Orchid Blues

HOLLY PLAYED HOSTESS AND CLEARED THE dishes away from the coffee table, and the empty cartons that had once held Chinese food. Doug put on a pot of coffee, and they waited for Harry, who was on the phone in the den. Finally, he came back.

“Here,” he said, handing the computer-generated picture of John to Eddie. “E-mail this to the address at the bottom of the page.”

“It means we’re not going to be able to penetrate the restriction on this photograph and download this guy’s file. I’m not sure that even a court order would produce it.”

“I know a guy who agreed to look at the picture,” Harry said. “He can probably get a look at the file, and if he’s had enough to drink, he might tell us some of what’s in it. I got him at home, and he’d already had at least one Scotch.”

“Harry,” Holly said, “I’m beginning to get the impression that nobody in the federal law enforcement community talks to anybody else outside his own agency.”

“This guy’s not in the law enforcement community; you might say he’s quietly in the law-breaking community, in his way. But you’re right: the level of interagency cooperation only tends to rise when somebody can recognize some self-interest in a situation. If this guy helps us, then I’ll have to help him sometime, ignore a regulation or two, and I probably won’t like doing it.”

They fell silent for a while, watching the flames from the driftwood fire. Nobody seemed to want to add another log.

Harry shook his head. “No point guessing; he could be anybody. And if my buddy won’t help, and if the guy has never been arrested, then we’re going to have one hell of a time figuring out who or what he is.”

“I could maybe get his fingerprints,” Ham said. “You know, steal a glass he’s used, or something like that.”

“It might come to that,” Harry said, “but I don’t want you to take the risk, unless it’s the only way. Anyway, if his photograph is restricted, it’s very likely his prints will be, too.”

The phone rang, and everybody sat up. Harry went into the den to answer it, and he didn’t come back for twenty minutes. When he did, the group was all ears.

“Well, I don’t know how much help this is going to be,” Harry said, when he had settled into his chair once more. “My guy was able to access some records, records that even he was not supposed to have access to, so this one is going to cost me.”

“All right, he worked for one or more government agencies as an independent contractor—always paid in cash, no social security number involved, no paper trail, except in those inaccessible files.”

“Anyway, the name on the file—and this doesn’t mean it’s his real name—was Alton Charlesworth.”

“You have a point,” Harry said. “But Charlesworth was involved in technical and financial stuff, breaking into bank records, tracing the movement of money from bank to bank and country to country. It was wet work, involving burglary at the very least, and maybe much worse.”

“My guy wouldn’t give me any. He did say that if you wanted to hide some assets or launder some money, Charlesworth would be your man. He hinted at darker deeds, too, but he wouldn’t be specific. My guy said he wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley—or anyplace else, for that matter. He made the man sound thoroughly unpleasant. He also mentioned that there would be no criminal record—or, if there had been one, it would have been quietly expunged from all the relevant computers. The guy sounds like a rollover.”

“A rollover is somebody who gets caught doing something naughty, and the people who catch him realize he might be more valuable doing naughty things for them, rather than being put in a prison cell. So they roll him over—give his background a shampoo and a haircut, and he belongs to them.”

“There’s no pension plan for people like this,” Harry said. “In fact, my guy said that if I ran across Charlesworth in person, he’d like to hear about it. He was real casual about it, but what this says to me is that Charlesworth bailed out of whatever program they had him in, and that they would either like to have him back or give him a new haircut, starting at about the Adam’s apple.”

“I don’t get it,” Ham said. “What would a guy like this be doing involved with some half-baked gun nuts like these folks out at the lake? You think they’re robbing so many banks that they need somebody to launder the proceeds?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Harry said. “We tend to notice when somebody starts robbing a lot of banks, even if they’re spread out all over the country. Bank robbers always have a modus operandi, and they stick to what works for them. So far, we’ve got a pattern of only two, separated by a number of years. If the same group did both jobs, then they’ve more than likely got the proceeds salted away and are spending it on groceries and plumbers and ortho dontists and car repairs.”

“There is that,” Harry said. “And if, as you say, this guy John has been away for a while, then where has he been?”

“I really don’t think they’ve got that much money,” Harry said. “What occurs to me is that maybe John is a traveling man, going from place to place and, maybe, from group to group.”

“Be interesting to see how much you see of old John in your visits to the group,” Harry said. “He wasn’t there for the first few visits, but he’s here now, or was. I want to know if he’s there on your next visit.”

“And Ham,” Harry said, “I don’t think you can keep going back out there without asking at least some questions. It wouldn’t seem natural to have no curiosity at all about what you’re seeing there.”

“Don’t get too pointed, just be easy about it. I think, at some point, you have to let them know that you’re not going to get too involved until you know what’s going on. It’s a matter of when you believe they’re starting to trust you.”

“Of course, you don’t want to get too curious,” Harry said. “If they think you’re too curious, they might choose to do something about you, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”