Free The Vulture by Frederick Ramsay

something that everybody has missed so far. I don’t care how good the killer was, somebody saw something, heard something. There is evidence the FBI and the State Police have overlooked. You go find it.”
    â€œWe can look, sure. Why not Billy and Essie?”
    â€œIke said that if I were to include Billy in this conversation, no matter how much Billy promised not to, and to stop Essie from crying herself sick, he’d tell her.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œEssie, he said, hasn’t a disingenuous bone in her body. The minute she found out, she’d be grinning all over herself. If anyone is watching, he will guess why. Is Ike right?’
    â€œHe’s right. The trouble is, I need Billy on this. You think we have watchers?”
    â€œI don’t know, but when in doubt…Figure something out about Billy. Are the rest of you straight about keeping the fact that Ike is alive quiet for a while?”
    â€œRuth knows, right?”
    â€œShe does.”
    â€œOkay. How do we get in touch with you, Garland?”
    â€œSam will know how. Okay, we’re done here.”

Chapter Eleven
    Frank had his feet up on Ike’s desk and his chin on his chest. He’d been that way since he’d returned from his meeting. Billy asked him who he’d met and what had happened to Sam, but Frank had only mumbled something about new evidence and had stalked into the office. Billy followed him in and sat. Frank was his older brother and he could read his moods. Something important had happened in the last hour and Billy wanted to know what that was. He took a seat in the corner, fingered the brim of his Stetson, and waited.
    â€œIf you want to plant a bomb on a car, you have to have access to the car, right?” Frank said at last.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œDid you calculate the distance the car traveled before it blew and where it might have been if Ike had gone home instead of the other way?”
    â€œYeah, we did. It would have exploded on the Calland campus, blown out windows in several buildings, possibly one of the dormitories.”
    â€œOr the president’s house?”
    â€œOh, yeah. That too, I guess. Hey, you don’t think—?”
    â€œI don’t know what to think. Look, if we assume that having it go off on the campus or, more likely at the place where Ike lived, was a secondary objective, it means the bomb had to have been put in the car in the parking lot outside the restaurant. We have no evidence of that so it had to be someplace pretty close to it. The bomber could not have known where or how long Ike might drive in a given day, but he would figure that late at night, his next stop would be home. Sam looked at that surveillance tape a dozen times and if the device was placed on the car there, she would have spotted it. Whoever rigged it, couldn’t have known that Ike would make a stop on the way first, but it wouldn’t matter if home was the final destination. He had to rig it somewhere else, but not too far away.”
    â€œYeah, I never thought of that. Wait, there’s another thing. If you’re right, the bomb had to be linked to the odometer, not on a timer, otherwise it would have blown while he was meeting the NARC. That means it would have to be a pretty sophisticated device.”
    â€œSo, it had to be installed somewhere else. I’ll ask Sam to draw a circle with a twenty-mile radius with the restaurant at the center and then pull the surveillance tapes of every parking lot, gas station, and mall inside it.”
    â€œWe should ask Ruth if she knew where Ike went that night,” Billy said.
    â€œYeah, we should but I’m guessing she won’t know. Ike was careful about bringing work home, he said. “Ruth! Oh my God. Look, if that thing was set to go off at the university, it follows that whoever did this, wanted more than just Ike dead. He wanted to hurt Ruth as well, maybe even catch her in the