Doc Hollenbeck’s house was a red-brick Federal-style townhouse with white-painted shutters set on a small lot close to a low treelined bluff overlooking the valley of Rock Creek and the Woodley Park Zoo. A magnolia tree stood at parade-square attention out front, fiery pink and hot rose torches burning on a tiny front lawn as smooth and green as a billiard table. The yard was edged with low green wooden fencing, and the little driveway was covered in interlocking peach-colored stones. A wall of poplars and a few spreading willows swayed above the roofline. The magnolia had apparently dropped its blossoms recently, and Doc was out on the lawn as Luke drove up, sweeping the soft pink petals into a bushel basket. Luke parked his blue Crown Victoria behind Doc’s Jeep Cherokee while Doc got to his feet with some obvious difficulty. He limped over to the drive as Luke was reaching into the back seat for the beers.
“Luke, you dago dipshit. You see the shape I’m in?”
Luke looked him over. Doc was wearing patched brown corduroys, penny loafers, no socks, and a hooded dark green sweatshirt with a raised crest embroidered in gold and red thread around a schooner. Doc’s blue-black face was shiny, his grin huge and carnivorous.
“Dago dipshit?”
“Look at me, I’m a cripple!”
“You look like the Ozzie and Harriet poster boy. What does the schooner stand for? Don’t tell me you’re a sailor?”
Doc looked down at the crest on his sweatshirt.
“Why not?”
“Man, I can’t see you sailing.”
Doc took the beers, held them up to the streaming afternoon sunshine. “St. Pauli Girl? Out-standing! What? Darkies sailing? Man, what’s the world coming to? Yeah, we sail. Come on in, nobody else is here yet. I got something to show you.”
They headed up the walk toward the house, Doc limping still, his broad back marked with perspiration.
“Yeah, I’m early. Punctuality is the last refuge of the bored.”
Doc snorted, put out a huge hand and shoved open the front door, sweeping Luke into a formal front hall. The inside of the house was dark and cool, but sunlight glimmered on polished wooden floors, shining through from a sunroom at the rear of the house. The rooms were low and painted in soft pastel tones, the furnishings heavy and comfortable looking. The sunroom was filled with flowers and white wicker furniture. Its floor was stone, some kind of pink granite. Beyond the windows of the sunroom, Luke could see more of those poplars, a rose garden, and past the rose garden a low valley lined with willows and green brush. A glimmer of silver ripple showed through the thick brush down in the valley. Rock Creek.
“Christ, Doc. This place is gorgeous.”
Doc smiled, nodded, as he popped the caps off two of the St. Pauli Girls. “Glass?”
“No thanks, just in the bottle. What’s this area called again?”
“Adams Morgan. A lot of Clinton’s people live here. Mostly Beltway Bandits, civil service drones like me.”
“Looks expensive.”
“Washington’s an expensive place. Adams Morgan is kind of like Forest Hills in New York. People work in Foggy Bottom, mostly they live here or in Georgetown, or across the river in Rosslyn or Arlington. There’s a lot of money in D.C., but it’s quiet money. The city’s kind of frozen in 1955. Tell you the truth, I like it that way.”
“Not the Southeast.”
“No, not Seven District. You wanna sit down here or go outside?”
Luke looked around at the cool white wicker.
“Here’s fine. I still can’t get used to the heat down here. I got here, it was March, still a lot of chill. Now it’s like New Orleans. Like the Delta.”
Doc sat down opposite Luke. The big chair creaked under his weight. He drank from the green bottle, sighed.
“It is a delta. Most people don’t think of it, but Washington’s really part of the Old South. That’s Virginia across the river. Most of the Civil War was fought less than two hundred miles from here. The first big battle, Bull Run, was fought less than twenty-five miles from here, down at Manassas. July 21, 1861. McDowell got his ticket punched. Union boys ran all the way back to the Potomac. People from Washington went down in carriages to see the South get beat, almost got trampled during the retreat. Soldiers fighting around Henry House, they’d look up, see the dome on the Congress. The Shenandoah Valley starts at Harper’s Ferry, runs between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoahs, uphill all the way to Lynchburg, almost. Most of the Civil War happened up that valley. You should take a drive, see some of the places.”
“You’re a buff? Civil War?”
“No. But there’s history all around here. That’s why I like it. I used to be down in Houston. Hated it. Glass. Steel. Rained all the time. Texans are all loud, cranky, full of themselves. Business guys with cell phones surgically attached to their heads. Yuppie larvae all over the place. Lois hated it too. Around here, it’s like you’re in the center of America. You want to feel American, this is the place.”
“Maybe. It’s also a gangbanger’s Disneyland.”
“Yeah, well, while we’re on the topic, I want to take this opportunity to impress the bejesus out of you. Come on down to my office.”
Doc led them down a flight of stairs into a cool carpeted basement lined in wood paneling, covered with family pictures and souvenirs. There was a big scruffy plaid couch in front of a fireplace. A massive rear-projection TV with huge speakers took up another wall, next to a long bar with a sink and another fridge. The room smelled of cigar smoke and firewood. A striped tabby cat the size of a beer cooler was lying on the couch. It opened one eye and looked at Luke, yawned, showing a ridged pink mouth and a set of fangs that his ex-wife would have envied. This is a rec room, thought Luke. This is how regular people live. It gave him a twinge to see that even someone in law enforcement could make a real life for himself. It undermined all his rationalizations. Doc sat down at a desktop computer and flicked it on.
