“I always do,” he said.
Cole pulled his glare away from Knowles.
“How about you?” Laramie said to Cole. “Any questions? Doubts? Challenges?”
“None,” the cop said.
“If he has none,” Knowles said, “I’m happy to move things along. There is no evidence-paper, photo, or image-of Achar’s existence before January 1995?”
She gave his question, and her answer, some thought.
“No,” she said, “none we’ve got.”
“Idea, then,” he said. “We’ll need five or ten photographs of Achar to do what I’m thinking-ideally, spaced out over the past ten years, so we get shots taken of him at various ages. We’d also need a computer with high-speed access, and permission from whoever has kept the lies intact to hook into my home system.”
Laramie waited to see whether her guide would appear in the doorway between rooms and acknowledge Knowles’s requests. He didn’t.
“An image search?” she said.
“Correct. Two companies and a series of universities have been compiling a national image database along with an accompanying search technology. The database includes video. I’m in possession of the beta version of the search engine, but searches can only be conducted by computers with Internet-2 access, which I have, but only at home. The only images that will show up are those that have been archived into the national database, of course. But ours is the age of the camera, and that was true eleven years ago too.”
“Meaning he could have been photographed, or videotaped, by somebody, somewhere, in his prior identity,” Laramie said.
“Yes. The search engine is rudimentary and it’s been claimed that three percent of the world’s images have been digitally archived to date. My guess? It’s actually far under one percent. But worth a search anyway.”
“Assuming,” Laramie said, “all this is true-not an exercise.”
“Yes. Assuming that. But either way, it’s a good idea.”
One the task force hadn’t thought of, Laramie thought. At least not that they revealed to me.
“One thing people do to you when you’re a cop,” Cole said from his chair, “especially when you’re working a homicide, is lie.”
Laramie, day care instructor that she was, rotated her attention to the cop.
“Mostly people do it at first,” he went on, “then give in after a while. Eventually, they all want to confess-in one way or another.”
He seemed to leave it at that, Laramie getting the idea he didn’t intend to go on.
Knowles spoke, brimming with sarcasm again.
“And?”
Cole shrugged.
“I think it happens because everybody’s carrying secrets around,” he said, “and in their everyday lives they’ve grown used to keeping them stashed, like cash under the mattress. In a murder investigation, we’re basically turning lives upside down and shaking, so we can see what falls out. At first, people try to hold on to their secrets at all costs. I’m talking the stupid ones-totally unrelated to the murder most of the time. Like how many times a guy who’s married says he’s talked to a girl he likes. But once you call their bluff and break through the first layer, they tend to get suddenly comfortable, and start confessing everything they’ve ever lied about. Like they’d paid for the interview by the hour. Like all along they had to get it out.”
Laramie waited for more, but Cole appeared to have completed his train of thought. Knowles-strangely, Laramie thought-began nodding with some enthusiasm.
“You’re saying Achar didn’t appear to reveal who he was, but that maybe he did,” he said. “To somebody.”
Cole nodded without looking over at Knowles.
“Guy’s whole life was a lie. He had to want to tell at least some of it to somebody. Even if he didn’t plan to leave any bread crumbs besides the so-called suicide mistake, chances are he left some anyway. And if we’re right about the flare-gun theory, he probably tried more than one way to tell us about what he was up to. I’d like to get my eyes on all the videotape you have on him too, get a look at the man in life-but where I’ll be able to do my best work is to conduct, or re-conduct, all relevant interviews myself.”
Laramie said, “You mean anybody interviewed by the task force?”
“Yes. Everybody. Nothing against the FBI, CIA, the rest of the task force, or you, but when I can, I prefer to do my own work. I might be able to learn what he was trying to tell us if I talk to the people he told-I’ll have a better chance at it anyway as compared to reading transcripts.”
“I’ll see if we can get you started today.”
Laramie stood, and on the dry-erase board wrote two lines in its upper-left corner: Internet-2 image search and Re-interview all.
“I’ve got a few other thoughts,” Cole said, “in case you want to hear them.”
“You’ve got a lot of thoughts,” Knowles said.
Cole didn’t acknowledge the author’s comment. Laramie had a fleeting thought that the day care dynamic was only going to get worse once Rothgeb showed up. Considering the much sharper turn for the worse things would undoubtedly take were she to plug Cooper into the equation, she quietly thanked herself for keeping their “operative” compartmentalized.
“Have at it,” she said to Cole.
“Birth certificate thefts,” he said. “I’d start in Mobile, where Achar got his, then maybe expand outward. Didn’t see anything about the task force looking into it, though I can’t believe they wouldn’t have.”
“Not sure,” Laramie said, then, climbing the learning curve on Detective Cole, figured she ought to finish the thought Cole was likely to leave hanging. “So you’re saying we check and see whether more than one birth certificate was stolen from the place where he grabbed his?”
“Yeah. And other places. Problem is, when the kind of birth record he used is taken, sometimes there isn’t any record of it being there in the first place.”
“We should go the other way and look at the deaths,” Knowles said.
Cole rotated his head to take in Knowles, considered what he’d said, then nodded.
Laramie wasn’t grasping it yet.
“Little help?” she said.
“What-”
“It-”
They’d both started speaking at the same time, then stopped. Laramie almost flinched in anticipation of the argument she figured would ensue.
“Go ahead,” Cole said.
Knowles nodded. Laramie raised her eyebrows.
“It doesn’t do any good for our kind of guy, a sleeper,” Knowles said, “if he’s stolen the identity of somebody who’s alive. The way it’s done-at least the way I understand it-is you swipe the birth certificate, or just use the Social Security number, of a dead person.”
Catching up, Laramie said, “Nobody’s around to argue that you don’t exist.”
“Yeah.” Cole took the baton. “The most effective way to do it is by stealing the Social of somebody who died young. Would just make the most sense either way for it to be somebody born twenty-five or thirty years ago.”
“So there isn’t anybody still, what, actively grieving for him?”
“Well, yeah, that too, but what I’m talking about is the records. Last couple of decades, most jurisdictions have been keeping an electronic copy of birth certificates and death records in the same system. Before that, you could be born and die in the same town and the only record of either event was buried in separate files in different buildings. Plus you’re getting the age right on the Social Security number. But maybe the most important thing is, if we’re talking an early death-such as the real Benjamin Achar’s death from SIDS-there isn’t any significant record of life that’ll register with the federal government based on the Social. In many cases, Socials weren’t issued to children until they were six, eight, ten years old. Not until recently.”