Джордж Пелеканос: The Double

“You don’t think the two events are connected?”

“I don’t know. It’s a stretch. But I’ll look into it. That is, if you decide to hire me.”

“Amanda said you get forty percent.”

“I take it in cash. In this case, that equals eighty thousand dollars, based on the assessed value of the painting. It’s a lot of money, Grace.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Frankly, I find it odd that you would spend eighty grand getting back a painting that you got for free.”

“Actually, I don’t have the eighty yet. But I do have a buyer for the painting. Assuming you retrieve it for me.”

“A buyer,” said Lucas, trying to keep the skepticism from his voice.

“A serious collector has given me a pledge, in writing, that he’ll purchase it for two hundred thousand dollars. When I sell The Double, I’ll cut your eighty thousand out of the payment.”

“This is real?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But you could take that money and buy a fleet of Minis, brand new and loaded, and pay retail this time.”

“It’s got nothing to do with money,” said Grace. “I want to see that painting on my wall again, if only for a little while. In a way, he raped me, and he won. I need to take something back from him. When the painting is hanging on my wall, I can get started with my life again.”

Lucas wasn’t so sure. Grace Kinkaid’s washed-out eyes, her pencil-thin arms, her increasingly slurred speech all told him she had a long way to go before she’d ever be right. “You want me to provide some references?”

“Not necessary. Amanda says you’re competent and straight.”

“So I’m hired?”

“Yes.”

He touched his finger to the file. “Can I have this?”

“It’s for you,” said Grace, and she looked him over. “I hope you’re as advertised. Billy’s all kinds of twisted.”

“Thanks for the work, and your confidence.” Lucas picked up the file and stood. “I’ll be in touch.”

The following morning, Lucas worked at home. On his laptop, he typed in the names William Hunter and Bill Hunter and searched for them via his premium People Finder program. He came up with several hits in the District/Montgomery County, PG County, Maryland/Northern Virginia area, which folks now called the DMV. He recorded the most recent addresses of all the listings and, where available, the phone numbers, and made some calls.

Lucas reached a couple of men, discounted them due to age and their responses, and made a note to follow up on those William Hunters he couldn’t reach. But he was not encouraged or particularly hopeful. Billy Hunter was most likely a fake name the predator had created. It had come to Lucas at the tail end of the previous night, when he had returned from Grace Kinkaid’s apartment, smoked some herb, and sat thinking, expansively, in his living room chair.

Billy Hunter = Pussy Hunter.

A sociopath would create a name like that deliberately, and laugh about it.

Lucas opened the file Grace Kinkaid had given him. He looked at the e-mail from Grant Summers regarding the sale of the Mini Cooper S. Lucas figured that Summers’s e-mail address, ending with @msn.com, had been set up as a throwaway, as scammers tended to use companies like MSN, Yahoo! and Hotmail, which required no verification for the setup. Without a subpoena, which he had no chance of obtaining, tracing the address back to a specific computer or person would be impossible.

Lucas Googled and Bing-searched the address, and came up with nothing. He took the next step: e-mail tracking. Using three of his investigative database searches, IRBsearch, LexisNexis/Accurint, and Tracers, he attempted to identify the owner of the Grant Summers e-mail address. Again, nothing.

He was pretty sure the message had been sent from an Internet café in Paris, London, or Amsterdam, but for shits and grins Lucas highlighted the Grant Summers e-mail address and clicked on Options. A dialogue box opened, and at the bottom of the box there appeared a section, displayed in very small letters, called Internet Headers. There he found a series of numbers: the originating IP address of the Grant Summers e-mail. Using Melissa Data, he was able to locate the city, state, country, and zip code of origin, as well as the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the e-mail’s origin. Looking at the information, he felt both high and caffeinated. He Google-Mapped the coordinates and came up with a row house on a local street. The location lookup was not an exact science, and there was a chance that this was not the house he was looking for, but it put him on a block, enough for a neighborhood canvass. Grant Summers, whoever he was, might well have been a foreigner, but he was operating his car scam out of D.C.

Lucas saved the data.

He did four sets of forty push-ups on rotating stands, and two hundred crunches, his prison workout and daily ritual. He took a shower, dressed in utilitarian clothing, and drove his Jeep over to Prince George’s County, where he had arranged an interview with the mother of Edwina Christian.

Lucas made a low hourly wage working for Tom Petersen, and he was looking at an eighty-thousand-dollar payoff on the Kinkaid job. A smart guy might have prioritized the work. But Lucas liked to honor his commitments, and he had promised Petersen he’d get him something useful before the trial. Also, he was curious.

Virginia Christian lived in a boxy brick apartment building in Hyattsville, off Ager Road, near the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River. Lucas sometimes passed through this area on his long bike rides out to Lake Artemesia, and while pedaling through the partially wooded area of the neighborhood he always took care. Gang signs were sometimes spray-painted on the paved trail, and often he came across groups of young and not-so-young men smoking weed and drinking beer in the middle of the day. It wasn’t the marijuana or the alcohol use that bothered him, as he partook himself. There had been several rapes and assaults on this stretch of the bike trail the past few years.

Virginia Christian let him in to her apartment, which smelled of nicotine and fried food, and led him to a breakfast table. She was in her midforties, heavily made-up, large of leg and back, large-featured, with treated, tinted hair worn in waves and touching her shoulders. Rolls of excess weight showed beneath the lower portion of her deep red blouse.

Over the phone, Lucas had simply identified himself as an investigator, as he always did, which implied authority without detail or explanation, and Virginia had immediately said, “For who?” Lucas gave up the fact that he was working for Tom Petersen, the attorney defending Calvin Bates, who was charged with her daughter’s murder. Surprisingly, she said he could come on over and talk. She had been a police officer at one time, she explained, and she understood the process, adding, “And the game.”

The stale smell of alcohol came off Virginia Christian as they talked across the table. It was early, and the scent could have been a remnant of the night before. If so, it had been a long night of drink.

“You mind?” said Virginia, pausing before lighting a Newport that she had extracted from a deck.

“Not at all.”

Lucas opened his notebook and uncapped a pen. Virginia used a blue butane lighter to put fire to her cigarette.

“So y’all trying to get Bates off?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m an investigator working for the defense. And I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“So am I.”

“I mean you no disrespect.”

“I was in law enforcement myself. You’re just doin your job.”

Lucas wondered if she had been good police, and where and why she had gone off the path. Petersen had mentioned something about a credit card scam. The indiscretion had gotten her booted off the Prince George’s County force, but she remained in the same line of work: Lucas had noticed a shirt with a security-company patch on a coat tree by the front door.