“Why so sober, Judy?”
“I was just speculating on those hi-jackers, Kathy,” Judy replied as they started across the dew-laden lawn. “I’m more than half convinced that we made a bad mistake last night.”
“You think we let Joe Pompilli get away?”
“We must have. Kathy, he and that other fellow we didn’t know, may have been killing time at the restaurant, waiting for that truckload of auto parts to go through town! Then, they merely followed, and picked the truck off at a convenient spot on the road.”
“That makes a nice sounding explanation,” Kathleen chuckled. “But there’s one bad flaw in your reasoning.”
“Two of ’em,” Judy admitted with a grin. “First, it doesn’t seem logical that Joe Pompilli would dare show up in this area when he must know that state highway patrolmen are on the alert.”
“He was badly hurt in that accident too,” Kathleen added.
“Maybe not as seriously as we thought. The other defect in my theory is that Lowell Diethelm positively identified him as a regular trucker on the road.”
“That’s the part one can’t get around,” Kathleen nodded soberly. “Either the patrolmen made a mistake in identifying an ordinary trucker as Joe Pompilli, or Lowell Diethelm has been misled.”
“In either case, I guess it’s too late for us to do anything about it now,” Judy admitted. “We had our chance, and we muffed it.”