—
LUCAS, BOB, RAE,and a highway patrol sergeant met outside the interview room and Rae asked the sergeant, “You got her purse?”
“We do. We’ve got both a purse and a travel bag.”
Rae said, “Let’s take a look.”
The purse was a small Louis Vuitton leather satchel and contained a wallet with a driver’s license in the name of Grace Pelhamand another in the name of Sandra Duncan. Neither had an address that went back to the house in Dallas.
The travel bag contained two bottles of water, some tissue, a box of Tampax, some liquid hand cleanser, and in a small side pocket, a legitimate-looking American passport with a two-year-old photo of Box and the name Michelle Martin.
“These guys were psycho about security,” Bob said, flipping through the passport. There were no visa stamps. “Wonder if they’re running for the border?”
Lucas asked the patrolman to run the three separate names for connections to vehicle license tags. He nodded, said, “We can do that in a couple of minutes,” and, “We haven’t touched the truck in case you want it processed.”
“I’m not sure what we’d be looking for, but I’d like to go through it,” Lucas said. “How far is it from here?”
“Way we fly, another twenty minutes down the highway.”
“Let’s go take a look at it,” Lucas said. “We’re not going to get anything from Box right now. Major Highstreet said you could run her into Fort Worth for us. She might soften up once we’ve had her inside a federal lockup for a few days.”
“We can do that. I’ll lead you back to Gordon, I’ll have one of the guys move Box into Fort Worth.”
They left in a five-car caravan, two patrol cars with Lucas, Bob, and Rae bringing up the rear. As they were leaving, the patrol sergeant told them the two driver’s licenses were legitimate, that there were no tickets issued to either one, and there were no vehicles associated with either name.
The jail was located in a residential neighborhood and Lucas paidno attention to the RV parked down the street, or to the small red car tucked in behind it. RVs and red cars were a dime a dozen.
—
THE FORDpickup truck was exactly where Box had left it, on the side of the road. A bored highway patrolman was keeping an eye on it.
When they arrived, he came over and introduced himself as Charles Townes, the cop who’d spotted Box’s truck. “I chased her into the trees over on the other side of the interstate. Got hung up on a cut bank and by the time I got loose, I’d lost her. She might have got away if she’d been a little quicker, but we had a chopper out looking for some boy racers on the Fort Worth Highway. I called him in and he came right down and spotted her.”
“Good work all the way around,” Lucas said. “I’ll drop a note to Major Highstreet, telling him that.”
“Appreciate it.”
Rae had a box of vinyl gloves in her gear bag, and they all pulled them on before they started digging through the truck. Bob found one thing of interest in the glove box: there were several insurance certificates made out to a Brian Dumble on the truck, dating back five or six years—and one certificate for a Lynn Marshall on an Audi convertible.
“They put the Audi certificate in the wrong vehicle,” Bob said. “It’s got the tag number on it.”
“This is good. Have Townes check on Brian Dumble for a driver’s license, and any cars connected to the name or to the Marshallname. Let’s get that Audi tag number and the other stuff out to the patrol.”
The truck had furniture in the back, and a suitcase full of women’s clothing, but nothing that gave them anything useful. They were finishing the search when Rae said, “The most important thing is, we haven’t found a single telephone.”
“I was just thinking about that,” Lucas said. “There’s no way in hell that she didn’t have a phone with her.”
Townes was standing outside the truck and he said, “The helicopter pilot said she rolled down the window a ways back down the road and waved at him, like she was giving up. I wonder if she might have been throwing something out, instead of waving at him?”
“Good thought,” Lucas said. “Can you call the guy?”
“Yup. I’ll go do that,” Townes said, and he went back to his car.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae had given up on the truck when Townes came back. He said, “I talked to the pilot, he said it wasn’t too long before she pulled over. Probably less than a hundred yards.”
“We need to look,” Lucas said.
They had six people to walk the roadside ditch. Lucas wanted to start back farther than indicated by the pilot, so they wouldn’t worry about whether they were cutting it too close. There was a dead tree on the far side of the ditch, halfway to their starting point, and the sergeant said, “Let me break some branches off that tree. Use them for pokers.”
