Santa Fe Edge

23

Todd Bacon slept later than he had meant to, then ordered breakfast from room service. He still had one lead to follow, and he finished breakfast in a hurry and showered.

Ten minutes later, he was driving out Cerrillos Road, looking for Adobe Moving and Storage. He found it and turned into the parking lot. A middle-aged man was behind the counter.

“Good morning,” Todd said to the man. “I wonder if you could help me?”

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“A couple of days ago you had some boxes arrive here from Vero Beach, Florida. Can you find that shipment in your records?”

The man turned to his computer. “ Vero Beach, Florida,” he muttered to himself. “Yes, here it is.”

“Can you tell me to whom the shipment was addressed?”

The man peered at the screen. “No name.”

“No name? How could you deliver it?”

“The boxes, four of them, were addressed to us, and identified by a number.”

“Can you tell me to whom you delivered the boxes?”

“We couldn’t deliver them; we had no name and address. I remember they were picked up here at the office by a woman.”

“Can you describe her?” Todd asked.

“Fairly tall, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Also a baseball cap and dark glasses. I helped her load the boxes into her car.”

“What kind of car?”

“A Lincoln Town Car, I think, silver color.”

“Can you remember anything else about her?” Todd asked.

“No, just that she was very nice. She might have been pretty without the cap and the sunglasses.”

“Thank you,” Todd said and left. A silver Town Car-that’s what the man with the 182 RG had rented. He drove back to the airport to the FBO. The same young woman was behind the desk.

“Morning,” Todd said. “We spoke yesterday.”

“I remember,” she replied.

“You said that the man with the 182 RG had rented a Lincoln Town Car?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Could I have a look at the car?” he asked.

She turned to her computer. “I’m afraid it was rented again. Left half an hour ago.”

“Do you have the credit card information on the man who rented it?”

She looked again. “Paul Janzen, Atlanta, Georgia.” She gave him the address and phone number.

“What kind of credit card?” Todd asked.

“I only have the number,” she said, and to his surprise, she gave it to him.

“Thank you so much,” Todd said, and left, excited now. Back in his own car he dialed the phone number of Paul Janzen. A pizza parlor answered. He called information, but no Paul Janzen had a number in Atlanta.

He drove back to his hotel, sat down at his computer, got into the Agency mainframe and ran the credit card number. To his surprise, it existed but there was no name for it, just the number. Very odd. He got into the FAA database and did a search for Janzen but got nothing.

“This guy is Teddy Fay,” Todd said aloud to himself. “But where the hell did he go?”

TEDDY SAT IN HIS new living room, watching Lauren unpack her boxes. He had examined the packages, and they didn’t appear to have been opened since he left them in Vero Beach. There was nothing in the boxes that would identify Lauren-no tracking devices, either, just clothes, shoes and makeup. She couldn’t be identified from the labels.

“When you picked up the boxes,” he said to her, “did anything unusual happen?”

“No,” Lauren replied. “They were sitting in the office, and the man behind the desk helped me load them into the Lincoln.”

“Did he ask for your name?”

“No. I just gave him the numbers on the boxes, the way you told me to.”

Teddy nodded. The young man-Bacon, his name was-had only two nexuses for him in Santa Fe: the FBO and the storage company. If he was any good at all he would have worked both of them to the bitter end, but in both cases, he would have come up empty. Everything he could learn would have pointed to Teddy turning in the rental car and leaving town in his airplane, which he had done, of course.

“We’re safe,” he said to Lauren. “But we’re going to stay in the house for a couple of days.” She had already been to the grocery store.

“If you say so,” she said. “Why are you so confident?”

“Because I could not have found us with the information he had,” he replied, “so he couldn’t, either. He was sitting in the bar last night when I went to the men’s room, and he didn’t recognize me, so he doesn’t have more than a general description. And we’re driving a different car now.”

“That makes sense,” Lauren said. “He must have come to Santa Fe because we shipped the boxes here, but that’s a dead end.”

“Let’s not ship anything else,” Teddy said. “If we need to leave Santa Fe, we’ll travel lighter. We can always buy clothes.”

“Sure, we can.”

“We’re going to stay in the house for two more days, until it’s time to pick up the airplane, then we’re going to take it to Las Vegas, New Mexico, which is a few minutes’ flight east of Santa Fe. It’s dangerous to backtrack, to take it back to Santa Fe. Bacon could have left word at the FBOs there to call him if I turn up again. If, on the odd chance, we ever need to run, we can drive to Las Vegas in a hurry and take off from there.”

“Sounds good,” Lauren said. “And we should be safe in Santa Fe, because when Bacon leaves he’ll check it off his list and won’t come back, having already exhausted his search here.”

“I like the way you think,” Teddy said. “It’s like the reverse of the cop you used to be.”