Deadly Pursuit by Michael Prescott Page A

his newspaper.
    Five minutes. Ten.
    Finally the door opened, and someone emerged. But it couldn’t be the same man. The outfit was different, the hair was different, the shopping bags were gone.
    No, it was him, all right. He’d undergone a complete transformation. Left without ordering any food, too. Very odd.
    When he told his wife about it, she made him watch the local news, waiting for an update on the day’s big story, the manhunt for Jack Dance. “Was that the man you saw?” she asked when Jack’s picture appeared on the screen.
    Hugh Markham said it was. Twenty minutes later, he was saying the same thing to a West Valley cop.
    Markham had a good memory for details. He ticked off the specifics of Jack’s new look: moussed hair, glasses, denim shirt, blue jeans, knapsack.
    A sketch artist altered the mug shot accordingly. Police circulated copies of it in the vicinity of the Burger King. A taxi driver stationed outside a hotel two blocks away recalled driving Jack to LAX. The American Airlines terminal.
    The ticket clerks had already gone home for the day. LAPD tracked them down and showed them the picture. One clerk remembered selling that man a one-way ticket to Miami.
    “Miami P.D. is still trying to find someone who might have observed him in the terminal,” Lovejoy said. “So far they’ve had no luck. Of course, it’s late there—three a.m.—and they can’t roust all the employees.”
    “If the flight attendant can’t make a definite ID, how do we know Jack was ever on the plane? He might have bought the ticket just to throw us off. He could still be in L.A.”
    Lovejoy nodded. “I raised that possibility with Drury, strictly on a conjectural basis.” Strictly to cover your rear, Moore corrected silently with a brief smile. “But it appears unlikely. If Jack were trying to divert us, he would most probably have charged the plane fare on one of his credit cards. That way we’d be certain to know about it.”
    “True.”
    “Anyway, Miami appears to be our best lead, and Drury wants us to follow up.”
    “Why can’t the Miami field office handle it?”
    “They will. But we’ll supervise.”
    “Drury say anything about the, uh, problems with the arrest?”
    “Oh, yes.” Lovejoy showed her a tight, nervous smile, and for the first time she realized how scared he was. “Yes, he said a great deal.”
    Moore looked away. She’d had no opportunity to consider any implications of the botched raid this morning other than Jack Dance’s continued elusiveness. Now she saw the matter from a different perspective: Peter Lovejoy’s career. He was the task force leader. He would take the heat for the screw-up that had allowed Jack to evade capture.
    Every facet of Lovejoy’s life, every detail of his daily routine, even his mannerisms and vocabulary, had been carefully selected to protect him from the ultimate catastrophe of a career meltdown. Tonight he was facing that nightmare—perhaps already had faced it, in his talk with the deputy director.
    She glanced at his face in profile, read no expression there. His hands gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual. That was all.
    He was taking it well. Better than she would have expected. She wondered if she had underestimated him. She hoped so.
    The whine of electric saws was the first thing she and Lovejoy heard as they emerged from the elevator on the penthouse floor of Jack’s high-rise. The search team, having finished with the Nissan and the CSGI office, had returned to the apartment, where they were methodically tearing apart walls. Complaints from the neighbors about the noise had been ignored.
    The wholesale dismantling of an apartment was perhaps outside the strict parameters of a legal search. But the task force was convinced that Dance had hidden the syringe somewhere. It had not turned up in any of the obvious places. And, after all, the suspect had already demonstrated a fondness for secret panels.
    Passing under the yellow