"Mrs. Glass just painted apartment C. Somebody rented it. Scratch any chance of fingerprints."
"Who ever Cleary is, by design or luck, he isn't making it easy for us," Dean said as he continued to search. "Kansas is the last place I'd have guessed."
"He didn't pedal a bicycle to Kansas either, Dorothy," Fred said, peering at the map.
"Here it is, Rollins." Dean pointed to a small dot midpoint on the page. "It's out in the middle of nowhere, just off the interstate. He's headed west."
"Get your AAA book," Fred said. "See if there's a motel or something."
"I doubt he's staying in Kansas. He's probably on the road- maybe going to California." He began perusing a fat envelope of Midwest travel information secured for his July Iowa bike tour. There were no motels listed in Rollins, Kansas. "Maybe he just mailed the key from there and stayed in a larger town nearby."
"Well, it's a start," Fred answered glumly.
Dean tried to remember his earlier phone conversation with Mrs. Glass. "When Cleary spoke to his landlady on Monday, the seventeenth, he told her he'd already mailed her the key."
Fred looked at the wall calendar. "He took his time getting to Kansas. Byrne disappeared on May fourth, almost two weeks earlier."
Dean tossed aside the map and papers and flopped down on the living room sofa, startling Mrs. Lincoln. "That's too much time in between."
"He was working on his new identity. Maybe waiting for papers to come."
Dean thought a moment. "If I skipped the way you're saying he did, I'd want to get as far away as soon as possible."
"Maybe," Fred said as he plunked down beside his stepson. "Let's run it from the beginning. You're Byrne and you've found the dough-more than you'll see in a lifetime. Untraceable. You make up your mind-to keep it and skip."
"Okay-I'm just speculating," Dean closed his eyes. "You need an identity-papers in your name-charge accounts, a bank where you can feed in a little money at a time, a driver's license, all that stuff."
"You can buy an identity." Fred dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand.
"Only in your mystery stories. An insurance clerk wouldn't know where to start. Byrne was a loner and super cautious. Besides, between the time he found the money and when he disappeared, he lived a regular life. According to his expense accounts, he only went to Scranton twice that we know of-both visits only a day or two. That doesn't give him much time to apply for false papers."
"That's why it took him two weeks to make it to Kansas," Fred answered. "His first step was renting an apartment and getting an address-a mail drop. Scranton. He establishes an identity-J. Cleary."