Iron Orchid (Holly Barker 5)

This was one coincidence too many, he thought. As he took the up escalator to the street, Teddy replayed his memory of the past few days, of his actions. He had made a mistake. He had met the scooter guy at the 23rd Street subway stop, and he had abandoned the scooter a block from that entrance. They were looking for him on the Lexington Avenue subway.

They must be desperate, he thought, to spend manpower that way. At street level he hailed a cab. He’d stay off the subway for a while.

FORTY-TWO

A WEEK PASSED, and Holly and Ty went to Lance’s office to present their report. Lance and Kerry Smith waved them to a seat.

Holly set a flat-screen monitor on Lance’s desk and placed the wireless laptop associated with it at a corner where she could easily access the keyboard.

“Here’s what we’ve done,” she said, tapping some keys. The screen filled with passport-sized photographs of men in their late middle years. “We took eight hundred and forty-one digital photographs of men on the Lexington Avenue subway between the apparent ages of fifty-five and seventy-five. We eliminated slightly more than half, because they weighed too much and their faces were too full. Then I personally went through all the remaining photographs and eliminated all the men I felt could not possibly be our guy. I know this is subjective, but I’m the only one who’s actually set eyes on the man, even if he was disguised. We finished up with two hundred and ninety-two possible Teddy Fays, and we transmitted their photographs to Langley, specifically to the Technical Services division, where they were reviewed by a couple of dozen employees who had worked with Teddy or, at least, had seen him several times a week. The result is that not one of them identified a single photograph as Teddy Fay.”

Kerry looked at the ceiling, and Lance sighed.

“I took the additional step of ordering another sketch of Teddy, which was seen and commented on by all the people who had looked at the photographs, and here is the result” She placed a sketch on Lance’s desk.

Lance and Kerry looked at the sketch for a long time.

“It’s Larry David,” Lance said, finally.

“We’ve heard about the resemblance before,” Ty said.

“It’s useless,” Kerry said. “Unless we were looking for Larry David.”

“He’s too bland,” Lance said, “too devoid of distinguishing features: no prominent nose, no beetle brows, no scars, no buck teeth.”

“What can I tell you?” Holly said. “Teddy Fay is the Sir Alec Guinness of serial murderers. He’s a nearly blank canvas upon which he can stick prosthetics and hair and become somebody else.”

“So we can’t post him on the ten-most-wanted list,” Kerry said. “We can’t call ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and nail him that way. It would never work, and we’d get thirty thousand phone calls from all over the country from people who think it’s their Uncle Harry or Larry David.”

“This is why I’m not a police officer,” Lance said glumly. “Or why I wasn’t until now. Being a spy was a lot more fun.” He turned and looked at Holly. “I don’t want you to feel badly about this,” he said. “It was a good idea, and it was worth the manpower; it just didn’t pan out; we weren’t lucky enough.”

“Any more ideas?” Kerry asked hopefully.

Holly looked at her feet. “Well…”

“What?” Lance asked. “Say it.”

“There was this one thing that happened in the subway, at the Sixty-third Street Station.”

“What?” Kerry demanded.

“As the train pulled into the station, I caught a glimpse of a man I’ve seen in my neighborhood. I don’t know his name, but I’ve sort of bumped into him a couple of times, and he fits the description. What makes me think of him is that he was standing on the platform when the car I was on passed, but he didn’t get on the train. I looked through all the other cars for him, but he wasn’t on the train.”

“Why do you think he didn’t get on?” Lance asked.

“I think he may have seen me,” Holly replied. “I didn’t make eye contact with him, but if he’s Teddy Fay, he knows me from the opera. Maybe he saw me on the train and balked.”

“That makes sense,” Kerry said. “God knows the guy has good instincts. If he saw someone on the train whom he knew to be CIA or FBI, that would be enough to keep him off it.”

“Maybe he even guessed what we were doing,” Lance said. “Does he know where you live, Holly?”

“The first time I saw him was when I was coming out of my building,” Holly said.

“Well, if he saw you arriving at the Sixty-third Street station on the train, and he knows that’s the one nearest your building, and you didn’t get on there or get off, maybe he put it together.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have gotten onto the trains myself,” Holly admitted. “It was such shitty duty that I thought I ought to share it with the others.”

“The first thing you have to get used to when you’re supervising people, Holly, is handing people shitty assignments without pity,” Lance said. “From now on, I don’t want you on any surveillance detail of any of the potential victims we’re watching. I don’t want Teddy to spot you in a car or on a street, except where you live.”