“You said you knew a couple of faces?” Davis went on.
“Sitting beside Daffy is a female named Penelope Alice Detweiler,” Matt said, “who I know is not aiding and abetting
our fugitives.”
“How do you know that?” Jernigan challenged,
“She’s dead,” Matt said.
“Penny Detweiler died of a narcotics overdose,” Chief Coughlin said.
“I see. Well, that would seem to buttress my observation about the meaning of the word ‘nice,’ wouldn’t it?” Davis said.
The group shot disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a series of other snapshots of Bennington girls, each showing Susan Reynolds with a square box around her face and a circle around the face of either (or both) Eloise Anne Fitzgerald or Jennifer Ollwood—in some shots, of both.
“The blonde is Miss Susan Reynolds, of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, white female now twenty-six years of age, five feet five, 130 pounds, blond hair, pale complexion, blue eyes, who has puncture wounds, entrance and exit, on her inside upper thigh caused by her having taken an arrow during archery practice at summer camp when she was sixteen.”
There were chuckles around the table.
Somebody—Matt could not tell for sure, but it sounded like Jack Matthews—asked incredulously, “Archery practice? Some girl didn’t know the bow was loaded?”
There were more chuckles.
Another photo of Susan appeared, a more recent photograph. In it she was wearing a dress.
“This was taken three months or so ago, outside the Department of Social Services Building in Harrisburg, where Miss Reynolds is employed as an appeals officer,” Leibowitz said. “She resides with her parents in Camp Hill and drives a red Porsche 911—which she obviously didn’t buy with what they pay her at Social Services—and in which she frequently drove to her family’s summer home in the Pocono Mountains on weekends.”
“When this came to our attention,” Leibowitz continued, “we sought and received assistance from the local authorities.”
“What ‘local authorities’?” Chief Coughlin asked.
“The county sheriff, Chief,” Leibowitz said. “We gave him a camera with a tripod and a telephoto lens—”
“You gave him a camera?” Peter Wohl asked.
“I asked about that myself, Peter,” Walter Davis said. “It was cost-effective, Agent Leibowitz told me. I suppose a good camera like that is worth five hundred dollars. . . .”
“I think that particular camera outfit cost us $412.50,” Leibowitz said.
“How do I get on your gift list?” Wohl asked.
“Anytime you’re willing to place a premises such as the Reynolds summer home under at least part-time surveillance and save the FBI the man-hours of keeping it under surveillance ourselves.”
“Clever,” Wohl said appreciatively.
“And it has a certain public-relations aspect, too, Peter,” Davis said. “Getting a camera from the FBI makes the local authorities look on us as their friends. As hard as you may find this to believe, not all police officers look on us fondly.”
“But on the other hand, Walter,” Wohl said, “some of my officers like FBI agents so much that they take them on sight-seeing tours, absolutely free of charge.”
“Actually, now that my temper has had time to cool down,” Leibowitz said, “I have to admit that was sort of funny. But let me show you what our $412.50 bought.”
A somewhat grainy photograph of a Ford sedan came on the screen.
“We ran the plate. The plate was stolen. There were no recent reports of a Ford like that having been stolen in a four-state area.”
“They switched plates,” Denny Coughlin thought out loud.
“We think that’s probable. And there are just too many two-year-old Fords like that to make it cost-efficient to run every one of them down.”