It was around dawn when he heard a faint tapping and looked up. The sound was actually Mistretta banging on her plate-glass window to get his attention. After stopping by home, recognizing how hopeless the idea of sleep was, Behr had driven over to her place, getting there by around 5:45, and parked in her driveway since he hadn’t wanted to wake her.
He was out of his car, computer bag in hand, by the time she’d reached her front door.
“You my bodyguard or just some kind of freaking gargoyle?” she asked.
“Not sleeping much, huh,” he said.
“Just an early riser.” She stepped aside and let him in. One look at her weary eyes told him the truth. “What’s happening?”
“I got something and wanted you to be a part of it.”
He set up his laptop at her dining table, and she got him coffee while he spouted wearily about DNA and lack of hair and what he’d learned from Shantae Williams. She sat down next to him as he opened an e-mail from the screen name “daesoodrift,” one of the tough kids at the Oriental Grand, and quickly downloaded the images.
“Who’s this?” she asked, as Behr opened and began scrolling the faces from the community meeting.
“A bad, bad man, I believe,” Behr said. He knew exactly where to look. He’d spotted the guy after five or six minutes of searching the footage before he had driven over. He’d gone ahead and sent the picture to Breslau to cross against the crime computer. The department had better software for this kind of thing, which would save hundreds of hours of combing. If the man had a record, eventually he would come up. Behr set the images next to each other on his desktop—a shot of the man with and without his hat from the massage joint and an image of him in similar hat, clothes, and pose in the church basement.
“Holy shit, Behr,” Mistretta said. “Lookit that.”
They both stared at the pictures of the man at their staged meeting, and of him as he was captured the previous night: with his hat off, intense slate gray eyes, his shoe-polish-brown toupee and drawn-on eyebrows. Behr told her how he’d stumbled into the massage place, what had happened to Jasmine.
“You manage to get a name on this scumbag?”
“No. Not that lucky,” he said, “but I have an idea. Just need to wait for the stores to open.”