“You remember the Letraset we found last night in Rona’s place?”
“We found?”
Doc grinned. “I’m being gracious. Lois makes me be gracious at least twice a week. I went out, bought some of the same stuff. It’s on the bar there.”
Luke walked over to the long bar. Several sheets of Letraset in Arial Mixed were spread out over the top, next to sheets of blank paper and sheets with letters scribbled over them.
“You compared the sheet you found with a new sheet, figured out which letters Rona was lifting. Right?”
Doc beamed at him.
“Excellent, Luke. You should be a cop.”
Luke came back to stand beside Doc. The screen blinked a couple of times and settled into a program window.
“This is an encryption program. I got it from Target Acquisition. I defined the parameters based on what we figure he was cutting.”
“What do we figure he was cutting?”
“You got your Virginia DL yet?”
“No. Mine’s still State of New York.”
Doc flipped his own DL out onto the computer table. “See there. Those address numbers, the letters?”
“Arial?”
“Absolutely. Point size he used is strictly for the name and address. So I got the numbers. That was easy. Rona made several passes at the same five numbers in that Arial point size. Two 5’s, a 1, and two 3’s. Then he lifted a set without a mistake. He lifted three 2’s and one zero.”
The screen showed a grid pattern with these numbers entered in separate sectors.
“The program knows the template for the Virginia DL. It also recognizes the Arial point size. They’re definitely address-related numbers.”
“Man, how do you work this out?”
“I don’t. This encryption program runs a comparison with all possible zip code numbers for Virginia. Watch.”
Doc hit the enter button and sat back to let the screen run through a series of letter and number patterns. It took a few seconds.
23220 = RICHMOND VIRGINIA
“See. Outstanding.”
“How does it know that?”
“Probabilities, whatever. Don’t worry about that. So now we can eliminate one of the 3’s—he used it up in the zip code.”
“And the zero?”
“Yep, and the zero. That leaves us two 5’s, a 1, and the last 3. We work that out exponentially—”
“You work that out exponentially.”
“The machine does, anyway. And we have all these letters, but we already know that some of them got used up to make RICHMOND VA. That leaves us with—”
“Doc, I hate crosswords.”
“Luke, how can I impress you if you won’t stand still? I ran all this stuff through encryption and decryption and got a hundred and four possibles, combinations of names and addresses in Richmond, Virginia. Most of them were obvious garbage. The program doesn’t know that NOSCRAG EERS is not your usual American name.”
“Jeez, how many combinations could there be? You have twenty-six letters there, including the duplications? It would take a year to work out all the ways they could fit.”
“Took about an hour. I did it when I got home this morning.”
Luke looked at Doc, shaking his head. “So you have the answer already.”
“Yeah, yeah—listen, Luke, you want to snag a desk job here in D.C., you gotta learn about this stuff. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, once you can give it a city, it compares all the letters in this grid with all possible street name combinations for Richmond. Once I cut out all the junk names, what I had left was this.”
Doc hit a function key.
1553 JEFFERSON AVENUE
“And that left the apartment—no, there’s no numbers left. All that’s left is the name, right?”
“Right. Here it is.”
LUCIO GARCIA
“Terrific. What about all those little letters left over?”
Doc flicked the papers with his hand. “These are all a different point size. They fit DOBs, these little details up here in the upper right-hand corner of my license. You can forget those.”
“So Rona was making a Virginia driver’s license? In the name of Lucio Garcia, with an address of 1553 Jefferson Avenue in Richmond?”
“Check it out. Here’s a Richmond phone book.”
Luke flipped through the pages, found GARCIA, and ran his finger down the list.
“Christ, there really is a Lucio Garcia at 1553 Jefferson.”
“Your guy pulled it straight from the Richmond directory.”
“Why? What if somebody checked it out?”
“That’s why, Luke. The ID’s even better if the guy can show it as listed in last year’s phone book. Gives it credibility.”
“Credibility for what, though? This isn’t just a check scam. Why would he need that kind of depth in the ID?”
Luke stepped back and picked up his now-warm beer, pulled at it for a second.
“Doc, what we do next is put out a BOLO on that DL. Whoever Rona was making it for, he’s gonna have to use it, or else why get one in the first place?”
Doc shut the machine off and stood up. “Yeah, and what do you usually have to show your DL for?”
“Bank accounts? Renting a hotel room if you don’t have a card? Hospitals? Welfare?”
Doc led him back upstairs to the sunroom. The big cat followed them, snaking in and around Luke’s legs as he climbed the stairs.
“Hey, Stonewall likes you.”
“Stonewall’s a damn big cat, Doc.”
“He’s a Maine coon cat. No jokes.”
“What do you feed him?”
“Whatever he wants.”
Doc pulled out a couple of fresh beers and sat down in the big wicker chair. “How about car rentals?”
Luke shook his head. “You can’t rent a car without a credit card. They won’t take cash at all. They can’t ding you for tickets later if they don’t have a credit card on file.”
“I thought credit cards were one of Rona’s things?”
“Not to use. He sells them.”
“So this time he’s selling a forged Virginia DL and a credit card. Maybe we should run this Garcia guy past NCIC and VICAP, see if he rings a bell. And the card companies. Let’s see if he lost some credit cards. Also get the Richmond PD to see if he ever reported his wallet stolen. Somebody’s getting a whole new life here.”
Doc looked out through the sunroom windows at the poplars swaying in the afternoon breeze, their leaves silvering as the wind ruffled through them.
“Yeah, Luke. But who?”