A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  If he had to go out in daylight, he would drive rather than walk. He would try to stay off the busiest downtown streets, where the popular stores and restaurants were. He would be a man who used back entrances. He would favor additions like facial hair, sunglasses, and hats.

  Weldonville Penitentiary was thousands of miles away, but Weiss would not be under the illusion that distances mattered to the people who were after him. He would be on his guard at all times, scanning for strangers who seemed too interested in him or seemed to have nothing to do but stare at passersby.

  Some of the FBI agents had worried that Weiss might have altered his appearance with plastic surgery, but Leah Hawkins wasn’t concerned. The techniques were all intended to correct injuries or flaws or make the subject’s face look younger. And while the best practitioners could do those things well, they weren’t able to make fundamental changes to the shape and metrics of a face. The eyes were the same distance apart, and no plastic surgeon seemed to add anything that didn’t look added.

  Leah was not worried that Albert Weiss would go to see his mother and Leah would fail to recognize his features. As a homicide detective, she had spent many hours studying faces, photographs, drawings, and reconstructions of faces to match them to murderers or victims. Her biggest concern was that she was planning to commit murder, which was something a decent person did alone rather than involving others. That meant she was limited to what one person could see, and to the number of hours one person could keep looking.

  She had brought some devices from Colorado to help with her work. She had a box of pinhole cameras that could be operated on their own batteries or plugged into an AC outlet or a laptop USB outlet. They would transmit photographic images to her laptop computer or phone. At the end of her first day, she placed one of them above the curtain rod of her back window, aimed it at the back of Mrs. Weiss’s house, and left it there. Then she got ready to go out to explore the streets of Naples in darkness.

  She was aware that in many situations her height would make her stand out to a man like Weiss, who would be watching everyone. She was a head taller than most women and a forehead taller than many men, so she stayed away from the light and the people. She had rented a car at the airport, and she did much of her exploring by driving slowly along the main streets or parking to study the pedestrians. After the people went home, she drove around exploring the geography of the city.

  When she went back to her apartment, she kept the lights off, ran through the recordings of Mrs. Weiss’s house from her pinhole cameras, and went to sleep.

  The next morning Leah Hawkins sat at the dining room table thinking about what a person would need in order to live in a city like this. He would need a supermarket, a pharmacy, a doctor, a dentist, a gas station, a barber. As the list grew, she began to write it down.

  “A bank,” she added. He’d been out for two years, and if he’d spent that time here, he would have a bank. She wondered if she could find a way to see the security footage of banks. The cameras in banks were the best. Anytime there was a robbery in a store, even part of a big chain or a store that sold cameras, the surveillance footage was crap. On the recordings from cameras over the tellers’ windows, a cop could see whether the suspect had shaved recently. The problem was, if her attempt to get Weiss turned ugly, she didn’t want to be on record as having asked institutions for help finding him.

  * * *

  Seven banking companies were listed online as having at least one branch in Naples. The first one that attracted her attention was part of a small corporation that had only nine branches, all in southern Florida. The branch in the center of town was large, probably the flagship. She took out a dozen pinhole cameras connected to transmitters. It took her several days to leave one camera aimed at the door nearest to each bank’s parking lot.

  Over a period of weeks, Leah acquired many hours of bank surveillance recordings and watched them at high speed whenever she had unoccupied time. Photographs of the twelve fugitives were taped to the wall by the computer, on the theory that if one of the twelve was here, others might be too.

  When she had tired of looking at the mother’s house, she explored the possibility that Albert Weiss had a house of his own. Naples had a population of about 21,500, with a median age of 65.2 years. Among them, 94.2 percent were Caucasian, 90 percent spoke English, 85 percent were born outside Florida, and 80 percent owned their houses. The best neighborhoods were mostly along the shore. The Old Naples neighborhood, where Weiss’s mother lived, was home to about four thousand people. Leah walked the district once a day. The first day she walked beginning at dawn, and each day she made her walk an hour later. She also drove the district for about two hours a day, going up and down streets in roughly a circular pattern with the Weiss house at the center. If Albert Weiss had come back here to be near his mother, then near his mother’s house was where to look for his place.

  Late one night she installed a pinhole surveillance camera high on the trunk of a tree across the street from Mrs. Weiss’s house, and a second on a tree in the house’s backyard. Her career had taught her patience. If the batteries began to wear out, she planned to go around again and change the batteries on all the cameras.

  As Leah walked and drove and watched, she worked on identifying the occupants of each house in the Old Naples neighborhood. Some had names on their mailboxes, and others received mail with addresses that could be read through a slot or on a package that was left in front. She would simply photograph with her phone anything she found and then look at it closely later.

  Whenever she saw a man from a distance who appeared to fit Weiss’s general description, she followed him until she could eliminate him as a possibility. Leah had formed the theory that Weiss did not have a job, or he would already have been found by one of the various police organizations that had been looking. He was more likely to have a fake profession of some kind so he could pay himself a salary out of a secret cache of money from his days as a kidnapper.

