Point of Impact (44 page)

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. As I say, Mr. Scott, your name, your family, his—”

“Well, you know, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot there. My father was a famous man, a celebrity back in the thirties. The story of what he accomplished with the Tenth Black King and what it led to … well, it
would
make a great American book. And in the shooting world, his name even to this day is instantly recognizable. Yes, I’ll get you some things that you’ll find helpful.”

“Thank you.”

“But I want something from you in return.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want in all the way. If I’m bait, then let him come to me. To me here. We’ll go all the way. I’ll do my part. This place is perfect; remote, access to a mountain, everything you need. Your boys can drive him up Bone Hill.” He gestured over his shoulder and Shreck could see the Blue Ridge foothill out back, its flanks covered in scrubby vegetation, its knob bald. “That’s where he’ll die, atop Bone Hill.”

This was exactly what Shreck had been playing for. Once again, the great Lon Scott had hit the bull’s-eye.

“That’ll make it much easier, sir,” Shreck said.

“Now what?” asked Nick. “We’ve got over a thousand names here. One of them may be phony, the pseudonym of a man who disappeared himself close to thirty years ago. How are the two of us going to winnow them down?”

“He can change a name, Memphis. He can change an address, an appearance, a way of talking. One thing he can’t fake. He can’t fake legs.”

Memphis looked at him. Bob crouched in the half-dark of the motel room, his face lost in shadow.

Nick had to admit it; yes, it was very neatly thought out, elegant perhaps. But he had to take it a further step.

“Is there some kind of register of handicapped persons I don’t know about? I mean, we can’t call a thousand men whose addresses from thirty years ago we have and ask them if they’re paralyzed?”

“There is. We break it down by state, get a list for each state. Then you call each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. You call and you find out who on the list has a handicapped license plate. State computers ought to be able to shake it out real fast.”

“Damn!
” shouted Nick. “Goddamn right, yes, yes. Then, in fifty phone calls we’ve winnowed the thousand down to just a few. How many can there be? And we
can
check them out.”

“That’s it, Pork. I’d bet a dollar against tomorrow one of those men will be Lon Scott. Be nice to find out how come he’s been hiding all these years, and how it was his famous rifle ended up in the hands of an outfit that kills important people for a living.”

Nick began calling the next morning in a rented loft space in downtown Syracuse, near the university, as soon as the phone company got the phones hooked up. Using his federal identification code number, which authenticated
him to the supervisory personnel, he was able to begin the computer searches in six states in a couple of hours. But it was exhausting, excruciating work and Nick was astonished to find in himself something he’d never allowed before—dreaminess.

He saw himself on the road, he saw himself somewhat like Bob: free, beholden to nobody. It occurred to him: Gould I invent my own life instead of allowing the Bureau to invent it for me? He’d been a man of many masters and eager to do their bidding; now he considered that he could be his own master.

Meanwhile Bob took the calls that came back on the other line.

“Agent Fencl, FBI,” he’d say, trying to subdue his Arkansas twang. “Yes, sir, but Agent Memphis is on another line. May I take your information please? I’ll see that it reaches him. Yes, ma’am. Yes, could you spell that please? Yes, and is there an address? Thank you very much, you’ve been very helpful.”

It took three days. In the end, they had seven names—that is, seven men who were among the first thousand subscribers to
Accuracy Shooting
and who had been issued handicapped license plates by their state department of motor vehicles sometime between 1964 and today.

“Wow,” said Nick. “All that work for seven names. Now, if I were in the damned Bureau, all’s I’d have to do is call up the offices in the states of these guys, and have them check them all out. I’d get reports back in thirty minutes. But I suppose our next move is to individually check these seven guys out?”

“Yep. Of course I don’t know what the original Lon Scott looked like. But I do know that he dropped out of sight in 1963 and hasn’t been heard from since. So seems to me, one thing we ought to find out is how old these boys are, and we can reject anybody who wasn’t at
least in his twenties in 1962; and we can reject anybody who wasn’t already crippled in 1962. Maybe that’ll get it down some.”

“No, wait a minute,” said Nick. “No, we’re going at this wrong. Look, think about it this way. The guy we’re looking for, the real Lon Scott, has one distinguishing characteristic—that is, he has a new identity. Now, the classical way in which you build a new identity is to take over the identity of a child who was born on or about the same time you were but who died in the next few years. See, nobody ever correlates birth certificates with death certificates. So you get the name of a child who died a few years after he was born from a graveyard or an old newspaper obituary; then you write to the state department of birth registration and say you’re him and you get a copy of his birth certificate. Then you use that as the basis of the new identity. Right?”

It was right. Bob nodded, for the first time looking almost as if impressed.

“Go on,” he finally said.

“So we call the counties in which the seven names reside, we call the death certificate registries, and we find which of the seven has died. And if we find one of those to be the case, then we know that somebody’s resurrected the name to use as the basis for the new identity. And wouldn’t that be our man?”

Bob looked at him long and hard.

Then he said, “You finally said something worth listening to, though you
explained
half to death. Now get busy.”

“The ad runs today,” said Dobbler, “in the ‘Books and Magazines’ section of
The Shotgun News
, just a few lines. Here’s the copy.”

He handed it to Shreck.

“It doesn’t even mention Lon Scott,” said Shreck.

