Water to Burn (18 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“And you’ve got the old one.”
“Just that. I hope the ride home hasn’t smudged or smeared the prints, is all. I’ll bring them up while you eat.”
Since Ari had no desk of his own, he ended up spreading his equipment over the kitchen table. I went into the bedroom and changed out of my party clothes into jeans and a Giants T-shirt, then leaned against the refrigerator and ate a couple of minature tacos and some guacamole while I watched him work. Before he’d put the glass into the box, Diego had made a little cage of soda straws around it, which had kept the napkin wrap at a safe distance.
“He did a good job,” Ari said. “I get the impression he’s been asked to gather evidence before.”
“Maybe that’s because he’s a bartender,” I said. “Are you sure those aren’t his prints, though?”
“He wiped the glass before he handed it to Caleb, and he held it by the base. Caleb took the barrel between thumb and forefinger. I was watching from the shrubbery.”
“Say what? On your hands and knees?”
“I was standing over by the shrubbery, not crawling around in it.”
On the table Ari had spread out a newspaper and laid out a couple of brushes, a packet of index cards, and a box of something that looked like bits of tape on paper backing. He had a fine black powder in a container similar to an old-fashioned compact for makeup. He dipped a fat kolinski hair brush in the powder, tapped off the excess, and delicately began powdering the glass. When I squatted down to eye level, I could see the thin black lines where the powder stuck to Caleb’s oily fingerprints.
“Brilliant,” Ari said. “Let me get some pictures of these.”
I stood up again and decided that I could have a few bites of that seductive chicken in salsa verde. When I got a fork out of the drawer beside the sink, Ari looked up from his work.
“That’s the ticket,” he said with just a hint of a joke in his voice. “Dig in. Have lots. Do it for America!”
“Oh, shut up!”
He smiled and did so, then picked up his tiny digital camera.
“It’s best to snap them, if you can, before you try to lift them,” he said. “In case something goes wrong.”
He grabbed a paper towel, tore off part of it, and stuffed it into the inside of the glass to provide a background. For some minutes he fussed with the light, the camera, and the sherry glass until he managed to get some snaps that weren’t ruined by reflections.
“The computer can work from digital images as well as it can from scanned paper,” he remarked. “Maybe better.”
“It’s done by computer these days, huh?”
“Yes. It’s the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which as you can doubtless guess we call the IAFIS. Your agency doesn’t have a monopoly on odd acronyms.” Ari paused, hands on hips, to survey the glass and his equipment. “You know, if you’re tired, you could go sit down. This is all rather routine work.” He glanced my way. “Unless I can persuade you to eat something more?”
“I’ve had plenty, thanks.” I wiped my hands on the remains of the paper towel he’d torn up. “I do want to sit down, yeah, and pick up my e-mail. Did you get enough to eat at the party? Finish this stuff if you want.”
“I just might. It’s quite good.”
The only e-mail of any consequence came from NumbersGrrl, who’d attached a background document on deviant level/world theory. I figured I might understand half of it. I was logging off when Ari came in, wiping a mixture of fingerprint powder and guacamole onto his jeans.
“I’m finished,” Ari said. “I need to send the photos off, is all.”
“Okay. Where are you sending them, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“An Interpol regional office. How fast the prints get into the system depends on how many other requests have come in.”
“How long will it take to get an ID back? Weeks?”
“No. It’s not like DNA. Shouldn’t take long, overnight at the most.”
“Y’know, sometimes I’m really impressed by what computers can do.”
Ari smiled at that. “It takes a human tech to make the final determination. The machine normally spits out five or six close matches. In this case, we know our suspect’s alleged name. We merely need to know if he has a record. Once the clerk picks the right print, the system will tell us that.”
“I bet he does have a record. There’s something too boyish about Caleb to be true. Boyish and kind of contrived.”
I was planning on putting off my lunch with Caleb until late in the week, after the information on the fingerprints came back, but Ari received the report on the prints just four hours after he’d sent them off. I was thinking of going to bed, and he was working on his laptop in the kitchen, when I heard him whistle in surprise. I trotted in to see.
“What is it?” I glanced at the screen only to see Hebrew letters. “You sure have an automatic encryption system there, don’t you?”
“If you want to learn some Hebrew, I’ll be glad to teach you,” Ari said. “It might come in handy one day.”
I made a noncommittal noise, and he returned to looking at the screen. “I’ll translate this for you,” he said, “and print it out, but the essence is, yes, Caleb has a record. Caleb Sumner is his real name. He’s still using it, I should think, because he served his sentence—eighteen months in a Massachusetts prison for blackmail—so I suppose people would consider him rehabilitated and all that. The sentence was light, but I’m assuming that was because of his age. He was nineteen at the time.”
“Whoa! Not a nice guy, young or old.”
“A petty criminal type, certainly. He’d had a few juvenile infractions, too. I can get the details from one of the American databanks.”
“I thought juvenile records were all sealed.”
“They are.”
“Then how can you get them?”
Ari merely looked at me. I realized I’d asked a stupid question. “Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”
Ari logged off and shut down the laptop. When he turned in his chair to look at me, I noticed his expression, solemn to the point of being stone cold.
“Nola,” he said. “We’ve got to have a talk about your brother-in-law.”
My heart thudded once. I sat down opposite him at the table.
“Caleb has to be blackmailing him,” Ari said. “It’s the only thing that would explain Donovan’s actions.”
“You’re right, yeah. Why else would Jack cringe around that little jerk?”
“The question then is, on what grounds?”
