We Know

"Well, Charlie pulled a damn good disappearing act. He took early retirement a week after your stepfather was killed. Then he pretty much vanished. No tax returns, no mortgages, no phone numbers. And I know where to look." Turning back to the screen, she slid a finger across the touchpad, tapped with her thumb. "Charlie had one son. Mack. Thirty-eight."

"Mack Jackman?"

"I went to elementary school with Ronnie Ronald. 'Mack Jackman' is rock-star cool by comparison."

The screen loaded. A home page. Mack Jackman Commercial Photography. It featured numerous catalog pictures of furniture. A beechwood leather couch. A pale sea green faux-suede chaise. A dining-room table, espresso stain and frosted glass.

Induma said, "The film used to take your picture outside Charlie's? Kodak Ektachrome 100. What'd the guy at the photo place tell you? 'Fine grain, high sharpness, makes your colors pop.'"

"If you're shooting something where you need really accurate color," I said. "Clothes or curtains."

"Or furniture," Induma said.

I clicked the "Art Shots" button on the Web site, and a few black-and-white cityscapes appeared that I recognized from the hall outside Opaque. The Voice in the Dark, tight with restaurant management as I'd thought; the smug Swiss host had made clear his unwillingness to give up anything, and the waitstaff could hardly play eyewitness. I wondered if there was some connection between Charlie and Kim Kendall, the other art photographer in the mix.

"I checked the Web page's source," Induma was saying. "The page elements are stored in date-sorted directories. He used to add docs from the server every few days, but he hasn't added a new one since June."

"Which in English means…?"

"This site hasn't been updated in three months. Not much of a way to run a business. He went off the grid. No new leases, no new jobs, no forwarding information."

"Money trouble," I said. "Hiding from whoever he owed. Then his dad swooped in to save the day."

Induma tapped the laptop with a thumb. "I couldn't source that pager number you got off that girl. I obviously don't have clearances for all the law-enforcement databases, but still. Whoever set up that pager knows what he's doing. How to not be seen, not leave trails." She folded her laptop and stood. "When's Mack contacting you? To give you the other key?"

"I don't know. But not soon enough." I jotted my cell-phone number on a piece of paper, and she tucked it into a pocket. I took her arm. "Thank you." The cashmere was soft against my fingers. I rolled my thumb across the fabric. "You were wearing this when I met you."

"You remember?"

"With dark blue jeans and open-toed sandals. Your toenails were painted a deeper shade of orange, and your hair was pulled back in a tortoise-shell clasp."

She stopped, laptop against her thigh. I watched her chest swell and settle beneath the sweater.

I said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything then."

Behind her, around us, people jostled and scraped by and sipped on the go. Her lips twitched-a bittersweet smile-and then she turned and disappeared through the door.

Chapter 29

Dripping with sweat, I sat on the bench before my locker. I'd hit the weights, jumped rope for twenty minutes, then run myself to exhaustion on the treadmill. The workout should've cleared my head, but instead I felt jumpy, antsy to get home to see if DHL had dropped off a transparent cell phone at my government-issued front door.

I tugged open the locker. Through the curtains of my hanging clothes, my money clip sat on the thin metal shelf. Still fat with cash-I'd stopped at an ATM-but something was different. A piece of paper was tucked beneath the clip, parallel with the top bill. I withdrew the fold of cash, pulled the silver clip free, and stared down at a familiar film-processing slip.

One roll, ready for pickup.

The photograph looked like shit, but it did its job. Pronounced against a blur of yellow stucco were five large painted numbers. The picture had been taken at a slant, encompassing the corner street sign. All the info, in one neat little snapshot.

I lowered the photograph and stared at the real thing. Precise angle, precise distance. I was standing where the photographer had been when he'd snapped the shot-across the street on an apartment-complex driveway leading sharply down into an underground garage. As I leaned against the retaining wall, my head was just above street level. An inconspicuous spot. Which was good, given the dark sedan pulled to the curb in front of the neighboring building.

The picture was one of only two that were exposed in the roll, waiting for me at the photomat I'd visited last time. Logic dictated that Mack was the guy who'd taken them. After all, he'd left me the first film-processing slip. But two things bothered me: The quality of the picture was poor by the standards of a professional photographer. And the film was a standard 35mm, not the high-end Ektachrome he'd used before.