Tony reasoned he was already in trouble with Ray so he pressed ahead. “At the club?”
Tia laughed out loud. “At the club we weren’t exactly looking at their faces.” Hers was getting a shade of pink to it. “No. Not at the club. Look, I’m really not sure, but I might have seen this guy out there. Lose the beard. Spike the hair a little…give it a little style… I might have seen him.”
“The whole point of the photo line-up is to let the witness make the ID. You can’t lead them, Tony, no matter how much you want to.” Ray lit into him before the car was even started. “You can have the whole thing thrown out if you don’t do it by the numbers.”
“I didn’t…”
“You led the Bork woman. You suggested LA. That’s leading the witness. It’s a tainted identification. A sharp lawyer will chew your ass for that.”
Ray was angrier than Tony had seen him before. He guessed that Ray had learned this the hard way, that when he was green he’d lost a case because he screwed up an ID. He knew Ray was a perfectionist and that he wanted his evidence pure and unimpeachable, but Tony didn’t think he’d done everything wrong, not completely. He was also surprised he’d gotten a cuss word out of his partner. Well…ass anyway.
“Fine.” Tony had an idea. He was going to let Ray get it all out of his system before he told him what he had in mind.
“You always use a six-pack. Always! You can’t be planting faces in people’s heads.” Ray lectured, still angry.
“I said fine.”
“You get into court and the defense lawyers will pick and probe and slice away exactly how you do things and it can cost the DA a case.”
“I’ve been on the stand before, Ray. I know how it works.”
“Not from a lead detective’s point of view you don’t.”
“You’re right.” Tony was doing his best to let Ray get back to an even keel.
“So do it my way. Got it?” Ray started the car. He was coming down.
“Absolutely. No leading witnesses in a six-pack ID.”
“That’s right.”
Ray backed the car out of the drive and started making his way toward Edina and Erika Hilgendorf’s office, hoping to catch her in. They drove in silence.
While Ray concentrated on the traffic Tony worked on his idea, tried to come up with the best way to approach his cranky partner. “I don’t think we should front the Hilgendorf woman yet.” Good or bad, Tony decided to pitch his idea. Ray drove on in silence, glancing only once at Tony, and he wasn’t smiling. “I think we should go back to the lab.”
“Why?”
“Because Tia told us what Stuckey might have looked like last year. He had the LA thing going. No facial hair. Some spike to the hair. He doesn’t exactly look like that now. He just looks grungy.” Traffic was heavy and for once in his life Tony was thankful for it.
Ray had to keep his eyes and part of his mind on the road. “Okay, give me all of it.”
“I didn’t lead Tia Bork to Stuckey. I lead her to LA.” Tony waited for the explosion. He expected Ray to tell him in a loud voice that leading was leading and not to parse words. He cringed slightly, waiting for it.
“Go on.” Ray’s measured, even-toned response made him worry even more. Was the old guy setting him up for something, he wondered.
“Once she had the locale she picked the guy out, or almost did. I think we should get Kumpula or someone in the lab to Photoshop the guy. Clean up his facial hair. Give him a surfer doo.”
“And put him back in the six-pack like that?”
“Yeah. And mention LA right from the start.”
“I’m not so sure about doing that.”
Tony had him halfway there, he reckoned. “Why not? It’s where the ‘Go Girls’ and Stuckey intersect, other than he’s young Scott’s roommate.”
“Are you saying Stuckey met Deanna Fredrickson in LA and followed her here to the Twin Cities? Managed to place himself in the same house as her son?” Ray didn’t see conspiracy like that in the case, not a bit. “That he was stalking her?”
“Not at all, Ray. All I’m saying is that’s where it intersects and that connection should be exploited. We don’t have much else.”
Ray snorted. “We don’t have anything else.”
“So we go back to the lab?” Tony said evenly, doing an invisible victory dance in the car seat.
“We go back to the lab.”
Kumpula told them he needed what was left of the afternoon to do a good job on the composite. Ray didn’t think it made much sense to chase around on a Friday night with a pile of pictures so they decided to check in with Carol and call it a day.
Carol Offord was smiling when they got back up to the squad room. Tony hoped she had something concrete. What she had was more like gold. “I found one!” She was almost bouncing in her seat.
“One what?” Tony perched on the edge of her desk.
“One of the ‘Ur MoM’ episodes. Well, part of one.” Tony grinned. Ray looked skeptical.
“Where?”
“Here. Well, over in Sex Crimes. I was whining to Jerry Horace, one of the guys over there I’ve worked with. He remembered the title from a sting last year. His crew took down that kiddie-porn ring, remember?” Ray remembered. He had been part of the bust but not out in front. Tony vaguely remembered it from the news.
“So Jerry goes down to evidence and pulls the guy’s computer, the one we confiscated. He found me a clip.” She waved a CD at them. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
Carol slipped the disc into a computer and called up the media player. A fuzzy still image appeared. To the right was a legend that read, ‘Ur MoM is so Hott #6’. A bright green time stamp blinked 2:20. The clip was only a couple of minutes long. She grimaced and looked to Tony and Ray before hitting the play button. Ray nodded. The image came into focus.
“Whoa!”
Tony’s eyes widened and his mouth went dumb-look slack. An older woman, thoroughly into her 40s, was sitting on a couch between two younger men. She had medium length black hair, snow white skin, and an obviously store bought pair of boobs, size XL. It was so obvious it looked comical to Tony. She was buck-naked and had her legs spread apart. Ray was squinting. Tony couldn’t decide if he was scrutinizing the video or trying to block the image out.
The woman was giving an enthusiastic blowjob to the man to her right, well…trying to, Tony reckoned. Her left hand could almost encircle the guy’s erect penis. She was stroking it in time with her bobbing head. Both men’s heads were tilted back, unrecognizable. The image flickered and changed. Now the woman was facing the camera, bouncing up and down on one of the men’s huge members. The woman was the star. The giant penises were just props.
The two minutes dragged on for two hours, it seemed. The scene shifted again. One man mounted her from behind and was thrusting away while she tried to keep the other’s dick in her mouth. Raw nasty sex flashed on the screen but Tony didn’t feel the slightest bit of titillation or excitement. The camera panned to show the look of tortured pleasure on one of the men’s faces, the one getting the blowjob-just a quick camera tilt to the face and back to the action.
“Gotcha!” Tony reached toward the screen, meaning to tap on Sean Stuckey’s distorted face. The camera panned down so quickly he ended up tapping on the image of Stuckey’s erect penis.
Carol and Ray burst out in loud raucous laughter when Tony jerked his hand back. It didn’t matter if they were trying to break the tension or having some fun at his expense. Tony joined them. The scene shifted and Carol hit the off button. They’d seen enough. They’d seen too much.
“Good Lord,” Ray sputtered. “Sorry Tony, but I’ve been needing a laugh like this for some time.”
Carol wiped a finger under one eye, getting her own laughter under control. “You want to wash up?”
Tony just shook his head, still wearing a ‘yeah-you got me good there’ smile, but he was thinking it wasn’t all that funny.
“That was our boy, Sean.” Tony was trying to get them back to the reason they’d played the clip.