The Third Twin - Ken Follett [160]
Lisa had been listening. “You found him?”
“Yes, he was born in Fort Devens and he’s twenty-two today. He’s the Henry King we’re looking for, sure enough.”
“Good work!”
“But he seems to have an alibi. He says he was working at a bar in Cambridge.” She looked at her scratch pad. “The Blue Note.”
“Shall we check it out?” Lisa’s hunting instinct had been aroused and she was keen.
Jeannie nodded. “It’s late, but I guess a bar should still be open, especially on a Saturday night. Can you get the number from your CD-ROM?”
“We only have residential numbers. Business listings are another set of disks.”
Jeannie called information, got the number, and dialed it. The phone was answered right away.
“This is Detective Susan Farber of the Boston police. Let me speak to the manager, please.”
“This is the manager, what’s wrong?” The man had a Hispanic accent and he sounded worried.
“Do you have an employee named Henry King?”
“Hank, yeah, what he do now?”
It sounded as if Henry King had been in trouble with the law before. “Maybe nothing. When did you last see him?’
“Today, I mean yesterday, Saturday, he was working the day shift.”
“And before that?”
“Lemme see, last Sunday, he worked the four-to-midnight.”
“Would you swear to that if necessary, sir?”
“Sure, why not? Whoever got killed, Hank didn’t do it.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”
“Hey, no problem.” The manager seemed relieved that was all she wanted. If I were a real cop, Jeannie thought, I’d guess he had a guilty conscience. “Call me any time.” He hung up.
Jeannie said disappointedly: “Alibi stands up.”
“Don’t be downhearted,” Lisa said. “We’ve done very well to eliminate him so quickly—especially as it’s such a common name. Let’s try Per Ericson. There won’t be so many of them.”
The Pentagon list said Per Ericson had been born in Fort Rucker, but twenty-two years later there were no Per Ericsons in Alabama. Lisa tried
P * Erics?on
in case it should be spelled with a double s, then she tried
P*Erics$n
to include the spellings “Ericsen” and “Ericsan,” but the computer found nothing.
“Try Philadelphia,” Jeannie suggested. “That’s where he attacked me.”
There were three in Philadelphia. The first turned out to be a Peder, the second was a frail elderly voice on an answering machine, and the third was a woman, Petra. Jeannie and Lisa began to work their way through all the P. Ericsons in the United States, thirty-three listings.
Lisa’s second P. Ericson was bad tempered and abusive, and she was white-faced as she hung up the phone, but she drank a cup of coffee then carried on determinedly.
Each call was a small drama. Jeannie had to summon up the nerve to pretend to be a cop. It was agony wondering if the voice answering the phone would be the man who had said, “Now give me a hand job, otherwise I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Then there was the strain of maintaining her impersonation of a police detective against the skepticism or rudeness of the people who answered the phone. And most calls ended in disappointment.
As Jeannie was hanging up from her sixth fruitless call, she heard Lisa say: “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Our information must be out-of-date. Please forgive this intrusion, Mrs. Ericson. Good-bye.” She hung up, looking crushed. “He’s the one all right,” she said solemnly. “But he died last winter. That was his mother. She burst into tears when I asked for him.”
She wondered momentarily what Per Ericson had been like. Was he a psychopath, like Dennis, or was he like Steve? “How did he die?”
“He was a ski champion, apparently, and he broke his neck trying something risky.”
A daredevil, without fear. “That sounds like our man.”
It had not occurred to Jeannie that not all eight might be alive. Now she realized that there must have been more than eight implants. Even nowadays, when the technique was well established, many implants failed to “take.” And it was also likely that some of the mothers had miscarried. Genetico might have experimented on fifteen or twenty women,