“It can’t. Too obvious. It has to be subtle! If it’s obvious, he’ll smell a trap and never come close. He’s made the connection to the Tenth Black King, I guarantee you! You can’t
force
these things!”

He almost shouted, forgetting to whom he was talking.

Shreck just took a pace back.

“How do we know he’ll spot it?” he asked.

“We
trust
him. He might not find it right away. But as he travels he’ll talk to people who will have seen it. He
will
find it, that I guarantee you. And he’ll obey the instructions in the ad.”

The phone number reached, through several blind linkages, an answering machine in RamDyne headquarters.

“The message they hear simply tells them to leave Visa or MasterCard numbers, and to give their addresses,” said Dobbler. “So they leave their voices on the tape. Now this is very important. You see, we have the taped interrogations of both Memphis and Swagger, Memphis recorded in the interrogation in the swamp and Swagger during your discussions with him back in Maryland. So we’ve made a voice scan and reduced their voices to an electronic signature, which is in turn coded into a computer. Every call we get is automatically
filtered through the computer and it is instantaneously checked against the vocal signatures. When we get a match, it lets us know.”

“And then …”

“And then we reel him in. Slowly. Ever so slowly, trusting our instincts and our reading of Swagger’s character. We reel him in and destroy him. It’s like hunting a predator with bait. The bait is the research … or it’s his illusion that he can get out of this and somehow clear himself.”

Shreck nodded.

“It
is
clever,” he conceded.

Dobbler looked at Shreck and realized that for the first time, he wasn’t frightened of him.

For almost a week there were so many times they were close that it made them almost half-crazy. They spent the days on the phone in the Syracuse loft, and after the close of business hours in the last of the western states, they’d come out and go for a walk, get something to eat, just stretch and decompress. They made an odd couple: the tall, thin middle-aged man who had a way of holding himself in; the thicker, friendlier younger man, hair blond and thatchy, eyes brown and warm, whose gentle bulk hid considerable strength. They almost never talked as they walked and ate. They seemed comfortable in the silence.

Then one night, Bob asked about the chair.

“What’s it do to a person? The chair.”

At first Nick thought he was asking about the
electric
chair, and thought somehow in his FBI career Nick had seen an execution or two. But then he realized Bob meant to touch on something he’d said at Colonel O’Brien’s. Chair. Wheelchair.

“Ah. It sucks. I think I hated it more than she did. Because it was my damn failure, my damn guilt. Sometimes
at night, I’d lie there listening to her breathe. You could see the damn thing in the moonlight. It was like it was laughing at you.”

“Suppose you were in it? Suppose your own daddy had put you there, and then blown the top of his head off in grief. What would that do to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick.

“Well, dammit, think about it. Give me an answer. I have to know why this bird did what he did.”

“Hell, bitterness, I suppose. It could cripple you so bad you’d hate the world. That didn’t happen to her, of course; she was too special and decent. But to someone else? I suppose it could easily lead you to guns, to feel the power in them that your body was deprived of. The gun could complete a paraplegic. It could make him very, very dangerous. But there are so many killers in this world who aren’t crippled. What’s so special about one that is?”

Bob just looked at him, rather sadly.

“You still don’t get it, do you, Pork?”

“Get what?”

“Come on, we’d best be heading back. More phone calls tomorrow.”

But as the time passed, the chance of the great breakthrough seemed to recede. All the calls had been made, sometimes two and three times. In ever widening circles, they’d tried to match death certificates against the seven names, patiently hunting through counties and then states. Somehow, however, the connection seemed to evaporate as they drew near to it.

“Suppose we’ll just have to drive out and find each of these damn guys and eyeball ’em and go from there,” Bob said. He was looking at the current issue of
The Shotgun News
, which he’d just picked up on a newsstand, as he did every other week, irritating Nick no end. It was such a dirty little rag, full of close print and
murky black and white pictures of surplus guns. “The rag,” Bob called it with a snort of joyful contempt. It didn’t even have stories—just pages and pages of gun deals.

“You know, I’m really beginning to wonder if pursuing Annex B might not be a more reasonable course at this point. Working with Sally Ellion, there still might be a way to get into the Bureau’s computer bank. She’s very smart. She likes me. I think—”

“You just want to nail that nice young gal, Pork, why don’t you admit it?”

“No, she’s a
nice
girl, I just—”

The phone rang.

“Agent Memphis.”

“Mr. Memphis. I’m Susan Jeremiah, in the Clark County, North Carolina, registrar’s office?”

“Oh, yes, right, I remember. I talked to you some days ago. About the seven names—”

“That’s right.”

“And you couldn’t help?”

“No sir. But I got to thinking on it. One of those names on that list was a James Thomas Albright. And there was no James Thomas Albright on my list of deaths for the years 1935 through 1945.”

“No. That’s what you told me—”

“But I got to thinking there
was
an Albright. A Robert Parrish Albright, who died when he was two in 1938, right here in Clark County.”

“I see,” said Nick.

“The names being so similar. I just got curious and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went and checked our names registration. You know, with a valid birth certificate, you can petition the court to change your name legally.”

“Of course.”

“And I was stunned to discover that in June of 1963,
a Robert Parrish Albright of this county petitioned the court to change his name to James Thomas Albright. The request was granted, and nobody had ever bothered to check the changed name against the death certificates. No one knew that the real Robert Parrish Albright had died in 1938.”