Wednesday morning, February 18th
I put Boo in her kennel and headed out the door shortly after the sun finally showed up outside. Mel and the FBI were on the case to find Jef. There was nothing I could do there but I had finally realized I’d done next to nothing on the assignment Russ had given me on Monday. I knew I needed to go to Columbus, track Roman Bakula down and watch him for a while.
The stuff Rosita sent me showed a home address in Whitehall so I tried it first. It turned out to be a townhouse in the middle of a grouping of three set in about the center of a large complex of apartments and townhomes. Bakula had a one car garage included with his unit and a small driveway fronting that. There was no car in the driveway.
I put on a hard hat I’d kept from my old Customs gear, grabbed a clipboard with some official looking nonsense forms on it and I went to each of the three doors in succession. No one answered at his townhouse as I suspected might be the case or at either one of his neighbors’ homes. I couldn’t see into his garage but I didn’t need to. It was obvious he was gone, probably to work for the day.
Going around to the back of the grouping, I was surprised to find small, fenced in yards behind them. I hadn’t expected that with townhomes. Instead, I figured there would be more units or just a roadway between units like back in Chicago where I’d spent much of the past several years.
While I was contemplating just letting myself in through Bakula’s little chain link gate and seeing what I could see through his lower story windows, a maintenance worker slowed as he drove by in a dump truck and sketched a wave at me.
I waved back and feigned intense interest in my fake paperwork until he was out of sight and then I returned to my car parked a couple of rows away. I took off the hard hat and stowed it in the trunk and put on a toboggan instead.
After taking up the clipboard again, I walked back to Bakula’s row and started knocking on the front doors of the group of four units across the street from his.
Only one door was answered. A young LPN working with a much older lady let me in to talk to her patient. I pretended I was a government worker doing a census canvass before the official surveys went out. I asked a few basic questions about her and scribbled her answers on my clipboard. After that, I mentioned that I had the information I needed from most of her neighbors but I wondered if she knew anything about the man across the way. All she could tell me was that she saw him out and about from time to time when the weather was nicer. She said he was very polite but, other than that, she really didn’t know anything about him.
So far, Roman Bakula was living up to his clean-cut billing.
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