Die Trying

better. Thought some more. Checked his watch again. He nodded to himself. Now he could tell McGrath where Holly Johnson had gone at twelve o’clock yesterday.

    SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND two miles away, panic had set in. Numb shock had carried the carpenter through the first hours. It had made him weak and acquiescent. He had let the employer hustle him up the stairs and into the room. Then numb shock had made him waste his first hours, just sitting and staring. Then he had started up with a crazy optimism that this whole thing was some kind of bad Halloween joke. That made him waste his next hours convinced nothing was going to happen. But then, like prisoners everywhere locked up alone in the cold small hours of the night, all his defenses had stripped away and left him shaking and desperate with panic.
    With half his time gone, he burst into frantic action. But he knew it was hopeless. The irony was crushing him. They had worked hard on this room. They had built it right. Dollar signs had danced in front of their eyes. They had cut no corners. They had left out all their usual shoddy carpenter’s tricks. Every single board was straight and tight. Every single nail was punched way down below the grain. There were no windows. The door was solid. It was hopeless. He spent an hour running around the room like a madman. He ran his rough palms over every square inch of every surface. Floor, ceiling, walls. It was the best job they had ever done. He ended up crouched in a corner, staring at his hands, crying.

    “THE DRY CLEANER’S,” McGrath said. “That’s where she went.”
    He was in the third-floor conference room. Head of the table, seven o’clock, Tuesday morning. Opening a fresh pack of cigarettes.
    “She did?” Brogan said. “The dry cleaner’s?”
    McGrath nodded.
    “Tell him, Milo,” he said.
    Milosevic smiled.
    “I just remembered,” he said. “I’ve worked with her five weeks, right? Since she busted up her knee? Every Monday lunchtime, she takes in her cleaning. Picks up last week’s stuff. No reason for it to be any different yesterday.”
    “OK,” Brogan said. “Which cleaner’s?”
    Milosevic shook his head.
    “Don’t know,” he said. “She always went on her own. I always offered to do it for her, but she said no, every time, five straight Mondays. OK if I helped her out on Bureau business, but she wasn’t about to have me running around after her cleaning. She’s a very independent type of a woman.”
    “But she walked there, right?” McGrath said.
    “Right,” Milosevic said. “She always walked. With maybe eight or nine things on hangers. So we’re safe to conclude the place she used is fairly near here.”
    Brogan nodded. Smiled. They had some kind of a lead. He pulled the Yellow Pages over and opened it up to D.
    “What sort of a radius are we giving it?” he said.
    McGrath shrugged.
    “Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” he said. “That would be about the max, right? With that crutch, I can’t see her doing more than a quarter-mile in twenty-minutes. Limping like that? Call it a square, a half-mile on a side, this building in the center. What does that give us?”
    Brogan used the AAA street map. He made a crude compass with his thumb and forefinger. Adjusted it to a half-mile according to the scale in the margin. Drew a square across the thicket of streets. Then he flipped back and forth between the map and the Yellow Pages. Ticked off names with his pencil. Counted them up.
    “Twenty-one establishments,” he said.
    McGrath stared at him.
    “Twenty-one?” he said. “Are you sure?”
    Brogan nodded. Slid the phone book across the shiny hardwood.
    “Twenty-one,” he said. “Obviously people in this town like to keep their clothes real clean.”
    “OK,” McGrath said. “Twenty-one places. Hit the road, guys.”
    Brogan took ten addresses and Milosevic took eleven. McGrath issued them both with large color blowups of Holly Johnson’s file photograph. Then he nodded them out and waited in his chair at the head of the conference room table, next to the telephones, slumped, staring into space, smoking, drumming a worried little rhythm with the blunt end of his pencil.

    HE HEARD FAINT sounds much earlier than he thought he should. He had no watch and no windows, but he was certain it was not yet morning. He was certain he had another hour. Maybe two. But he could hear noise. People moving in the street outside. He held his breath and listened.