“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.”
FOURTEEN
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.