So they had chocolates and tea and Dana calmed down enough to take a seat and attune herself to what the counselor had to say. They made small talk for a few minutes while they sipped tea and worked their jaws around nougat and caramel and cherry centers, and then the woman looked to Dana. “You do read lips, then, dear? Or would you be more comfortable with an interpreter? Or your husband-?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Of course, yes. Does he-can he translate?”
“Sure,” Bridger said. “I can try. I took a course last semester in adult ed, but I'm pretty clumsy with it-” He gave a laugh and the woman took it up. Briefly. Very briefly. Because suddenly she was all business.
“Now, Dana,” she said, spreading open the file before her, “as you've already no doubt gathered, you've been the victim of identity theft. ” She removed four faxes from the file and pushed them across the table. The mug shot of the same man gazed out at them from all four, and Bridger felt a jolt of anger. Here he was, a white male who looked to be thirty or so, with a short slick hipster's haircut and dagger sideburns, his eyes steady and smug even there in that diminished moment in the Tulare County Sheriff's Department, in Marin, L. A., Reno, here he was, the shithead who'd put Dana in jail. “Unfortunately,” the counselor was saying, a little wince of regret decorating the corners of her mouth, “the onus is on you to defend yourself.”
“Is that him?” Bridger said. His voice was hard, so hard it nearly choked him getting it out. All his life he'd cruised along, high school, college, film school, Digital Dynasty, living a video existence, easy in everything and never happier than when he was sunk into the couch with a DVD or spooned into a plush seat in the theater with the opening credits rolling-Melissa used to call him a video mole, and it was no compliment-but in that moment he felt something come up in him he'd never felt before, because now everything was different, now the film had slipped off the reel and the couch was overturned. It was hate, that was what it was. It was rage. And it was focused and incendiary: “So this was the son of a bitch.”
The woman nodded. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a cord round her throat and she lifted them now to her face and peered down at the photos. “We don't know his real name and he could have been arrested under any number of aliases in the past-”
Dana spoke up suddenly. “What about fingerprints?”
“We haven't run a fingerprint trace. They haven't, I mean. It's because”-here she paused, looking to Bridger to carry her past the sad truth of the moment-“well, I'm sorry to say that a crime like this, a victimless crime, just doesn't merit the resources…”
Bridger's hands were traumatized. He had to fingerspell most of it-“victimless” took him forever-but Dana picked right up on it. “Victimless?” she said. “What about me? My job? My students? What about the four hundred and eighty-seven dollars-who's going to pay that?”
Who indeed?
The explanation was circuitous, dodging away from the issue and coming back to it again, and it took a while to unfold. First of all, Dana was a victim, of course she was, but she had to understand just how much violent crime there was in the state of California-in the country as a whole-and how limited law enforcement resources were. There were rapists out there, murderers, serial killers. Sadists. Child molesters. But this in no way diminished what had happened to her and there was a growing awareness of the problem (the counselor-what was her name? — dispensed clichés like confections, like tea, because they were soothing) and there were a number of steps Dana could take to restore her good name and maybe even bring the criminal to justice. At this point, the woman drew a pad and pencil from the top drawer of her desk. “Now,” she said, “do you have any idea who this man is or how he might have got hold of your base identifiers?”
Dana hesitated a moment till Bridger had laboriously spelled out “base identifiers,” a term neither of them had previously come across. “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “I've never seen him before.”
“Have you lost your purse or had it stolen anytime in the past few months?”
She read this on the woman's lips and shook her head again.
“What about your mailbox-is it secure? Locked, I mean?”
It was, yes. The mailboxes at her apartment complex were located in a special alcove, and everybody had a key to his or her own box.
“What about at work? Do you receive mail at the”-here the woman brought the glasses back into play and glanced down a moment at the sheet before her-“the San Roque School for the Deaf?”
Dana did. And no, the mailboxes there were in the main office and anyone could have access to them. But Dana hadn't missed anything-her pay stubs were there every two weeks on schedule and there had been no interruption of her mail at home, or not that she knew of, anyway.
The woman looked to Bridger a moment. He'd been so rigidly focused on what she'd been saying and the effort to communicate it to Dana that he'd forgotten where he was. Now he saw that it was getting late, past six anyway, the venetian blinds pregnant with color, thin fingers of sunlight marking the wall like the vestiges of a thief. He thought of Radko. He thought of Drex III. He'd have to go back after dinner, he was thinking, and that thought-of dinner-made his stomach churn in an anticipatory way. When was the last time he'd eaten?
“You see, the reason I ask,” the woman went on, holding Bridger's eyes a moment before shifting back to Dana, just to be sure he was with them so that none of this-her spiel, her words, her professional empathy-would be wasted, “is because the vast majority of identity fraud cases come from a lost or stolen wallet or misappropriated mail. In fact, one of the thieves' favorite modus operandi is to get your name and address-out of the phone book, off your business card-and put in a change of address request with the post office. Then they get your mail sent to a drop box in Mailboxes R Us or some such, and there's all your financial information, credit card bills, bank statements, paychecks and what have you.”
She paused to see what effect she was having. The fingers of light crept higher up the wall. On her face was a look of transport or maybe of triumph-she knew the ropes and she was in no danger and never would be. “Then all they have to do is make up a driver's license in your name, order new checks, replacement Visa cards, and voilà-you're out an average of something like five thousand dollars nationwide.”
Bridger was thinking about his own mailbox, just a slot with his apartment number under it, and how many times had the cretins at the U.S. Postal Service stuffed it with his neighbors' mail by mistake? Or what about the time he wound up with half a dozen mutual fund statements addressed to a woman on the other side of town who had only a street address-196 Berton instead of 196 Manzanita-and a zip code in common with him? What if he'd been a crook? What then?
Dana broke into his reverie. She was getting impatient. She wanted action. That was Dana: cut to the chase, no time to spare. “Yeah,” she said, her voice even hollower and more startling than usual, “but what do I do now, that's what we want to know.”
The woman looked flustered a moment-this was a departure from the orthodoxy, from the ritual that soothed and absolved-but she recovered herself. “Well, you'll want to file a police report right away and you'll need to include that in any correspondence with creditors, and the credit reporting agencies should be notified if there are any irregularities. Your credit reports. You should order copies and check them over carefully-your Visa and MasterCard and what-have-you as well. But we'll get to all that. What I want you to know, what I want to tell you, is how these things happen-so you'll be prepared next time around.” The look of rapture again. She arched her back and gazed into Dana's eyes. “An ounce of prevention, right?”