The Way You Look Tonight (16 page)

Another burst of laughter forced the gulp of coffee he’d just swallowed back up from his throat and out of his mouth and nose, spraying across the lower half of the
newspaper in front of him. He managed to sweep it to one side just in time to preserve the sanctity of her photograph. HER, hunt HIM? Didn’t they understand anything? After all that he had
achieved? All that he had proved? He studied the photograph again.

She was remarkably beautiful. And she was his. She belonged to him. His gift. The paper said so, didn’t it?

Very well. He would claim her.

‘How long you known ’bout this bitch for, Foster?’

The pudgy Miami detective threw the newspaper to the floor and glared at the FBI man opposite. There were scattered mutterings from other officers standing around the room.

Lee had arrived at Key Largo’s police headquarters to discover a mutiny of sorts had already begun. He realised immediately he must neutralise it before the investigation was derailed by
injured professional pride and wounded southern male vanity.

He’d walked into the temporary operations room to find a gaggle of detectives crowded round that morning’s
Courier
, Stella’s startled face staring out at them from the
front page. One of the men was poking at her image with a stubby forefinger, saying: ‘I ain’t taking no advice or orders from some goddamn stuck-up English-her-ladyship, I’m
tellin’ you guys that for free.’

Now they were glaring at Lee, waiting for his reply. He made direct eye-to-eye contact with the man who’d challenged him.

‘How long? For a whole lot longer than it’ll take me to bust you clean off this investigation, lieutenant. I can have you directing traffic by noon, trust me. Christ, in my time
I’ve canned guys I’d call friends. You, I don’t even like.’

The man opposite blinked and licked his lips, glancing at his fellows. ‘Sounds to me like you been pussy-whipped good and proper already, Agent Foster.’

Lee crossed the space between them in three strides and pushed the lieutenant hard against the wall. As the man bounced off it he twisted him through 180 degrees, shoving his face into the
white-washed brickwork and sliding his right arm under the astonished detective’s jaw, putting him in a fierce choke-hold. The man spluttered ineffectually.

‘Hey!’ one of the others shouted. ‘You assaulting a fellow officer there!’

Without looking round, Lee snarled: ‘Not for the first time, pal, and if you don’t shut your yap I guarantee you it won’t be the last.’ The man fell silent.

‘Right.’ Lee tightened his grip on the lieutenant’s throat and the man’s chokings were cut off. He raised his voice. ‘Listen up, every one of you. Stella Arnold
knows more about the kind of man we’re after than you guys put together. She knows more than I do, come to that. She’s not here to give anyone orders: she’s here to give us the
kind of advice we need to nail this bastard before he tortures another kid to death. Meanwhile, the only orders around here come from
me
. You got that, everyone?
You
got that,
lieutenant?’

He suddenly released his grip and the man slid down the wall, coughing and retching.

Lee ignored him and turned to face the others. ‘Show of hands. Anyone who wants off this case raise your arm NOW. I don’t want pussies on my investigation who feel threatened by a
twenty-two-year-old girl. Go on – raise your chickenshit hands. Then you can clear your desks and go home. I’ll decide what to do with you later.’

No one moved a muscle.

Lee let the moment hang a little longer before nodding briefly. ‘OK. So let’s get back to work. Someone bring the lieutenant here a glass of water.’

He walked across to the blackboard in the corner of the room and wiped it clean with the sponge hanging from a cord at the side. Then he chalked a single word in capitals and tapped it with a
fingernail.

‘Cars.’

The squad looked at each other, mystified.

‘He’s something to do with cars,’ Lee explained. ‘Mechanic, maybe. Car rental.

‘But most likely he’s a cab driver. We’ll start with the latter. I want every taxi outfit here on Key Largo visited in person. Then if necessary we move on to garages, then the
rental companies. We’re looking for a youngish guy, probably under forty, probably good-looking, probably smooth-talking, probably been on the job a while. We need them to account for their
movements on the four nights in question. Anyone who can’t do that, or you have even the slightest bad feeling about – bring them in. Cuff them if you have to. We’ll fingerprint
every damn one of them until we find our man.’

