He turned off the ultraviolet light and moved the new one hundred dollar bill back under the desk lamp, studying the watermark, a shadow of Ben Franklin alongside his face on the bill. The Treasury started making these changes in 1990 and steadily improved on them. The shot-dead bill had none of them. He picked up a counterfeit-detector felt pen and marked the tattered bill. This was stuff store clerks did daily, either holding the bill up to light or using the pen. The pen reacted with starch binders and acid. Genuine US notes were starchless and acid free, and he waited for the counterfeit bill to turn brown, but it stayed yellow.
He made another mark on it then marked the new bill to test the pen. It stayed yellow as it should. Raveneau wasn’t sure what to make of the counterfeit bill not reacting. Either the pen was defective or the counterfeit bill was printed on starch-free paper back in 1989. But that wouldn’t have been easy to do. He held it up again and it was still yellow.
He had learned that all the embedding was in response to counterfeiting, in particular to the supernotes. The supernotes scared Treasury and ever since US bills kept evolving. The latest had a textured surface, but given the way things had gone, the way printing also evolved, that wasn’t going to be enough either. Neither was his trying to learn about counterfeiting. He unplugged the lights and slid the ultraviolet under his desk. He put la Rosa’s light back where she liked it to sit, then adjusted it. He put the shot-dead bill back in an evidence bag and sent la Rosa a text before riding the elevator down.
It was still early when he walked out but he guessed Lim would be there by now. He walked to his car. Someone once likened the end of the peninsula where San Francisco was built to a thumb pushed out into the bay. Raveneau drove to the southeastern side past the desolate poverty of the Bayview and beyond the old power plant out to the crime lab in Hunter’s Point with Allyson Candel’s shoebox in a plastic bag on the passenger seat next to him.
At the crime lab Howard Lim who headed the lab slid it out of the bag and with gloves on opened the top.
‘You’ve handled these already. Why didn’t you bring them here when you first got them?’
‘I just got them last night. I won them in a card game.’
‘You see, you’re getting old. When you were younger you would have driven them straight out.’ He looked over at Raveneau and shook his head. ‘You should see yourself. I hear the medical examiner comes up every afternoon to just make sure you’re alive and not a cold case. If you’ve already handled everything why did you come out here to bother me?’
‘I want to know what you can tell me about the photos.’
Banter aside, Lim got it. He understood. He was an avid photographer, had been for decades. He sifted through. There were seventeen photos and a handful of Kodachrome slides. Six of the photos he set aside, glancing at Raveneau, saying ‘Polaroid. You remember Polaroid. Seems so long, long ago now, like when you were fifty.’
In one of the six Polaroids a dark-haired woman swam beneath a waterfall. Raveneau thumbed through the shots and left the waterfall picture on top. Lim adjusted his glasses, looked at Raveneau, started to say something and didn’t. He picked up a small black and white of Jim Frank in his Navy uniform.
‘In Honolulu there used to be these photo booths for sailors. This is from one of them.’
‘Taken when?’
‘I guess early 1970s.’
‘Is your family still in Hawaii?’
‘Some are. My father is. He’s old but he still drives. In Hawaii it is OK to drive when you are older. Everyone drives slower, not like some old crazy detective in San Francisco trying to catch a killer who is already dead.’ Lim turned. ‘What connects now to this killing?’
‘I don’t know yet but it ties to counterfeiting and a victim who once worked for the Secret Service and later possibly other US agencies.’
‘A spy?’
‘I haven’t learned much yet about what he was doing, but I think he was trying to penetrate counterfeiting rings.’
Raveneau and Lim came in the same year. Then, Lim was black-haired and smooth-faced, and ever-so-serious about crime lab techniques and cross contamination. He was much more easy-going now. He set the photo booth shot of Jim Frank trying to look like Robert Mitchum or James Dean in uniform off to the side. He picked up another black and white. He kept the banter going because it helped him think.
‘You need to sit down, rest your back?’ Lim asked. ‘You want to get your walker out of your car?’
‘No, I rode a bike out here. I exercise every couple of hours. I’ve got two marathons next weekend, both are on Saturday.’
‘That’s probably the only way to get blood to your brain now. Other agencies you say, maybe the CIA?’
‘The original inspectors actually thought it was possible, but I don’t have any reason to believe that.’
‘You don’t have any reason yet.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Very careful slow inspector and…’ Lim seemed to forget where he was going with that. He picked up one of the 4 x 6 photos and said, ‘Hapuna Beach.’
‘Where is that?’
‘On the Big Island and a very nice beach, a famous beach. Who is the woman with the man in the uniform?’
‘Allyson Candel. His name is or was Jim Frank. He was a pilot for United. I’m trying to locate him and hoping he’s still alive.’
‘You are, so maybe he is too.’
Raveneau smiled and let it be.
‘She was a stewardess and her son told me that photo was taken in the mid 1980s.’
‘Mid eighties is about right, I think.’
‘How do you tell?’
‘The type of paper.’
Lim turned the photo on edge and ticked his thumb along it. He flipped it over and showed Raveneau spots where the paper was yellowing. He flipped it back over, laid it down gently. In this shot Jim Frank had his arm around her. It looked as if they both had just gotten out of the water. Frank was dripping wet but wearing dry sunglasses and Allyson Candel was quietly beautiful.
‘What about the one you set aside?’ Raveneau asked, but you couldn’t rush Lim. No one could rush Lim. The chief of police wouldn’t get anywhere pushing him. Lim took the photo with him and came back a few minutes later.
‘Ben, come back here,’ he said, and then picked up the shot of Frank and Allyson Candel on the beach. A different photo was under a lens and magnified. Lim slid it out, replaced it with the beach shot. Now the beads of water on Frank’s face were more visible as was the unevenness of how he’d shaved that day. But the photo also became grainy. The look Raveneau caught in Allyson Candel’s eye was less resolved, became blotchy.
‘OK, now look here.’
Lim slipped the other photo, the landscape shot back under the lens. His voice was quieter as he asked, ‘What differences do you see?’
On the back of the photo written in pencil were the words, ‘the house.’ But the photo caught much more than a house built in a notch on a steep grassy slope. The day was quite clear and the line of the Kohala coast swept south with a white line of breakers. The corrugated roof of the house and the stand of trees below and the two-lane highway well below stood out sharply.
‘It’s nowhere near as grainy. The quality of detail is at a whole other level.’
‘Many levels up,’ Lim said. ‘This kind of resolution at that time was uncommon. This is very high quality. It could be a professional photographer who shoots this, someone who photographs landscapes for art or books. This is better than you would use then for magazines. Some military and government agencies were at this level, so maybe this Frank is a spy. Maybe he worked for the CIA.’ He smiled at Raveneau and added, ‘If I took your picture with this camera, even you would look good.’