Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
The man in the gangster suit scratched his chin, as he watched the CCTV camera footage from the Transit Center bus station in Franklin, Tennessee. He’d been doing so for less than five minutes when he finally spotted her, boarding an early bus to Birmingham, Alabama.
‘And there you are,’ he whispered to himself, freezing the image on the screen, with the touch of a button. ‘You really are a clever one, aren’t you, Miss Mary Smith? I have to give you that. And very well prepared too.’
In the footage, Mary looked a little different than she had the night before, at The Whiskey Bent Saloon – certainly a lot less glamorous.
Her hair was tucked under a baseball cap that she had clearly purchased from the hotel in which she had spent the night.
Her jacket was zipped up to her neck, and she kept her hands firmly tucked into its pockets.
She had no carry-on luggage with her, except for her handbag, which was slung over her shoulder.
As she boarded the bus, Mary had kept her head low – eyes on the ground – so that the CCTV camera wouldn’t capture her face, but the man had no doubt that it was her – she was wearing the exact same outfit as last night – which wasn’t exactly surprising, given that she’d never gone back to her apartment in Nashville to pack a bag.
The man in the gangster suit knew that because he had waited for her there the entire night.
After he had placed the call to his employer to inform him that he had lost Mary, he tried to anticipate what her next move would be, and the most obvious one would be for her to return to her flat to at least pack a bag before hitting the road again, but that was not what she did.
The man had been given a lot of information on Mary, including that she was a very smart woman, but what he was never told was that she either had some kind of photographic memory, or an incredible talent when it came to remembering faces.
At Nelson Stewart’s trial, just over seven months ago, gangster-suit man had sat as far back as he possibly could – last row – last seat on the far left.
During Samantha Stewart’s testimony, her eyes had circled the courtroom, like a teacher’s during a lecture, trying to make sure that every student’s attention was on her, but it was a large courtroom, with one hundred and twenty-five seats, and most of them were taken.
There was no way that six months later she could still remember every face in that room, unless she had an eidetic memory or a gift when it came to remembering faces.
But last night, outside The Whiskey, Mary Smith had done just that – recognized him – even though their eyes had met for just a fraction of a second.
Why else would she have fled the way she did?
This morning, as the sun cracked through the horizon line, the man, who had been sitting in his car all night, hidden away, but with a clear view to the entrance door to Mary’s apartment building, knew that he’d anticipated the wrong move from her.
Mary wasn’t coming back to her flat to pack a bag, grab some money, or anything else.
She was already gone, but the worst of it was that now, she also had at least a five-hour head start on him.
‘She jumped into a cab last night,’ the man had finally concluded, angry with himself for not thinking of that earlier.
Every other possibility would’ve been too risky for anybody who knew that they had just been tracked down.
Survival instinct would tell anyone in that situation to get away…
fast… not wait for a bus, order an Uber, or try to get away on foot – but if Mary didn’t go back to her flat, then where did she go at that time of night with nothing but her handbag? A hotel? A friend’s house? Where?
He knew that right then, only two people would have the answer to that question – Mary herself and the cab driver who had picked her up.
Now the race was on to find the cab driver, which despite having a precise five to ten minute window – from the time that Mary had spotted him across the road, until the time that guitar man had come out again looking for her – it still took gangster-suit man almost two and a half hours to find out which cab companies had picked up a single female passenger around The Whiskey Bent Saloon area at that exact time last night.
Four different drivers made the list, but only one had had a female passenger who matched Mary’s description.
The driver had dropped her off at The Comfort Inn Hotel, in Franklin – just off the I-65.
At the hotel, all that gangster-suit man had to do was flash his fake FBI ID to find out that they had only one guest who had checked in late last night – Vicky Anderson.
She had also checked out first thing this morning – before 6:00 a.m. And that was how he came to be sitting inside the control room at the Transit Center bus station in Franklin, going over all the CCTV camera footage from every bus leaving the station early that morning.
Mary had jumped onto a Greyhound bus that had left at 6:25 a.m., heading towards the city of Birmingham, in Alabama.
The man checked his watch – 10:55 a.m. Mary would’ve already arrived, as the trip from Franklin to Birmingham took around three hours. He could make it in just under two-and-a-half, depending on traffic, but he had to leave pronto.
The man reached for his car keys and rushed out of the control room.
This cat and mouse game was turning out to be a lot harder that he had anticipated.