His SPP gave me an impression of tremendous selfcontrol without even a hint of what he might be controlling. As for the question, I could stay silent, give evasive answers, or outright lie. I decided on none of the above.
“Is he blackmailing Jack directly,” I said, “or threatening Jack’s father to make the blackmail stick? Jack would do pretty much anything to protect him.”
“Possibly both.” Ari hesitated, then gave a little “throw caution to the winds” shrug. “They were both involved in running guns to Northern Ireland, weren’t they?”
My heart thudded again. His SPP returned to normal.
“What makes you think that?” I said.
“Oh, come now.” Ari crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me.
“Okay, okay. Yes, they were, but Jack was a teenager at the time, doing what his dad told him to do. Remember that, will you?”
“I’m not a judge and jury.”
No, I thought, just a cop, but it’s my bad luck you’re an honest one. Aloud, I said, “How did you find out?”
“I suspected Jack from the day we went out to Marin to interview your sister. Over Pat’s death, if you remember. She made some odd remarks about firearms in relation to her husband. So I checked the files and saw various reports on Donovan senior.” His smile was as thin as the edge of a knife blade. “His activities were one of those things that everyone knows, but no one can prove. No one ever caught the transfer boat with the guns aboard. When the Gardai finally managed to confiscate a shipment, there were no fingerprints on any of the contraband. Your FBI never saw the guns being shipped from the States. There was nothing that would stand up in any court.”
Kevin Donovan had spread money liberally around to ensure that dearth of evidence. I knew that Ari would feel duty bound to report any charges of police corruption, so I kept my mouth shut about that. My stomach twisted so badly that I felt like vomiting, and it wasn’t the salsa verde to blame. Ari cocked his head to one side and considered me with narrowed eyes.
“Nola, why do you look so frightened?”
“Are you going to report this conversation? Like a jerk I just gave evidence against them.”
“Time to file charges ran out a long time ago. The statute of limitations applies to Customs violations, you know, at least in America. I suppose the British government might still prosecute, but I can’t see your government extraditing the Donovans. I’m not even sure if what they did was a crime under American law.”
“You’re right, aren’t you? Call me twice a jerk.”
“Never that.” Ari smiled at me. “I know how much your family means to you.” The smile vanished. “But answer me one thing. Jack’s not running guns to Gaza, is he?”
“Hell, no! Not to anywhere in the Middle East or to anywhere else, for that matter, not now. Why would he? They weren’t doing it for the money.”
“Good point.”
“It was the old ‘Erin go bragh’ that caught both of them,” I went on. “Once Jack’s dad made his huge heap of cash, he was bored. Now, I can’t see how building shopping centers is exciting, but Donovan père loved every minute of it. He took up kind of an odd hobby to replace it.”
Ari’s turn for the sigh—of relief, in this case. “Good. I wasn’t looking forward to arresting your sister’s husband.”
“Would you have arrested Jack? If he’d been running guns to Hamas, say.”
“I would have had to.” He said it quietly, but I could hear the steel in his voice. “I would have been sorry, but I would have. What would you have done?”
My first reaction was “I’d have dumped you so fast . . .” My second reaction was total paralysis, because somewhere in my weird brain I knew it never would have been that simple. Ari waited, watching me. I finally wrenched my mind back into gear.
“I don’t know,” was all I could say. “I honestly do not know what I would have done.”
“Let’s hope we’re never in a position to find out.”
I mistrusted my voice and nodded my agreement. My stomach continued to yearn for antacids.
“Jack must know about the statute of limitations,” Ari went on. “I don’t understand what Caleb could be holding over him. According to the records I’ve seen, Donovan’s been an impeccable citizen ever since.”
“As far as I know he has, too. Which brings us back to his father. He’s in his ‘pillar of the community’ phase. Big man in the Knights of Columbus. Local charities adore him. When he had his cancer treatments last year, his church held special masses for his recovery. How would they all feel about a gun runner in their midst? Not everyone in that parish is Irish.”
“Then exposure could create a very bad situation.”
“Donovan senior isn’t young anymore, and he’s been really sick. If he ended up in the middle of a scandal, the stress could kill him.”
Ari nodded. I could pick up his filing the data away in his mind. “I need to have a talk with Jack.”
I must have winced or made some other physical gesture, because Ari looked offended.
“I’m planning on putting his mind at rest,” Ari said. “Not making things worse.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“I suppose you’re thinking that I won’t be tactful.”
“Yep. That’s exactly right.”
“For you, I’ll try.”
“I’ll come with you when you do.”
Ari looked briefly exasperated, then shrugged. “Oh, very well! Now, don’t mention Caleb’s background to Kathleen until we’ve had our chat with Donovan. If she asks, tell her I’m still confirming the details of the case.”
“That sounds nice and official, yeah.”
I got up and went into the bathroom. I grabbed the bottle of heartburn meds, shoved four of them into my mouth, and washed them down with a glass of water.
“What’s wrong?” Ari was standing in the doorway and watching.
“My stomach hurts,” I said, “from our little talk just now.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sounded perfectly sincere. “I didn’t think it would upset you.”
I considered throwing the bottle at his head but thought better of it. “What matters now,” I said, “is doing something about Caleb. Can we get him arrested for blackmail?”
“If Donovan’s willing to file charges, certainly.”
“That’s a pretty big if.”
“I’m fairly sure that American law offers protection to blackmail victims.”
“Yeah, but is it enough? If Jack’s dad were in blooming good health, maybe, but he’s not. What if something got out?”
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