The half-throttled lieutenant spoke in a rasping croak. ‘That’s a lot of guys. It’ll take us days. And we’re short here. Coulter – he’s been running the case
until now – called in sick yesterday. Suspected appendicitis. He’ll be out for—’

Lee turned to him. ‘Breathe easy, pork chop. I spoke to Coulter by phone from the coast before I flew down here. We’ll manage. Right now I want you to go down to the control room and
bring up the patrol car records for all four nights. Look for anything unusual or suspicious.’

‘What? You think he’s a
cop
? Seriously?’ someone asked after a shocked pause.

Lee shrugged. ‘He could be. Now, let’s get on it, gentlemen.’

Lee Foster had been born in the middle of the Great Depression twenty-nine years earlier. His father Laurence was then a Phoenix-based architect with no commissions to build
anything any more, and his mother Frances was a hairdresser with her own salon and no customers. By the time Lee was six months old, the mortgage company had foreclosed on the loan his parents had
taken out to buy the salon two years earlier, and Laurence had sold his Ford for 200 dollars, their furniture for not much more, and bought one-way train tickets to Los Angeles.

‘Everyone says it’s not as bad in LA,’ he told his wife. ‘We’ll rent somewhere and start over. We’ll be fine.’

And by Lee’s third birthday, they were. Laurence had landed a job at City Hall thanks to FDR’s huge public investment programme and Frances was waiting for their son to start school
so she could enrol at law college. By the time Lee was in high school, his mother had graduated and was practising in the rich field of accident and injury litigation. In 1941 she won a major case
for the Teamsters union – Frances masterminded their strategy in a class action revolving around truckers’ safety on long-haul trips – and the Fosters bought a three-storey house
on the outskirts of Beverly Hills.

By the mid 1950s Lee had graduated with honours from UCLA and was wondering exactly what to do with his crisply furled diploma in English Literature. He toyed with the idea of teaching but the
idea didn’t really appeal to him.

Then one evening, alone in the house while his parents attended a charity ball downtown, he idly switched on the family’s TV set. The titles of a brand-new weekly cop
drama were playing.

By the time the credits rolled thirty minutes later, Lee’s world had somersaulted.

City Detective
told the story of a tough-but-bright New York police lieutenant, played by an actor called Rod Cameron.

Lee was captivated before the first commercial break. He realised it was a stupid popcorn cop drama – he’d worked out who the killer was inside ten minutes – but it lit a fuse
deep within. Crudely but effectively, the programme had revealed his destiny to him.

He was going to catch killers. He was going to save people.

He was going to be a police detective.

Officer Foster spent less than three years on the LA force before he was talent-spotted by the FBI and quietly suborned into its ranks. His skill was to be able to look at a
case, any case, in three dimensions. He could see into and around and behind whatever facts were assembled before him, however sparse.

‘You have perspective, Mr Foster,’ his FBI recruiting officer had told him. ‘You see round corners. Most of us see stuff flat, like in a regular movie.’ He mimed putting
spectacles on. ‘But you have those 3D glasses, don’t you? You have depth of field. In this business, that’s a rare and precious gift, son.’

Now, pairing off his officers to begin the trawl around Key Largo’s cab firms, Lee privately wondered where that 3D vision had gone. He couldn’t believe he
hadn’t grasped the potential car link before Stella had. She was right; it was obvious. In fact, he hadn’t had a really useful insight into this case since arriving in the Keys. Mind
you, that was less than twenty-four hours ago and he was unbelievably tired. It had been an exhausting summer on the west coast and he was still coping with the three-hour time difference between
here and California. He should stop beating himself up.

He yawned. Something was tickling the back of his brain; a dawning realisation he couldn’t quite grab a hold of. Absent-mindedly, he bent down to pick up the
Courier
from where it
was still lying, crumpled and scrunched up from where the stupid, rebellious lieutenant had thrown it twenty minutes earlier. He shook it open and looked at Stella’s innocent, lovely face
staring out at his.

And the shadowy, hazy thought quietly moved into focus.

