are.”
“Well, you can’t just walk out the door,” Jenny pointed at Sam. “Every officer knows what you look like. Come into my studio. I have an idea.”
Sam and Molly followed dutifully to Jenny’s studio. She got out her paints and got busy on Sam’s face. She momentarily vanished into her bedroom, then reappeared with a wig of long platinum blonde hair. She cropped it short, adjusted the wig on Sam’s head, and continued to shape it into a haircut suitable for a preppy college-age kid.
“I wore this one on Halloween and didn’t have the heart to throw it away,” she said as she worked.
Afraid to look in the mirror, Sam patiently sat through Molly’s smirks and Jenny’s giggles. “Glad I can be so amusing to you two.”
“You just look…” Molly started.
“Handsome,” Jenny interjected. “Ruggedly handsome was what I was going for. Take a look for yourself.” She ushered Sam to the bathroom mirror. “Your whiskers are good, but this will hide you better if someone sees you from a distance.”
Sam couldn’t believe the transformation. Though he’d always looked youthful, Jenny’s artful hands made the illusion more real. He looked like a frat boy!
Jenny pulled out a hardware-store For Sale sign from the closet and handed it to Sam. “Now, put this sign in the Mustang’s window,” Jenny said, smiling as she gave the sign to Sam. “It’ll look like you’re just a kid taking a cool car out for a test drive. Where are you going first?” She dug through a few keys in the clamshell on her dresser.
“A pay phone. It’s a long shot, but I want to call a buddy at the fire station.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Molly was skeptical.
“I have to trust someone, Mol,” said Sam, shrugging. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow morning, you and Jenny get out of town as quickly as you can, okay?”
“We will,” Jenny piped up. “We’ll head to my sister’s place in Raleigh and expect you to meet us there. She lives at the bottom of Byrd Street off of Glenwood Avenue. Do you know where that is?”
“Vaguely,” Sam said, “but I will find you when I can. Take care.” He thought about hugging them, but he opted to wave instead as he headed toward the garage where the Mustang waited.
Chapter twenty-seven
Sam backed Lee’s Mustang out of the short driveway and headed to Kure Beach in search of a phone. He parked near congested bungalows a few blocks inland of the beach, and he walked the remaining distance in as slouchy a stroll as he could manage to disguise his height. The late afternoon sun cast his shadow long on the pavement before him, and he slouched further until his back ached. As casually as he could, Sam stood in line for his turn at a phone booth. When the kid wearing baggy shorts in front of him finished his call, Sam took his place at the exposed booth, dialed Eddie Sherman’s number, and held his breath.
“Sherman here.”
“Eddie, this is Sam. Did you find anything in the computer from the hotel file?”
“Where have you been? I heard you were suspended! I’ve been looking for you for two days now.”
“I really can’t go into it right now, Eddie, but if you have something on this, I could use your help.”
“Well, yeah. I guess you could. I did find out something that seemed out of sync. There were calls from one particular hotel room to two local numbers that turned up repeatedly on the hotel’s automated operator system exactly two months apart. Same room, same numbers. See, all the numbers are stored on the computer’s hard drive for billing purposes, and they are kept on file on the server for a period of two months after guests leave in case someone tries to skip out of the hotel without paying. Then collection agencies are enlisted and they challenge the people on the receiving end of calls made to try to find the whereabouts of the person who skipped.”
“A tracing mechanism?”
“That’s right. It’s something a lot of hotels still use, though most won’t accept calls this way. They want guests to pay on their own dime, their own calling card.”
Sam was puzzled. “So someone has a favorite pizza joint and wanted it delivered when here on business. Or a girlfriend. What’s so unusual about that?”
“Well, they weren’t calls to a pizza joint. And it wasn’t just one call to order a