Guardian of Lies (12 page)

“No. She has a cellular, but she turns it off when she goes to Colombia.”

I give her a slip of paper and a pen and Katia writes the address of her mother’s house on it. In fact, it is a description of how to get there.

“Is there anyone in Costa Rica who could retrieve the camera for us, a friend or relative who could get it from the house and ship it to us?”

She thinks for a moment and shakes her head. “Lorenzo, perhaps.”

“Who is Lorenzo?”

“Lorenzo Goudaz. He is a friend of my family, but he has no key to my mother’s house. Besides, he will be angry when he finds out what has happened to me. I introduced him to Emerson in San José but Lorenzo didn’t like him. He told me not to trust him.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said Emerson was too nosy, asking too many questions. He told me to be careful. I should have listened to him.”

I take his name and telephone number to put on Harry’s short list of contacts in Costa Rica in hopes that perhaps this Lorenzo can contact Katia’s mother.

“You say Pike had a computer with him in Costa Rica and he used it to copy the pictures.”

“Yes, a laptop.”

“I assume he brought it back to the States with him when he came home?”

“Of course. That’s how he printed the pictures in his study. The ones the police took from my bag.”

A cop’s best friend, your own computer, the first thing they seize at any crime scene. Only in this case, it’s gone.

“Do you know what happened to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pike’s computer is missing. The police didn’t find it at his house.”

“It was on the desk in the study. It’s where he kept it. It was there when I left that night.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I saw it when I put the note on the desk.”

According to one of the homicide investigative reports, Pike had a website for his business. A wireless antenna for the Internet and a printer, all in the study. But there was no computer.

Ordinarily this would be a problem for them, limiting leads. More often than not, the answer to what happened is in the computer, e-mails and the things people research on the Internet, all of which leave tracks. But the police don’t seem to be concerned at all in this case, probably because they have Katia and a seeming mountain of evidence against her. But like the missing cache of coins, they didn’t find Pike’s computer on Katia when they arrested her, and they can’t explain why. All the little unanswered questions.

According to Katia, it all comes back to the pictures.

I ask her about her mother and whether she has ever had any problems with the law.

“I know what you are thinking,” says Katia. “My mother goes to Colombia, so she must be involved in drugs.”

It’s obvious from the way she gripped this that the same thought has crossed Katia’s mind. “No. It’s not true. She has never had any problems of that kind, and she would never do that. I would know. None of my family has ever had anything to do with drugs. You can check, but you will find nothing. Besides, I don’t think Emerson was looking for drugs. It was something else.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. It’s just a feeling. But I don’t think so. He was looking for someone or something in those pictures. You should talk to my mother,” she says. “Maybe she knows something.”

“How do I get in touch with her? Do you have a phone number in Colombia?”

Katia shakes her head. “She has no cell phone with her. I don’t even know where she stays. Usually she calls home every week or so from a phone in the city.”

“Where does she call from?”

“Medellín.”

For three days after finding the binder and identifying the insignia, Orville Honeycutt nibbled at the edges of the Pike photo assignment. He burned a day of sick leave playing hooky. He had more than a month of leave, and what he didn’t use he would lose when he retired.

To see what was in Pike’s photos he needed to get at the lab in the basement when no one was there. The opportunity would come tonight. The painter was working downstairs. Nobody was going to stick around with the fumes trapped down below.

It was late afternoon, four thirty. He went online one more time, checking to see if Pike had responded to his e-mail to provide a method of payment. There was no reply. Honeycutt could send him one more notice and if he didn’t hear back simply close the file, but he didn’t want to.

He thought for a moment and then picked up the phone. He called a cell number across the river in the District of Columbia.

Freddy Younger answered.

“You got a minute?” said Orville.

Younger recognized the voice immediately. Freddy and Orville had worked together in army intelligence decades earlier when they were both young and stupid. They used to carouse at night before Freddy got married and had kids and Orville got old. They did the same type of work and it kept them in touch over the years, only Freddy’s pension was much better than Orville’s. He worked doing photo forensics at the FBI’s crime lab.

“What’s up?” said Freddy.

“Something I want to run past you.”

“Shoot.” Freddy listened but sounded distracted.

Orville told him about Emerson Pike and his pictures, about the old man in the military fatigue jacket, and about the insignia on the shoulder patch, the Seventy-ninth Regiment, what Orville had discovered about its history. It wasn’t much, just a few lines on a page in the old denim binder. This was filled with loose-leaf pages, periodically updated by U.S. intelligence agencies and given to their private contractors doing photo work. This was before computers and the digital age. The updates would come periodically by regular mail.

Intelligence, and particularly the military, always wanted to keep tabs on foreign troops around the world, their numbers and where they were deployed. The material in the binder was decades out of date. This may have been the only reason he found what he was looking for. Inside was a page with a picture of a shoulder patch identical to the one Honeycutt had found on the fatigue jacket.

“Are you near your computer?” asked Orville.

“Yeah.”

“I’m shooting you an e-mail. It’s blank, but check out the two attachments.”

Honeycutt sent him a copy of the enlarged shoulder patch and a second image showing part of the name over the breast pocket on the old fatigue jacket with the Cyrillic letters, only the first two of which were decipherable,
H
.

“It just went out. You should have it in a minute.” Orville had Googled the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and knew that the first two letters on the name patch translated to
N I
in English.

“Why so important?” said Freddy.

Orville explained that, according to the information in the binder, the Russians had reorganized all of their rocket brigades in the early 1960s. At that time the Seventy-ninth had only been up and running for a few years. It ceased to exist shortly after the reorganization, sometime between ’63 and ’64.

