otel," Boyd said grandly.

The driver swung around to stare at them, blinked, and finally said:
"O.K., Mac. You said it." He started with a terrific grinding of gears,
drove out of the Penn Station arch and went two blocks.

"Here you are, Mac," he said, stopping the cab.

Malone stared at Boyd with a reproachful expression.

"So how was I to know?" Boyd said. "I didn't know. If I'd known it was
so close, we could've walked."

"And saved half a buck," Malone said. "But don't let it bother you--this
is expense account money."

"That's right," Boyd said. He beamed and tipped the driver heavily. The
cab drove off and Malone hailed the doorman, who equipped them with a
robot bellhop and sent them upstairs to their rooms.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Boyd and Malone were in the offices of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on East Sixty-ninth Street. There,
they picked up a lot of nice, new, shiny facts. It was unfortunate, if
not particularly surprising, that the facts did not seem to make any
sense.

In the first place, only red 1972 Cadillacs seemed to be involved.
Anybody who owned such a car was likely to find it missing at any time;
there had been a lot of thefts reported, including some that hadn't had
time to get into Burris' reports. New Jersey now claimed two victims,
and New York had three of its own.

And all the cars weren't turning up in New York, by any means. Some of
the New York cars had turned up in New Jersey. Some had turned up in
Connecticut--including one of the New Jersey cars. So far, there had
been neither thefts nor discoveries from Pennsylvania, but Malone
couldn't see why.

There was absolutely no pattern that he, Boyd, or anyone else could
find. The list of thefts and recoveries had been fed into an electronic
calculator, which had neatly regurgitated them without being in the
least helpful. It had remarked that the square of seven was forty-nine,
but this was traced to a defect in the mechanism.

Whoever was borrowing the red Caddies exhibited a peculiar combination
of burglarious genius and what looked to Malone like outright idiocy.
This was plainly impossible.

Unfortunately, it had happened.

Locking the car doors didn't do a bit of good. The thief or thieves got
in without so much as scratching the lock. This, obviously, proved that
the criminal was either an extremely good lock-pick or knew where to get
duplicate keys.

However, the ignition was invariably shorted