Collateral Damage (5 page)

“Honey, why don't you go ahead and get in the car and let the men talk for a minute, okay?”

Bea looked confused but obeyed. Hannibal resisted slapping her fanny for effect, but he did pick up a chamois and start slowly rubbing the Jaguar's fender. Murray was silent for a moment, then seemed to realize he had control of the conversation. Some people are comfortable with silence. Hannibal had judged correctly that Murray was not.

“You going to take care of her? Instead of her taking care of you?”

“I'm not Dean, if that's what you mean,” Hannibal said softly.

Murray worked the chrome of the door handle with more concentration than necessary. “He left around ten thirty. Right behind the woman.”

“Woman?” Hannibal asked. “Are you saying he had another woman here?” He did not have to fake his indignation. Bea deserved better.

“White woman,” Murray said, as if that was significant. “Skinny blonde dame, older than him by a ways. She hit that door as soon as Miss Collins rounded the corner.”

Murray glanced around as if he was looking for someplace to spit. Hannibal nodded in agreement with his sentiments. “How long was she in there?”

“Maybe half an hour. Just about long enough, if you know what I mean.”

“And Dean came out five or ten minutes later,” Hannibal said aloud but to himself. Time enough to quickly pack. So who was the woman? Certainly not a lover as Murray clearly assumed. “He was carrying a suitcase. Did he leave on foot? Which way did he head?”

Murray sat back on his haunches. “What are you, some kind of a detective?”

“Something like that. Just trying to help Bea out. Which way?”

“He was walking when he left,” Murray said, glancing over at Bea in Hannibal's car. “Never looked left or right, just headed up toward Washington Street. Looked like he was in an awful hurry to get away from here. Can't understand it myself. She's a peach, that girl.”

Hannibal nodded again. “Thanks for the help, mister. I think maybe the only way for her to understand what this guy was, is to face him again. If I can find him, then maybe…”

Hannibal shook Murray's hand just as Bea's silver Lexus pulled into the parking lot beside Hannibal's car. He reached it in time to see Cindy hand Bea her keys.

“That was fun,” Cindy said. “Might have to get myself a car one of these days.”

“You don't own a car?” Bea asked, as if Cindy had just revealed she didn't wear underwear.

“She prefers to hand her money to cab drivers,” Hannibal said, “or ride around with me.”

Cindy slipped a possessive arm around Hannibal's waist. “Yep, this is my favorite cabby right here. So, did you get anywhere, honey?”

Honey was what Cindy called Hannibal in the presence of unattached women. He considered it only marginally more subtle than the method dogs use to mark their territory. “I was just getting the lay of the land here, Cindy. The work will start after I get some pictures to distribute.”

“When can we get started with that?” Bea asked.

“If the reporter or cameraman who covered the event you and Dean attended is at work today I should get them pretty quickly,” Hannibal said. “I, not we.”

“I want to come with you.”

“Bea,” Hannibal said as gently as he could, “I'm sorry but we can't do this together. I can do this. Or you can do this. The choice, of course, is up to you.”

The woman actually pouted. “But I want to do something.”

“Then stay by the phone,” Hannibal said. “He might call or send a message. But let me do the searching, all right?”

News Channel 8 was all local and all news and, predictably, a twenty-four hour operation. But despite what Hannibal told Bea, he was surprised to find the reporter he needed to talk to at work on a Sunday evening. Yet there she stood, not so perky as she appeared on screen, standing over the young man at the controls in a darkened editing room, directing the construction of another video story.

Hannibal had called the station soon after driving away from Bea's house. He had learned that the girl in question, Irma Andrews, was the newest television reporter on staff. That being the case, it was no surprise that she drew many of the weekend fluff assignments. He also learned that she would be in-house on that Sunday evening, helping a videotape editor turn her latest script into two or three minutes of video news.

After placing that call, he had joined Cindy for dinner at the Blue Pointe Grill, a seafood haven on Washington Street, Alexandria's main thoroughfare. It had become Cindy's favorite eating spot since the day they found themselves two tables away from John Ashcroft. As far as lawyers go, this was a celebrity just short of a Supreme Court justice. Hannibal's only memory of that night was that for an Attorney General, he seemed to be a pretty poor tipper.

Hannibal told Cindy what he learned from Murray over swordfish marinated with rosemary.

“A woman?” she asked between bites. “How terrible for Bea. Another lover you think?”

“Actually, I'm thinking an accomplice. Maybe his partner come to tell him it was time to move on to the next vulnerable mark.”

“Hannibal, if you think this Dean guy is a con man just getting close to her to get into her bank account, then why'd he run?”

Hannibal chewed thoughtfully. “Who knows? Maybe the woman's a spotter who has an even better mark set up for
him. Or maybe the police are on his trail and getting a little too close for comfort. He might need to just disappear for while. Lots of possible reasons.”

“Okay,” she said, not willing to let it go and just enjoy dinner. “Suppose you're right. He's just a con man. She's in love with him, and he's gone for good. In that case, why find him at all?”

“Because, Cindy dear, that is what I'm being paid to do.”

