Shoot Him If He Runs (Stone Barrington 14)

“That would mean that the ninety-five percent-hundreds, perhaps thousands-would satisfy your criteria for thinking that they are Teddy Fay. Do you see where I’m going here?”

“The ninety-five percent don’t live next door to Irene Foster.”

“All right, I’ll give you that. Now you’ve isolated one criterion that doesn’t apply to the great mass. But it’s not an incriminating criterion, and it hardly resonates like, say, a DNA match.”

“Stone, Teddy through maybe years of careful preparation has ensured that we are never going to get a match of anything-DNA, fingerprint, photo, anything-because he has erased all those things from every computer that might harbor them.”

“Well, then, we’re left with kidnapping the three of them, locking them up somewhere and torturing them until one of them admits he’s Teddy-the George W. Bush method of extracting admissions from people we hate. And, of course, under torture, anybody will admit to anything, so all three of them might admit to being Teddy.”

“No, no, we’re going to have to rely on deduction to make the identification.”

“Ah, detective work!” Dino interjected.

“Well, yes.”

“Well, a tiny problem: we have no evidence to work with to deduce that any of the three of them is Teddy. You see the difficulty?” Dino spread his hands and looked sorrowful.

“Let’s get some evidence, then.”

Stone sighed. “We could break into their houses and ransack them, in the hope that if one of them is Teddy, he’s stupid enough to leave his old birth certificate or passport lying around.”

“Stone…”

“What I’m trying to tell you is that Teddy has made it virtually impossible for us ever to identify him by any means known to criminal investigation.”

“How about eyewitnesses?” Genevieve interjected.

“Eyewitness to what?” Holly asked.

“To Teddy. He worked at the CIA all those years; there must be dozens, maybe hundreds of people who knew him, who could identify him if they saw him. Photograph all three of them and send the pictures to Lance. Let him circulate them and see if he gets a bite.”

Dino looked at his girlfriend with admiration. “I think we might have a spot for you at the NYPD,” he said.

Holly looked at her watch. “I have to call in,?

?? she said.

29

Holly first called Bill Pepper.

“I’m here.”

“Me too.”

“Scramble.”

“Scrambled.”

Pepper came back with his voice-from-a-barrel. “What’s up?”

“When a foreigner applies to buy a house in St. Marks, does he have to attach a photograph to his application?”

“Yes, a passport photograph.”

“Can you hack into the government computers and get me the photographs of Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”