the time when the people who lived there left for work. He timed his departure to coincide with E. V. Waring’s. It was a risk, but he decided that it was more of a risk to be invisible and therefore inexplicable.
Eddie had taught him this method when he was a kid. He had called it turkey hunting. “Everybody thinks turkeys are stupid, because all they ever see is the fat-ass domesticated Butterball kind. But the wild ones are scrawny, tough and smart. They live in the woods and only come out into clearings they know to peck around, and then they go back into the woods. If they see anything that’s different, they don’t come out at all. So what you do is this. Wait until maybe midsummer. Then you take a broomstick and saw it off to about forty-eight inches. You paint it black and go out in the woods to a good clearing. You prop it against a log at a thirty- or forty-degree angle and then go away for a couple of months. The first day of the season you get up in the middle of the night, go out to the clearing and lay your shotgun right where the broom handle was. When the sun comes up, the turkeys peek into the clearing, see your gun, think it’s the broom handle and walk right in front of it. It’s the only way to get them.”