Less than a thirty-minute drive took Hannibal to the offices of NWS8 in Springfield, Virginia. And five minutes of friendly chat with several members of the skeleton staff on duty got him to what they called the edit tank where Irma Andrews was working. When she turned to face him, her piercing eyes moved over his entire body, from top to bottom, scanning him into her memory banks. The soft, open persona she projected on television was totally absent. In this woman's out-thrust jaw and pointed nose he read the kind of dogged determination that so often makes a good detective. And he supposed that, in a way, that was what a good reporter was.

“And you're Hannibal Jones,” Irma said, “and you need my help and it has to do with the feature I made last weekend which first aired Monday morning. You're not police. I don't think a lawyer. Maybe related to someone I interviewed but…. no. A private detective?”

Her stately frame leaned naturally forward and her eyes didn't blink as often as they should. It was a rare person who could put Hannibal off balance, but here stood one of them. “Private, yes,” he said. “I can see you're busy, but I'm hoping you'll take a minute to print me out a still photo from that video.”

Irma looked over her shoulder at her editor, who waved her on. She tossed her scarlet locks and motioned for Hannibal to follow her. Her strut seemed exaggerated to him, and accented by the tightness of her jeans, but her walk was
so forceful and aggressive it lost all sensuousness. Under her breath she mumbled, “I wish you guys would all get together on these things.”

They entered another edit cell, smaller than eight by ten feet, the two long walls lined with what looked to Hannibal like the controls of the Starship Enterprise. Irma handed Hannibal a pad of preprinted forms and a pen.

“You'll have to fill that out when I give you the picture,” she said. Then she pulled a videotape from a wall rack and dropped into a chair. She pushed the tape, thinner but longer and wider than a VHS cassette, into a machine and her fingers began to play over a bank of controls, shuttling around the tape, looking for the right story.

“You shoot in Beta format?” Hannibal asked.

“Right,” Irma said. “Beta SP actually. The boys shoot on little twenty-minute cassettes, but each reporter can archive their stories on one of these sixties. You know something about this stuff?”

“Not really,” Hannibal said, watching the blurred images fly past on a small monitor. “Do people ask you to do this all the time?”

The images slowed and an anchor came into view, introducing the story. “Actually it's pretty rare,” Irma said. “Not many people even know we can do this. But I had to print out a still for somebody else from this particular story a few days ago. In fact it was Monday night, not long after we aired it. The usual thing, they wanted a clear picture of a relative. I assume that's not your purpose.”

“No, I need copies to distribute. The person we're looking for has come up missing.”

“Oh, well in that case you want more than a print.” Servomotors whined as Irma put the tape player into normal speed. She pushed her wheeled chair a few feet to the side and punched a button, starting a computer. “Once you pick out the image I'll copy it to a floppy. You can get as many copies of that digital image as you want from lots of places.”

“Appreciate it,” Hannibal said, watching the action move along, watching Bea come into view, and the zoom he'd seen before, to lock onto Dean's face. “That's our boy.”

“Really,” Irma said slowly. She was moving the tape forward and back. Seen a frame at a time, it looked very much like a piece of motion picture film going past.

“A lot to choose from,” Hannibal said. “I thought the sequence was shorter.”

“At thirty frames a second, there are a lot of images to choose from. But this is the best one.” She pushed more buttons, and a variety of hums and clicks started. “So what's up with this fellow? He in some kind of trouble or something?”

“Like I said, he's missing,” Hannibal said. “If there's more to the story, I don't know it yet.”

Irma lapsed into silence while she gathered the print of Dean's face and the floppy disc she had loaded the image onto. Then she left the room. Hannibal followed her into a cubicle barely big enough to stand and turn around in. The desk she sat at was covered with papers, most of them bearing a small precise handwriting he assumed was hers. She gestured to a chair in the next cubicle, and Hannibal dragged it over. He sat, crossed his legs, flipped the top page on the forms pad over and began to fill in the requested information.

“Not yet,” Irma repeated. “Well, the woman who came Monday wanted a shot of the same boy.” Direct and to the point. Hannibal liked that. “She said she was related, but now I have to wonder.”

Hannibal kept writing. He wasn't sure yet how he should handle this. What was this young reporter after?

Irma moved a bit closer. Not the kind of closeness that implies intimacy, but rather the kind that applies a subtle pressure. “Look, just tell me if there's a story here, huh? I don't want to do festivals in the park the rest of my life.”

Now he knew. He didn't think he had anything newsworthy, but this woman might be helpful if she thought there could be something in it for her. He considered his answer carefully, because lying would be counterproductive.
“Miss Andrews, I've been on this case only a few hours. Right now it's a man who's run away without telling his fiancée. Not much there, but it could be anything. What if he's running from the law? Or from the mob? Or the woman you met earlier in the week could be his sister, separated at birth, searching for him.”

“Not likely,” Irma said. “This woman looked a couple decades older than your boy there.”

“Really?” Hannibal said. He sat quite still, his hands on the arms of his chair, but the middle finger of his left hand began to tap up and down. “Blonde woman, on the thin side?”

“That's right, bottle blonde. Brown eyes. Long, conservative cut flowered dress. Makeup carefully applied. And there is something going on here.”