She didn't smile back, but she did send Detective Webster for fresh coffee for both of us. She also told him to make a fresh pot, before he poured our cups. I was liking Detective O'Brien more and more.
37
His name was Leopold Walther Heinrick. He was a German national. He was suspected of almost every large crime you could think of. And by large I mean not petty. He wasn't a purse-snatcher, or a con artist. He was suspected of working for terrorist groups worldwide, mostly those with a decided Aryan bias. It wasn't that he'd never taken money from people that weren't out to make the world safe for bigots, but he seemed to prefer to work with them. He'd been linked to espionage that specialized in helping paler people either stay in power or get power over people that were less pale.
The file contained a list of known associates, with pictures of some of them. A few of the pictures were the equivalent of mug shots, but most were grainy faxes of surveillance photos. Faces in profile, faces caught dashing to cars, into and out of buildings in distant countries. It was almost as if the men knew they were being photographed, or feared they would be. There were two faces that I kept coming back to-two men-one in profile wearing a hat, and the other a blur of face staring out at the camera.
O'Brien came over to stand beside me, looking down at the two pictures that I'd laid side by side on the edge of her desk. "Do you recognize them?"
"I'm not sure." I touched the edge of the pictures, as if that would make them more real, make them give up their secrets.
"You keep coming back to them," she said.
"I know, but it's not like I know them-know them. More like I've seen them somewhere. Somewhere recent. I can't place them, but I know I've seen them, or two people very similar." I peered down at the grainy images, gray and white and black, made up of little dots, as if the fax was a copy of a copy of a copy. Who knew where the original had come from?
O'Brien seemed to pick up what I was thinking, because she said, "You're working from faxes of bad surveillance photos. You'd be lucky to recognize your own mother in these."
I nodded, then picked up the one with the big dark-haired man in it. He was about to get into a car. There was a generic older building behind him, but I wasn't a student of architecture, it told me nothing. The man was looking down as if watching his step off a curb, so I didn't have a full front view even. "Maybe if I could see a front shot. Or did they send us all they had?"
"They sent me all they had, or that's what they said." The look on her face said she wasn't sure she believed that, but she had to act as if she did. "They're pretty worried that more of Heinrick's friends might be in the states. We're going to be giving a stack of these photos to the patrol cops, with orders to follow and report, but not to apprehend."
"You think they're that dangerous?" I asked.
She gave me a look. "You've read Heinrick's résumé, what do you think?"
I shrugged. "Yeah, he sounds dangerous." I went over the list of known associates again. "None of these rings a bell." I closed the folder and laid it behind the two pictures. I picked up the second photo this time, the one of the pale-haired man. His hair looked white in the photo. White or a very, very pale blond. There wasn't much background to help me judge his size. It was a full-face shot, up close, only his upper body showing. He was leaning over a table, talking. This was a better photo, more detailed, but I still couldn't place him.
"Was this taken with one of those concealed spy cameras?"
"Why do you ask?"
I moved the photo so she could look straight down on it. "It's an odd angle for one thing, up, like the camera is low, about hip level. You don't usually take photos from the hip. Second, he's talking but not looking at the camera, and it's too natural. I'd bet good money he doesn't know he's being photographed."
"You could be right." She took the photo from me and looked at it, turning it a little to get a better angle on it. "Why does it matter how the photo was taken?" Her eyes had gone nice and cold, good cop eyes, suspicious, wanting to know what I knew.
"Look, I've watched you guys try to question Heinrick and his friend. They sound like a fucking broken record. You can hold them for seventy-two hours, but they can spend every hour of that time saying nothing."
"Yeah," she said.
"We could go fishing. Tell Heinrick that his friends really need to watch themselves better. You can't tell where these photos were taken. The blond is just in a room."
O'Brien shook her head. "No, we don't know enough to go fishing, not yet."
"If I remember where I've seen these guys, we might," I said.