“Why do you think he didn’t cash the check? Based on your description, he could use every penny he got.”
“I’m betting he tried and couldn’t,” Machado says. “A handyman who basically would go around Cambridge collecting bottles and cans, doing anything anybody might hire him for. I seriously doubt people paid him with checks.”
We walk through Lucy’s open door, and she’s at her desk, surrounded by large flat-screen monitors, and Toby pushes the cart in after us. He begins stacking the boxes against the wall.
“You want these anyplace special?” he asks her.
“Just leave them.” She says it like an order, staring at him.
“Raking leaves, yard work, home repairs, even electrical, and he’s not licensed in anything, according to his ex-wife. Probably paid in cash,” Machado is saying to me.
“He probably wasn’t mailing invoices to people,” I point out.
“No sign of anything like that in his house.”
“Then why did she owe Howard Roth money? Why didn’t she pay him at the time he did the work? Maybe it was for a job he hadn’t finished?” I suggest.
“I’m thinking what you are,” Machado says. “The work in the basement. Nothing hooked up yet. Maybe he drops by a couple times to finish and no one’s answering the door. Maybe he leaves a note in her mailbox.”
“Maybe.”
“And whoever is impersonating her sends him a check. The perp had to have his address.” Machado’s talking to me and looking at Lucy.
“Howard Roth, forty-two years old, died over the weekend at his central Cambridge home.” She reads what she’s just pulled up. “Bateman Street. You can Google it.”
“So maybe that’s how, and he gets the check in the mail,” Machado says. “He has no account at Peggy Stanton’s bank and nothing that might inspire a teller to hand over a hundred bucks to him.”
“Her bank would have her signature card on file, and it’s not a great forgery.” I sit next to Lucy.
“I agree with you there.”
Machado pulls up a chair and unzips his briefcase.
“If you put her signature and this one side by side?”
He slides out two plastic bags, and Toby is taking his time.
“So maybe some teller pulled up her signature card and got a bad feeling, wouldn’t cash it for him, plus his driver’s license isn’t valid, like I said. And that might be what the bank was calling about,” Machado says. “There are a couple messages on her answering machine from Wells Fargo, asking her to call. First one in early June, about the time the check was mailed to Howie.”
“How do you know it was mailed?” Lucy scans information scrolling by on every screen, what I recognize as files her search engines are finding.
I can’t tell what they are. I can’t decipher what I’m seeing, and that’s deliberate, because I’m not alone.
“What’s called the power of deduction.” Machado continues looking at my niece as if she might not be a waste of his time.
She’s in faded jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt that is tight and could use ironing, and tactical boots. I’m aware of the big ring on her index finger as she moves the wireless mouse. I smell her cologne, and I can tell when she wants people to leave us alone because she has something important on her mind.
“If someone stole her identity,” Machado is saying, “then this person wasn’t going to show up at Howie’s house and hand him a check, right? Safest thing would be to mail it. My guess is it’s the same thing this person was doing with her other bills. Forging checks and mailing them, and the bank probably wasn’t going to question checks made out to the gas, electric, and telephone companies. But they might pull up her signature card when someone walks in and looks like a homeless person.”
“It’s not a good forgery, hardly a serious attempt at it,” Lucy says.
I have two transparent plastic bags side by side, the check Howard Roth never cashed, and an earlier canceled one that Machado found in a file of bank statements inside Peggy Stanton’s house.
“Not signed but written or basically drawn.” She moves close to me, her eyes locked on Toby as he finally leaves.
“I didn’t realize she was a handwriting expert,” Machado says, and now he’s openly flirting with my niece.
“I don’t have to be an expert.” She gets up and shuts her door, and Machado watches her as if she’s a tartar. “Somebody lousy.”
“Maybe he got better at it,” I reply. “June first was early on.”
Lucy sits back down. “Since when is Toby in charge of mail?”
“I sent Bryce on an errand,” I reply. “He’s taking Shaw to the vet. In fact, I’m hoping he’ll fall in love with her and decide Indy needs a sister.”
“The shaft of the letter P?” Lucy slides the plastic bags closer.
She isn’t going to talk about Toby in front of Machado. She’s got something to tell me.
“Slants differently, and you can see where the person hesitated,” she says. “Thinking it instead of doing it, and the line is slightly crooked, the shaft is. Plus, her t has a high cross bar and the other doesn’t. Her a is well formed, and the other’s not. Her n looks more like a w, and the tops are pointed, and the other’s rounded.” She shows us as she describes it, adding, “Just my thoughts. I’m not an expert.”
“You ever testify in court about this stuff?” Machado can’t take his eyes off her.
“I never testify in court about anything.”
“I don’t get it. You’d be great in court.”
“They can’t stipulate me.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer. Lucy was fired by law enforcement. She’s a hacker. A shrewd attorney would destroy her on the witness stand.
“What’s going on?” I say to her, since she’s the one who has been texting, saying she needs to see me.
“When you’re done?” It’s her way of telling me that Sil Machado needs to leave.
thirty
LUCY EXPLAINS THAT PEGGY STANTON IS CONNECTED TO the paleontologist missing in Alberta, Canada.
The fake Twitter page used to dupe Marino was set up by the same person who e-mailed the video clip of the jetboat on the Wapiti River, my niece says. The footage was recorded on Emma Shubert’s iPhone around the time she vanished thousands of miles northwest of here.
“The Twitter account with the handle Pretty Please was opened August twenty-fifth, and Twitter verified it by e-mail sent to BLiDedwood.” Lucy spells the username. “The avatar is a photo of Yvette Vickers when she was in her heyday in the fifties.”
I reply I don’t know who that is, as I look around the space my niece is in.
“A B-list actress Marino wouldn’t be familiar with. I wasn’t, either. I had to use facial-recognition software to figure it out,” Lucy says. “She’s believed to have died of natural causes in 2010, was dead the better part of a year before her body was discovered in her run-down Los Angeles home. She was mummified.”
“It’s probably not a coincidence that she was picked for the avatar.” I think of what Benton said.
A serial killer. Someone older. He targets mature women who represent someone powerful he’s obsessed with destroying.
“All Marino’s going to see when he gets the first tweet from Peggy Lynn Stanton is a picture of a beautiful sexy woman,” Lucy is saying. “Someone who describes herself as into things old with character and she doesn’t mind keeping score because hers is impressive.”
“The Twitter account was opened two days after Emma Shubert disappeared from the campsite in Grande Prairie.” I make that observation as I’m making other ones.