Of course. If she was right about his being a cab driver – and every instinct told him she was – the maniac they were after would very shortly be checking out of the whole damn
scenario. The moment he realised that men in his line of work were being trawled by the police,
en masse
, he would be out of Key Largo and off into the blue yonder.

‘We’ve been too clever for our own damn good,’ he muttered to himself.

There was the sound of a heavy tread on the stairs leading up to the office and the fat lieutenant he’d half-strangled earlier reappeared. The man was clutching a month’s worth of
patrol car schedules and he dropped them onto his desk with an exaggerated sigh.

‘Leave those for now,’ Lee told him shortly. ‘I’ve got something more important I want you and me to do together, as fast as we can.’

‘So what might that be . . .
sir.
’

Lee ignored the man’s barely concealed insolence.

‘Grab us both a Yellow Pages. We’re gonna call every cab company on the Key. If a single one of their drivers doesn’t show up for work over the next couple of days, or calls in
sick, their office is to phone us immediately. I mean, right then and there. This is red flag stuff – be sure to make that clear.’

His interest clearly piqued, the man lumbered off to get the directories.

When he returned, Lee flipped both copies open at the section listing taxi firms. ‘You work backwards from the Zs, I’ll take it from the As,’ he ordered. ‘Ask for the
boss and tell him he’s not to discuss this call with anyone.’

‘Gotcha. Do we tell ’em to expect a visit from one of our boys over the next day or so as well?’

Lee considered that a moment, then shook his head. ‘No need.’

They might not be able to stop their bird flying the coop, Lee thought as he began dialling the first number, but they’d be on his tail so damned fast he’d go down harder than a bird
bounced by a diving falcon.

The bastard wouldn’t know what hit him.

It was a young uniformed sergeant by the name of Hicks who was one of the first to grasp the nature and scale of the problem facing them, after they’d visited just two
taxi call-rooms. Unlike the cautious older officer he’d been partnered with, Hicks was untroubled by being the bearer of bad news to a senior so it was he who volunteered to radio in and
speak direct to Foster.

‘It’s like this, sir,’ he said, leaning on the roof of the squad car in the sunshine and idly flicking the spiralled cord that connected the oval microphone to the transmitter
fitted under the dash. ‘These local firms don’t keep records worth diddly. Just a note of who was on duty on what shift, the mileage done, and how much was on the meter when they
clocked on and off. There
is
a log of pre-booked pick-ups and regular jobs, but not of cold calls, or casual pick-ups at hotels and bars.’

Lee scowled as he listened. ‘So what you’re saying to me is, the records don’t really tell us anything.’

‘Other than which drivers were operational on the nights we’re interested in, no, not really. I’ve radioed some of the other guys and they’re saying the same thing,
sir.’

Lee drummed his fingers on the desk, concentrating.

‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘I think I know what we’re gonna have to do – but I need to make my dispositions first. And I have to place a call.’

Back at Largo Lodge, Stella was getting bored. There was nothing much more she could glean from the files, and she was beginning to wonder if there was actually any further value in her staying
down here in the Keys. Unless she was wrong about the whole car connection, of course. That would involve some serious re-thinking.

If anyone gave a damn any more what she thought.

She was about to go for a walk along the beach before it got too hot, when the phone in her room rang.

Lee.

‘I need you to make your very best call on something. Right now,’ he said as soon as she’d picked up.

‘I’ll try.’

‘OK. Things are moving fast here. I’m going to have to bring in a lot of taxi drivers for questioning and fingerprinting at once, now, today. Logistically it’ll be a nightmare
so I need to keep the numbers down as far as possible and not waste time with guys you think are outside our frame. What I’m asking you for, Stella, is a definite age cut-off. You told me you
thought our man was probably under forty. Why? The psycho I just nailed back in California was nearly sixty. He killed five women. What makes this one here so much younger?’

Stella tried to marshal her thoughts.

‘Look, Lee . . . this isn’t an exact science, you know. Profiling is more or less in its infancy. I won’t lie to you, there’s a lot of stabbing about in the dark
and—’ Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’

He gave a graveyard chuckle. ‘It’s OK, Stella. That was pretty apt, as it happens. But go right on, please. I don’t have a whole lot of time this end.’