  His record showed no periods of employment before he was caught, tried, and convicted of kidnapping. Since it was hard to imagine anyone who hadn’t had a source of income before age thirty, when he’d gone into kidnapping, he had probably committed a few crimes before then and hidden those proceeds too.

  Leah was out most of every day and night looking for different places where a thirty-seven-year-old career criminal and occasional murderer might be found, and spent the rest running through recordings looking at perfectly normal scenes of life in a nice Florida community. There were times when she felt like a stubborn ornithologist waiting in the long-deserted habitat of a bird that the science world was almost certain was extinct. Then one day there was a possible sighting.

  9

  At first Leah couldn’t be sure. All she had was an image from one of the cameras she had placed in front of a bank, a man pushing the door open, stepping outside onto the pavement, and walking across the facade toward the corner of the building and out of frame. As soon as she spotted him, she stopped the playback and held him there. To her, he looked like Albert Weiss, but he probably wasn’t Weiss. Then, as she considered the question, she realized the only reason he seemed unlikely to be Weiss was that he had appeared on one of the cameras she had planted precisely to find Weiss. What if it was Weiss? This could be her only sighting.

  She ran the sequence again and again, and compared the face on the screen with the pictures she had stored on her laptop. He looked like Weiss, but Weiss wasn’t unusual-looking. She froze him again. She took a piece of paper and a pencil and looked at him as he came out of the building. He was leaning forward slightly, his right arm extended to push the glass door open. She drew his exact stance and counted the rows of bricks of the bank wall from his feet to his head. She estimated the distance from the top of the door to the top of his head. She noted that the length of his step was roughly one and a half per block of pavement.

  She could see from the side that he had a widow’s peak. She looke
d at the profile pictures in her computer file and measured how far the side hair had receded as about two inches. She translated the sight into a proportion of his head from forehead to back—about one-fifth. The proportion for the man on the recording was about one-fifth also. She got into her car, parked off Fifth Avenue, and went for a walk. As she passed the bank door, she took a phone picture of her own reflection in the glass and kept going.

  When she got home, she used her own height to tell her the height of the door and used that to give her an estimate of the man’s height. She put it at almost exactly five feet eleven inches. His slim body and his hair matched Weiss’s. She spent another half hour finding, stopping, and enlarging the man’s profile. She compared the profile with the profiles on Weiss’s mug shots.

  These operations required trying to copy the shape of the face with her pencil and paper, and while she was doing this, her recording was running. Other pedestrians walked past the bank’s doors; some went inside and others didn’t. Traffic on the street in front of the building was moving slowly, and when the traffic signal somewhere to the left turned red, the cars stopped and waited. When she had finished her comparison of the chin and nose shapes and positions, she looked at the screen. The cars had stopped again, and the man she could see in the lane headed from the right side of the screen to the left was the same one. She paused and held him there.

  He must have retrieved his car from the back of the bank and now he was leaving. She let his car inch forward and then expanded the image. The logo in the center of the trunk was a horizontal winged oval. She couldn’t make much of that, but the number to the right of it was 300. He was driving a blue Chrysler 300 sedan.

  She still couldn’t be positive that the man was Albert Weiss. He was Weiss’s age and size, had a profile that looked like Weiss’s, and had similar hair. As she strained her eyes to see better, she realized that the car seemed familiar. It was dark blue and very shiny. The more she looked at it, the more she felt the familiarity.

  Leah pulled up the many hours of recordings she had made at Alma Weiss’s house. For weeks she had gone quickly through each day’s recordings and determined that nobody visited Alma Weiss. Nobody ever pulled a car into her driveway, never drove into her garage. But then she saw the blue car. Somebody had driven it past the house not once but a number of times. Each time Leah saw it, she checked the time and date of the recording and wrote it down. Sometimes after the car went past, it parked. It was never parked in front of the house or beside the house. Sometimes it would pass and then reappear on the street behind the house.

  Leah saw no pattern for the timing of the car’s appearances, and she never saw anyone approach the house on foot. But the coincidence of the man’s resemblance to Weiss and the reappearances of the car were enough. Albert Weiss was hiding in or near Naples, and he had, at least occasionally, been near his mother’s house.

  It was night, time for Leah to visit her too. Leah surveyed her belongings, laying them out on the bed. There was a compact burglary kit that she had put together from things she’d learned arresting burglars—a pick and tension wrench, a set of bump keys, a very sharp folding knife made of tough 440 steel, and a pry bar. She had a small, powerful flashlight that could be mounted under the receiver of her service pistol.

  She also had a second Glock 17 pistol that had been fitted with a silencer and drilled to remove the serial number. It had been confiscated during an arrest at a motel off the interstate during Chief Roberts’s time. For some reason it had not been destroyed after the trial. Leah had looked at the transcripts and the evidence paperwork and discovered that the gun was listed as having been destroyed eight years ago, but there it was in the evidence room. She had left it there until a few months ago. Then she had taken it out, cleaned it, fired it at the range, and then cleaned it again and put it away. She had placed it in the metal carrying case where she kept her own service weapon and flown with it, listing it with the serial number of the spare Glock she kept at home. Tonight she removed it from the case, loaded it, took out the silencer that went with it, and brought them with her when she walked up the street to the house.

