Chapter 14 Curtis D. Morgan
Darby spent the day in the Georgetown law library, reading and
taking notes about the members of the Washington law firms that
Mattiece used. It was boring work, and her mind often wandered.
She thought a lot about Thomas.
♦
Matthew Barr went to New Orleans, where he met a lawyer
who told him to fly to a certain hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
He wouldn't tell Barr what was going to happen there, but when
Barr arrived he found a room waiting for him. A note at the front
desk of the hotel said he would receive a phone call in the early
morning.
He called Fletcher Coal at home at ten and told him the news.
♦
She stepped on the note when she opened her door. It said:
Darby, I'm in the garden. It's urgent. Gray. She locked the door,
went downstairs, through the restaurant and out into the garden.
She found him sitting at a small table, half hidden behind a wall.
'Why are you here?' she demanded in a whisper. He told her
what had happened, and what he'd done for the rest of the day. He
had spent it riding round the city in a dozen different taxis, waiting
for dark. Then he came to the Tabard. He was certain that no
one had followed him.
She listened. She watched the restaurant and the entrance to the
garden, and heard every word.
'I have no idea how anyone could find my room,' he said.
'Did you tell anyone your room number?' He thought for a second.
'Only Smith Keen, but he didn't have time to tell anyone
else.'
'Where were you when you told him?' 'In his car.'
She shook her head slowly. 'I told you not to tell anyone, didn't
I? You think this is all a game. It's not, Gray, it's real. This isn't
just a great newspaper story, which is going to make Gray Grantham
famous and win him prizes. I've seen people die. God knows
how many times I've been close to death myself. These people are
dangerous, and they're professionals. They know about you and
the Washington Post. They've probably been listening to you
since you wrote the first story about this matter. They'll have microphones
hidden in your apartment, your car and your office. It
looks as though they've got microphones in Keen's car as well. Do
you understand what I'm saying? Last night at dinner we tried to
pretend we were two normal people getting to know each other.
But that wasn't real: this is real.'
She was right, of course. He felt like a schoolchild in front of
an angry teacher.
'You can stay here tonight,' she said, 'and tomorrow I'll find you
another small hotel.'
♦
After breakfast the next morning she got on the phone. She rang
the Georgetown law school and pretended to be from White and
Blazevich. She said that their computers were not working, and
that for the sake of her records she needed to know which students
had worked for White and Blazevich last summer. She
waited, with her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, and
looked at Gray. The secretary from the law school came back on
the phone. 'Seven of them,' Darby said. 'Thank you.' She wrote
down their names. 'And do you have their addresses, please? We
need them for our records.' She wrote down this information too.
'That was brilliant,' Gray said when she had finished. 'Now all we
need to do is find as many of these students as we can, show them
your photograph of Garcia, and hope that one of them recognizes
him and can tell us his real name.'
'Why couldn't we just wait outside the firm's building until he
came out, and then follow him? That's what Croft was doing at
Brim, Stearns and Kidlow.'
'Too risky. It seems likely that White and Blazevich were involved
in some way in the killings. There are people who know
my face, and we know they're looking for you too. What if they're
guarding White and Blazevich? They would see us, and then we'd
be dead.'
They hired a car and began to try to find the seven students.
Gray found two of them at home and Darby spoke to another as
he was leaving a class at the school; none of them recognized
Garcia. They met at 10:45 and compared notes. At eleven, students
were leaving their classes and she found another of the
seven students, but he too knew nothing. A fifth was working in
the library; she didn't like answering Darby's questions, but she
admitted that she didn't know Garcia.
Only two left - Edward Linney and Judith Wilson. Wilson was
expected back at her apartment at one o'clock, so Gray spent the
rest of the morning trying to find Linney, but he was not at home
and no one at the school seemed to know where he was. They
hadn't seen him for several weeks.
They drove together to Judith Wilson's apartment. She wasn't
there at one, so they waited. She arrived an hour later. Gray
jumped out of the car, ran up to her and caught her at her front
door. He showed her the photograph, and Darby saw her shake
her head.
'Linney had better be good,' he said as he got back into the car.
'But where is he?'
'I hope we find him today,' she said, 'because tomorrow I leave
the country if we don't.'