A Maidens Grave

And the girlfriend was probably waiting outside Detective Foster’s house all along, while he—whoever he is—made the phone call to you.”
    “That means somebody’d have to know about the real Sharon Foster in the first place,” Budd said. “That Handy’d surrendered to her. Who’d know about her?”
    There was silence for a moment as the roomful of clever men thought of clever ways to learn about past police negotiations—through the news, computer databases, sources within the department.
    LeBow and Budd were tied for first. “Handy!”
    Potter had just arrived there himself. He nodded. “Who’d know better than Handy himself? Let’s thinkback. He’s trapped in the slaughterhouse. He suspects he isn’t going to get his helicopter or that if he does we’re going to track him to the ends of the earth—with or without his M-4 clearance—and so he gets word to his accomplice about Foster. The accomplice calls the girlfriend and they plan out the rescue. But Handy couldn’t have called on the throw phone. We’d have heard it.” Potter closed his eyes and thought back over the evening’s events. “Tobe, those scrambled transmissions you were wondering about . . . We thought they were Tremain and the Kansas HRU. Could they have been something else?”
    The young man tugged at his pierced earlobe then dug several computer disks from a plastic envelope. He handed them to LeBow, who put one in his laptop. Tobe leaned over and pushed keys. On the screen played a stilted, slow-moving graphic representation of two sine waves, overlapping each other.
    “There are two!” he announced, his scientist’s eyes glowing at the discovery. “Two different frequencies.” He looked up. “Both law-enforcement assigned. And retrosignal scrambled.”
    “Are they both Tremain’s?” Potter wondered aloud.
    Ted Franklin asked what the frequencies were.
    “Four hundred thirty-seven megahertz and four hundred eighty point four,” Tobe responded.
    “No,” Ted Franklin answered. “The first one is assigned to HRU. The second isn’t a state police signal. I don’t know whose it is.”
    “So Handy had another phone in the slaughterhouse?” Potter asked.
    “Not a phone,” Tobe said. “It’d be a radio. And four eighty is often reserved for federal operations, Arthur.”
    “Is that right?” Potter considered this, then said, “But a radio wasn’t found at the site, was it?”
    Budd dug through a black attaché case. He found the sheet that listed the inventory of evidence found at the crime scene and the initial chain of custody. “No radio.”
    “Could’ve hidden it, I suppose. There’d be a million nooks and crannies in a place like that.” Potter considered something. “Is there any way to trace the transmissions?”
    “Not now. You have to triangulate on a real-timesignal.” Tobe said this as if Potter had asked if it could snow in July.
    “Commander Franklin,” the agent asked, “you got a phone call, right? From this supposed trooper? It wasn’t a radio transmission?”
    “A landline, right. And it wasn’t patched in from a radio either. You can always tell.”
    Potter paused and examined one of the flowers. Was it a begonia? A fuchsia? Marian had gardened. “So Handy radioed Mr. X, who then called Commander Franklin. Then X called Handy’s girlfriend and gave her the go-ahead to intercept Sharon Foster. Tobe?”
    The young agent’s eyes flashed with understanding. He snapped his fingers and sat up. “You got it, Arthur,” he responded to the request that Potter was about to make. “Pen register of all incoming calls to your office, Commander Franklin. You object to that?”
    “Hell, no. I want this boy as much as you do.”
    “You have a direct line?” Tobe asked.
    “I do, yes, but half of my calls come in from the switchboard. And when I pick up I don’t know where it’s coming in from.”
    “We’ll do them all,” Tobe said patiently, undaunted.
    Who’s Handy’s accomplice? Potter wondered.
    Tobe asked, “Henry? A warrant request, please.”
    LeBow printed one out on Stillwell’s NEC and handed it to Potter then called up on his screen the Federal Judiciary Directory. Potter placed a call to a judge who sat on the district court of Kansas. He explained about the request. At home at this hour, the judge agreed to sign the warrant on the basis of the evidence Potter presented; he’d been watching CNN and knew all about the incident.
    As a member of the bars of