“Just tell me where and when. I’m not going back to sleep now, that’s for sure.”
The agent had then suggested this coffee shop. Bill was aware of its existence, but wondered how Agent Canfield had known about it.
Now they sat facing each other across a small table, steam rising from their cups. Canfield had ordered some kind of latte thing, and for Bill, it was his usual, basic, black coffee. They were alone in the cramped dining area, at least for the time being.
“So you saw portions of the original paint job?” Agent Canfield stared at Bill with an intensity he found equally fascinating and disturbing. She was dressed in a loose-fitting t-shirt, which did nothing to hide her figure, and a pair of sweat pants like the ones college kids wear with the name of their school running down one leg. Instead of a school, though, Agent Canfield’s said “FBI” in gold lettering. She had obviously thrown on the first things she dug out of a bag.
“Yes,” Bill nodded. “There were three rows of green, block lettering painted diagonally across the side of the truck’s cargo box. None of the rows were completely visible on their own, but I could make out a few letters in each row.”
“And they were?”
“The letters in the first row were ‘SPE,’ and in the middle row were the letters ‘FAR,’ with the letters ‘ET’ running along the bottom.”
Agent Canfield wrote the notations down in a small spiral pad Bill hadn’t noticed until just now. He wondered where she had been keeping it, since she wasn’t carrying a purse or any kind of bag. Probably, the sweat pants had pockets. Although she wrote quickly, Bill could see, even from the upside down position of the pad, that her handwriting was neat and legible. She wrote the letters in a descending diagonal pattern on the page, then spun it around so he could look at her handiwork. “Like this?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
She flipped the notebook around again on the table and stared at it, taking a sip of her latte. Her eyes never left the page as she drank. She shrugged. “Okay, I give up. What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure.” Bill shook his head, frustrated. “I feel like I’ve seen this before, or something similar, on a vehicle in the area, but nothing is coming to me. I’ve been thinking about it pretty much non-stop since I called you, and I just keep drawing a blank.”
The agent looked up at Bill thoughtfully. “It’s okay. Keep gnawing at it. If you really have seen it before, eventually, it will come to you. In the meantime, we’ll get the rest of the federal task force together this morning along with the local cops and run it by everyone. Maybe something will shake loose with someone. Either way, it gives us something to look for other than a plain white box truck. Within the hour, this description will be sent to every law enforcement agency on the east coast. If the guy is still driving this truck, someone will see it.”
“Do you really think he’s still using it?”
She shrugged again. “Who knows? It seems like a strange choice of vehicles for a kidnapper to use. It’s slow and cumbersome to drive, but for whatever reason he seems to prefer it. In some ways, it’s not a bad option. Those vehicles are pretty much invisible. They are all over the roads, and who pays attention to them? Nobody,” she said, answering her own question. “Hopefully we’ll get lucky, and he won’t realize you saw him driving it.”
Bill shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on that. He knows I saw him. He looked right at me as he drove by. I could almost have reached out and touched the guy; he was that close to me.”
She took another sip of her latte and licked foam off her upper lip. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe he’ll make a mistake. But I have a question for you.” The agent looked deeply into Bill’s eyes, her direct stare boring into him as if she could see into his soul.
Her mouth was drawn down into a tight frown. “How could you have missed this lettering when I talked to you right after the attempted kidnapping?”
“You mean when you interrogated me?”
She smiled. It was like the sun breaking through the mist on a foggy morning. “Okay, yes, when I interrogated you.”
“I’m not sure, exactly. When he first drove by, I was so stunned that I mostly just stared at him, sitting there in the cab of the truck. Then, after he passed me, as he was heading for the highway, all of my attention was devoted to trying to get the license plate number or at least part of it. But that blue smoke was so thick it obscured the plate very effectively. And the lettering on the cargo box is barely visible. It’s very faint. I think the only reason I even noticed it at all is because I wasn’t looking directly at it. If I had looked right at the side of the truck, I probably would have missed it entirely.”
Agent Canfield continued to stare at the letters she had written on the otherwise blank page of the note pad as if she might be able to decipher their meaning by the sheer force of her concentration. Bill wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t.
He cleared his throat, and she looked up at him expectantly. “Don’t you think it’s odd,” he said, “that, in over a dozen kidnappings—”
“Fourteen,” she interrupted, “Fourteen, if you include the attempt you broke up last week.”
“Okay, fourteen. Don’t you find it a little strange that, in fourteen kidnappings, no one else has ever seen this truck? Even though the lettering is faint and obscured and difficult to read, it’s hard to believe, in all that time, nobody else would have noticed it.”