  Leah Hawkins walked quietly around the side of the house, looking for the best way in. As she came around the house, Leah saw something that might help. This was Florida, so the backyard pool was inside a screened enclosure to keep the area free of pests and leaves.

  She knelt at the edge of the screen, studied it, and peered through it at the house. The pool was meant to be entered directly from inside the house, as if it were another room. The entrance to the pool from the house was through a sliding glass door that was closed.

  She opened her folding knife, cut an opening at the lower edge of the screen, extended the slice about three feet, and then crawled through the opening. She moved quickly to the sliding door and tried opening it, but it was locked. She inserted the knife blade into the space between the door and the jamb. She wiggled it and forced it upward a couple of inches to the hooklike latch that dropped over a bar. She pounded the knife upward with her other hand and it moved. She hit it again and the latch unhooked.

  She slowly opened the door, slipped inside, turned on her flashlight, and walked quietly toward the front of the house, scanning the space ahead of her. She stopped at the edge of the living room, where she had a clear view of much of the first floor.

  Leah remained still and listened. She couldn’t detect any sound. There were no lights anywhere, not even the faint glow of a low-voltage nightlight from a bathroom, the kind some elderly people used to prevent falling. She went up the stairs to the second floor.

  At the end of the hall, where a master bedroom might be, she saw a bedroom with the door closed. She stopped, went low, turned the knob, and then pushed the door inward. The room was what she had expected. There was a four-poster queen bed with a thin white fabric canopy, a duvet with lace around the edges, and a few big decorative pillows. Nobody was sleeping there, and she could not imagine anyone had in some time. There was a distinct old-lady smell that was a combination of stale perfume, cold cream, and maybe a hint of Vicks VapoRub, but the accumulated scents seemed to be mixed with dust.

  Now that she was up on the second floor, Leah was more aware than before that the house was hot. The lower floor had been a bit warm, but up here the sensation was much stronger. The warm air had collected on the upper level, and all day the intense, unmediated sunshine had burned onto the roof, and the heat hadn’t had time to disperse. She didn’t feel or hear air-conditioning, and there were no fans running to at least move the air around.

  Leah had already formed a theory about the house. She moved from room to room verifying it. Three of the four bedrooms had beds in them. One held another queen bed that was made up and looked as though it had been slept in recently and remade. She bent and sniffed the sheets and pillow without touching them. It was a male smell. Someone might have been here a week or two ago, since she had come.

  Leah went directly down the stairs and looked in the kitchen. It was marginally clean, but nobody seemed to have used it today. She felt the sink and drains, and they were dry.

  As soon as she opened the refrigerator, she knew. There was beer—eight bottles—but little actual food. There was cheddar cheese and some olives. In the freezer were ice trays and a bottle of vodka. She unlocked the door and went outside. She used her folding knife to jimmy the small side door of the garage.

  It was a two-car garage with a car parked on one side, but it wasn’t the blue Chrysler 300. It was a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla. On the far side of it was a row of stacked and tied newspapers, and on the top of them was a long bundle made of something wrapped in a tarp, with a couple of other tarps folded on top of it.

  Leah had no doubt, no hesitation. She went right to the bundle. It might have been because she had been a homicide detective for more than ten years, and had gone to look at so many victims, especially when she had worked at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. This one was way past t
he worst stages, and had moved into the realm of archaeology, but Leah’s nose was sensitive to a remaining hint of the distinctive smell.

  The woman had been old, a small person, about five feet three and quite thin. Leah could tell from the fit of the woman’s tracksuit that she had probably weighed about a hundred pounds or less at the time of her death. The usual decomposition process had completed itself a long time ago, probably a year or more. She was now mostly desiccated, dried and leathery. Leah looked closely at the visible parts, the fabric of the tracksuit and sneakers, and decided the woman probably had died a natural death.

  She rewrapped the body and went back inside the house. She climbed the stairs back to the man’s room. It looked to her as though Weiss must be using the room only occasionally, or only for short periods. A few pieces of clothing were in the closet—jeans, a stack of folded T-shirts, underwear, socks in a cardboard box. She went into the next room, which shared a wall with the man’s room. It was smaller and nearly square. But something very odd had been done to the room. All four walls, the floor, and the ceiling had been altered.

  She took out her flashlight and went over the place. There were no windows, but there was still a closet. All the room’s walls and the floor had been covered with particleboard sheeting, and it gave a bit when she walked on it. She pushed on the wall, and it moved inward a little too. She went to the side where the edge of the false wall was visible and saw under the particle board a layer of insulation almost three inches thick. There was a small bed made of steel with a single mattress on it, like one of the two components of a bunk in a barracks. Everything was clear. There was no possible misinterpretation. The walls, floor, and ceiling had been remodeled to be soundproof. The insulation and sheeting had also covered the windows. She examined the things she could see, and then she walked to the closet and opened it.