“I just heard the news,” he said. “Have we got our guy?”
“We don’t know yet,” Riley said, handing the car registration to Dillard. “But we need to contact the owner of this car. It’s likely that he parked it here himself, but we need to find out if he reported it stolen.”
“We’ll get right on it,” Dillard said.
Meanwhile, Riley noticed that the local police were pushing the hobo into a cop car.
“Come on,” she said to her colleagues. “Let’s follow them to the police station.”
*
A short while later, Riley, Bill, Jenn, and Cullen were facing the seated, handcuffed hobo in the station’s interrogation room. At Riley’s request, a local cop had given her a small bag full of ice for her hand. She noticed that Cullen didn’t ask for one for his nose.
Too proud, she guessed. Or too embarrassed.
Riley studied the hobo more closely, now that she could see him better in this light than she’d been able to down in the ravine.
He was predictably filthy, wearing cheap ragged clothes and broken-down shoes. He smelled bad, and he was bearded and his hair was long.
But he struck Riley as somehow different from the other hobos down in that ravine. He was tall, but not as hard and muscular as the others. And something about his manner seemed different. Riley couldn’t yet put her finger on how or why.
The man had already asked for a lawyer. According to Chief Buchanan, one was on his way.
“What’s your name?” Cullen asked.
“They call me Spider,” the man said.
“I mean your real name,” Cullen said.
“They call me Spider,” the man repeated.
He looked around at Riley and her colleagues.
“So what’s this all about?” he said. “Who called in some sort of team?”
“That’s what we were hoping you could tell us,” Riley said. “For one thing, where did you get that nice car?”
The man smiled. Although his teeth were hardly clean, Riley could see that they were straight and healthy.
“I bought it,” he said.
Bull Cullen let out a sarcastic chuckle.
“Yeah, right,” he said.
Riley darted Cullen a disapproving look. She really wanted him to keep his mouth shut. She was anxious to hear whatever the man had to say for himself—no matter whether he was lying or telling the truth.
In fact, she figured it might be worth encouraging him in a lie.
“Where did you buy the Mercedes?” she asked.
“In Chicago,” Spider said.
“So you didn’t steal it?” Riley asked.
“Why would you think I did?”
Riley said, “Well, you hardly strike me as the Mercedes type.”
“I might surprise you.”
Riley asked him, “Why did you run away from us?”
“I had things to do, places to go.”
He chuckled a little and added, “I’m a busy man.”
His smiled faded, and a look of anxiety crossed his face.
“You still haven’t told me what this is about. I’ve got no idea. You said a while ago that a woman was killed on the tracks. I don’t know anything about that. Whenever it was, I’m sure I’ve got an alibi. I passed the day panhandling around the station. Then I went down to join up with the vagabonds under the bridge. Those gentlemen can account for my whereabouts.”
His wording caught Riley’s attention …
“… passed the day … vagabonds … account for my whereabouts … gentlemen.”
He sounded like a well-educated man.
She wondered—should she be surprised? Wasn’t it possible that a hobo had once seen better days?
Anyway, she wasn’t interested in checking this man’s alibi with the rest of them. They’d seemed to consider him one of their own, and they’d surely say just about anything to protect him.
Spider continued, “Nobody has said I’m under arrest for anything. Unless you’re going to charge me with something, like maybe stealing my own car, I want out of here. I know my rights. And I’m still waiting for that lawyer.”
The man was fidgeting a little, and Riley sensed that he was genuinely eager to be released.
Was it because he was guilty of murder? She was having trouble reading him.
Bill asked, “Did you know the victim—Sally Diehl?”
“We were acquainted. All the guys knew her from around the train station.”
“Tell us what you knew about her,” Bill said.
“She was friendly,” Spider began. “She liked to talk to us …”
As Bill kept the man talking, Riley observed him carefully. His hands were dirty, but his fingernails were neatly trimmed. Although his hair was long and unkempt, it wasn’t scraggly or uneven.
She kept wondering …
What’s off about this guy?
Then she remembered what he’d said about the Mercedes.
“I bought it.”
In a flash, Riley realized who this man must actually be.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Before Riley could tell anyone what she’d just realized, the door flew open, and in came Chief Buchanan and the FBI field chief, Proctor Dillard.
Dillard said to Riley and the others, “You’re not going to believe this.”
Riley thought …
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I will believe it.
Dillard continued, “We tried to contact the registered owner of the car, Timothy Pollitt. We found out that he’s an English professor at Fargate College in Chicago. And here’s his picture on the college website.”
Dillard held up his cell phone so Riley could see the picture.
The man in the picture was smiling, clean, and respectable-looking.
But even so, the resemblance was unmistakable, just as she’d expected.
Riley looked at the hobo and said …
“You are Timothy Pollitt.”
The man stared back at her and said nothing.
“There’s more,” Dillard said. “He’s been married and divorced twice, and both of his ex-wives filed domestic violence complaints against him. They both said he made them fear for their lives.”
The door opened again, and another man hurried into the room and slammed his briefcase on the table.
He said, “I’m Doug Lehman, and I’ve been assigned to serve as this man’s attorney. I don’t know what’s been going on in this room, but my client is not going to say another word until we’ve conferred privately.”
Pollitt opened his mouth to speak, and Lehman waved his finger at him.
“Not one word, I said! I want everybody else out of here, right now.”
Riley and the others reluctantly filed out of the interrogation room and into the hall.
Bill and Jenn looked thoroughly surprised.
“What the hell?” Jenn said. “I mean, this guy isn’t a real hobo?”
“Yeah, I know,” Bill said. “This changes everything.”
But Riley wondered …
Does it?
Just then she noticed a man sitting on a bench in the hall.
It was Mason Eggers, studying a clipboard with a map draped across it.
She remembered what he’d said about his theory …
“I haven’t really worked it out yet.”
Riley wondered if maybe he’d worked it out by now. She was beginning to feel sure that they were going to need a new theory.
Riley said to Bill and Jenn, “You guys talk to Dillard. Find out whatever else he knows about Timothy Pollitt. Then get online and see what else you can find. I’ll join up with you shortly.”
As Jenn and Bill headed away to talk to Dillard, Riley walked over to the bench and sat down beside older man, who looked up from his notes at her.
“Is the hobo a suspect?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Riley said. “I know this is going to sound crazy …”
The man let out a short laugh.
“Don’t tell me. He’s got another life—aside from being a hobo, I mean.”
Riley stared at Eggers.
“He’s a college professor in Chicago,” she said. “He wasn’t trying to steal the Mercedes, it’s really his. How did you know?”
Eggers said, “Oh, I picked up on that the minute I laid eyes on him. I was a railroad cop for a lot of years, remember. I know the type. ‘Scenery bums,’ they’re called—or ‘oogles,’ in hobo parlance. They’re often successful people with good careers who go freight-hopping as a kind of a hobby—a pretty dangerous hobby, I might add. I hear there are more and more of them these days.”
Eggers thought for a moment, then said, “A college professor, you said?”