“So, somebody’s got an old Russian army jacket,” said Freddy.

Freddy sounded indifferent until Orville told him about the unit’s last overseas assignment. Then there was a long silence.

“How old did you say these pictures were?” asked Freddy.

“I didn’t,” said Orville, “but the same thought crossed my mind. That maybe somebody scanned some old photos into a computer. No, the files are too small and they aren’t TIFFs.” He was talking about Tagged Image File Format, the usual form of a digital image generated by a scanner. “They were all taken four months ago, on the same date,” said Honeycutt. “The man who sent them to me sent the original digital data files, complete, and they don’t lie.”

“What did you say this guy’s name was?”

“Emerson Pike.” Honeycutt took a deep breath and edged toward what he really wanted. “Can you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Write down the name Emerson Pike.”

“Pike, I assume, is spelled just like it sounds?”

“Correct. Obviously, I don’t have his date of birth or a social security number. I’m guessing he’s probably up in years based on the information in his e-mail and the way it was written. He lives in California, according to the electronic signature on his e-mail, a city called Del Mar. With the address and name, I’m sure you can find driver’s license records that’ll give you his date of birth. With that you could run a background check on him for me.”

“What?”

Orville was over the line and he knew it. Doing an unauthorized background check using Justice Department databases could land Freddy in big trouble. It could cut off his pension before he even got it.

“If you can’t do it, just say no.”

“No,” said Freddy.

“Listen, just do me this one favor. Just think about it before you say no.”

“I already said no, and I did think about it. If I got caught nosing around FBI background records, driver’s license data, and did an unauthorized disclosure, you know what would happen?”

“Don’t get caught,” said Orville.

“They’d fire my ass, then they’d arrest me, and I’d spend the next year and a half trying to explain to a federal judge how I was just doing a little favor for a friend. No thanks. And you know you should be very careful even asking me to do that.”

“That’s why I’m talking to you on your cell phone,” said Orville.

“Tell me what you’re looking for. You think the man’s got a criminal history?”

“No. I think you’re going to find big blanks, long periods of time with no entries, and probably files you won’t be able to access.”

“You think he’s a spook.”

“Retired spook,” said Orville.

“Then the answer is hell no,” said Freddy.

“Listen. I can tell you there’s a good chance I’ll find more information in the images. I’m still working on them.”

“How did you get this stuff?”

“Over the transom,” said Orville. “He sent them by e-mail. I don’t know if he took the pictures or if somebody else did. But whatever I find I’ll share with you if you help me. It may be nothing, then again, your people may want to know.”

“And if it’s nothing and I do a background check on this guy and somebody finds out, then what? Even if it is something, how do I go to them and tell them how we got the information? NO!”

“Thanks,” said Orville.

“Anytime.”

“Listen, if you change your mind and find anything on this guy, give me a call and I’ll show you whatever I’ve got at this end.”

“Let’s get together for a drink sometime,” said Freddy.

“Sure thing. Just think about it,” said Orville. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“You’re crazy,” said Freddy. “Take care.”

Honeycutt heard the line go dead. He hung up the phone and checked his watch. Another few minutes and the lab staff downstairs would be gone for the day.

The smell of paint made it difficult to work. But it was the price that Honeycutt had to pay if he wanted to use the photo-editing lab after hours. The painter was still at it.

Tonight he was busy finishing some of the smaller offices and work areas in the basement. He had been at it since five, and if his schedule held he would knock off just before midnight to clean up and start again the following evening.

Now that Honeycutt was in the lab, he could see the images that Pike had sent him on the oversize high-definition screen, the figures enlarged to almost half their actual size.

In all, there were seven separate digital images, six original exposures that had been shot on the same date four months ago. The only exception was the attempted enlargement, the image that was so badly mangled by poor focus, resolution, and glare that it was worthless. From the digital data he couldn’t be certain when the enlargement was originally made, but it had last been opened and edited two days prior to Pike’s e-mail. That was probably when Pike realized it wasn’t going to get any better, gave up, and sent it in to be professionally processed.

Honeycutt knew from Pike’s e-mail that the attempted enlargement was something in the background of one of the other pictures. What he didn’t know was which one. Take his pick. There were six.

Pike probably assumed that the lab would work off his own failed enlargement, cleaning it up.

Honeycutt wanted to work from the original rather than Pike’s degraded copy so that he could use the lab’s software to render the enhancements and get the best image possible.

Worse, Pike’s enlargement failed to copy sufficient file data from the original shot so that the original could be easily identified.

To Honeycutt, Pike’s enlargement was nothing but a white fuzzy blur with a few dark lines on it. With nothing else to orient him, finding the original picture and then locating the tiny speck in the background that represented Pike’s target took the better part of an hour. It was like finding a single piece to a jigsaw puzzle in one of six different puzzle boxes.

He looked for color, the shade of white in the enlargement, and then tried to imagine how small it might be in the original digital frame.

There was a piece of white cloth on a flat boulder off to one side in one of the pictures. Not it.

One of the men was holding a sheet of paper. He appeared in four of the shots, holding the paper in a different position with differing shadows and shades of light in each one. Honeycutt was able to eliminate two of them just by looking, and then used the magnification of the software to eliminate the other two.

When he finally found what he was looking for, Honeycutt suddenly realized what was happening in the pictures, the arm gestures and all the frenetic movement. The item in question provided the missing context for the photographs because the old man kept pointing at it. Only the stop-action of the camera’s shutter kept his outstretched finger from getting there.

The men in the pictures weren’t just talking, they were arguing. If Honeycutt had to guess, what they were arguing about had to do with the square white speck in the distance, the one on the table behind them, near the house. It was this document that Pike was trying to read.