The Panic Zone

68

Nassau, Bahamas

In the predawn darkness, a police car crept through Nassau’s Over-the-Hill district.

The faint yelp of a distant dog sounded a warning as a flashlight beam shot from the car’s passenger door. Light raked across the dilapidated shops with barred windows, the boarded-up canteens, eviscerated cars and tumbledown houses.

Royal Bahamas Police Detective Colchester Young and his partner Angelo Morgan had worked their street sources. An angry ex-girlfriend had tipped them to their subject, hiding at his aunt’s place in Over-the-Hill.

“He said he had to lay low,” she’d told them, then added, “he carries a gun all the time.”

The car rolled up to a neat home with pretty flower boxes.

In a heartbeat, Young and Morgan, armed with a crow-bar, semiautomatic pistols and a warrant, entered the house and found Whitney Wymm struggling to get up from the couch.

Wymm reached for the gun he’d stashed under the couch, but his wrist was crushed under Morgan’s boot. Young slammed Wymm to the floor, rolled him on his stomach, put his knee in his back and cuffed him.

Wymm was one of the top document counterfeiters in the West Indies.

Young and Morgan had effective methods of extracting information and within an hour of his arrest, Wymm admitted that he’d created new passports for the woman in the photograph the detectives had shown him.

Gretchen Sutsoff.

Wymm gave them all the photos he’d used to create new passports for her in the name of Mary Anne Conrad and for the baby she had with her, William John Conrad.

By the time the sun rose, the detectives had alerted their supervisor to the vital new information. The supervisor alerted his bosses, who saw that the update was immediately rushed through official channels to the FBI in Washington.

The FBI passed it to the FBI Field Office in Manhattan and the New York Police Department, and it was circulated to every law enforcement officer tasked to find Gretchen Sutsoff.

Early that morning in Manhattan, Art Wolowicz and Clive Hatcher were among the teams of NYPD detectives assigned to that aspect of the case. They were canvassing hotels when the new alert beeped on the mobile computer in their unmarked Chevy Impala.

“A new picture and alias-this one’s a freakin’ chameleon. Where we goin’ next?” Wolowicz asked.

Hatcher pried the lid off his takeout cup, blew on his coffee and said, “LaQuinta, then Comfort Inn, then let’s go back to the Tellwood.”