THE BANDIT QUEEN - Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Walt caught a cab to the airport and boarded the first plane he could on his way to Dallas. He arrived in the early hours of the morning and called the phone number of the security service. One of their patrol cars picked him up outside the terminal and drove him to the office. There he spoke with the men who had chased Deakin and Eden. He also interrogated the “father” who’d lived with Deakin for years. By the middle of the morning, he’d wrung them dry so he borrowed a car and drove to Jeannette Murphy’s house. He arranged for an artist to work with her on a picture of the girl and a current picture of the boy. At least she’d noticed enough about the two to come up with fairly good pictures. Walt took her through her story time after time until she was exhausted and in tears. Then he walked away without another word. Jeannette locked her front door and leaned against it for a long time. Then, with a huge gulping sob, she crawled into her bed and fell into an uneasy sleep. She woke up many times during the night, each time expecting to see Walt pointing a gun at her head. When she woke the next morning and realized she was still alive, she sent a quick prayer to God for letting her live a little longer. Then she showered, dressed, and drove to work because she had nothing better to do.
Walt had left a man watching Jeannette’s house. The next morning, after Jeannette had driven to work, he called the man off and sent him out to check motels. No credit card records in either Eden’s or Deakin’s names had surfaced so they must be paying cash. Walt had the security patrol cars flashing the pictures of the two teenagers at every motel clerk possible and looking for Eden’s car in the parking lots. So far they’d come up with nothing.
Late the next afternoon a security guard entered the office of a small motel. He waited his turn and then spread out the pictures of Eden and Deakin on the counter. The desk clerk glanced at the pictures and turned away to answer a ringing phone. When he turned back again,
he narrowed his eyes and picked up the picture of the girl. The guard held up the picture of Deakin but the clerk waved it away.
“I never saw him but I think I talked to her. She came to the desk the other day and wanted to rent a printer. She wound up renting our computer back there. It’s $12 an hour. She walked out a few minutes later with several printed pages and thanked me. I didn’t see her again. Let me see if she’s still here.”
The clerk scrolled down the screen of his computer and then said, “She’s not still listed. I’m not sure about her name but all these other people just checked in this afternoon. She was here for a couple of days. She must have left this morning before I came on duty.”
The guard thanked the man and called in when he returned to his car. Then he drove around the parking lot but Eden’s car was no longer there. He waited near the front entrance until Walt showed up and followed Walt into the motel office. Before long, Walt stood in the doorway of the room Eden and Deakin had stayed in. The maid had already paid her daily visit but Walt was sure she hadn’t cleaned off all their fingerprints. He pulled his cell phone out and called Tom Adams. He left the security guard standing in front of the door with instructions to wait for the fingerprint and lab technicians to show up.
Walt sent his agents to the airport to flash the pictures around. They came up with nothing. He also sent cars out the major highways out of Dallas, specifically along the interstate highways. Cars radiated out of the Dallas/Fort Worth area on I35 North and South, on I45 South, and on I20 East and West. Walt waited in Dallas until the techs had gone through the motel room and come up with two sets of probable fingerprints. One set matched the prints on file for Deakin and he assumed the other set would match the dainty fingertips of Deakin’s girlfriend. They’d bagged up everything they’d found and taken it away for examination in the lab. Walt sat in his car and flipped through the information Clark had given him. On the last page, he read the list of the scientists who’d worked with the Kimbroughs. Several of them still lived and worked in California so Walt made a leap of faith and decided to fly to Los Angeles to pay a visit to Dr. Evan Phillips. Maybe Deakin would try to contact him.