There was a single knock at the door and a bland young man in a coat and tie strode in, put a manila folder on the desk, and left.
Blackstone spent a few seconds looking at each of three sheets of paper. “On June eleventh of last year, someone who looks like you and had your driver’s license bought that rifle at a sporting goods store in Des Moines.” He slid over one sheet, a grainy photograph apparently from a store’s security camera. A person who looked something like me was buying an M2010-AW9.
“That’s not me,” I said. “I mean, I know it’s not me because I wasn’t there; I’ve never been in that store. But it doesn’t really look like me, anyhow.”
He took the picture back and examined it. Shook his head and got a jeweler’s loupe from a drawer and looked again. “Maybe, maybe not. Can you explain the driver’s license?”
“Well, no. Not if they had the neutron-counting thing.” I’d been sent a new license a couple of years ago with the ID dot: traces of two radioactive elements, the proportions different for each person’s license, impossible to forge. Some small stores didn’t have the neutron counters, but probably all gun retailers did.
He handed me my license. “This checks out. It is the one that was used to buy the gun.” He looked at Kit. “Ms. Majors, you are a mathematician. You know Occam’s razor.”
I knew that one; the simplest explanation is probably the right one. But she knew the whole thing: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
“Exactly. So for your story to be true, Mr. Daley, these are the entities: a miscreant had to steal your driver’s license before June eleventh, use it to buy a weapon, and return it undetected to your wallet before today. That is not impossible. But a simpler explanation is that the picture is you. And you had some arcane reason for setting this up.”
I looked at Kit. “That’s what I said you people would say. That it was just a publicity stunt.”
“Can you prove you were somewhere else on June eleventh?”
“June tenth is my birthday,” Kit said. “He took me out to dinner in Iowa City—did you use a credit card?”
“Probably.”
“That’s less than compelling. You could still be in Des Moines the next day.” He slid the picture an inch toward me. “I think the burden of proof is on you.”
“We slept together,” she said, her voice strained. “I was with him the next day, and he didn’t buy any gun.”
“Were you with him all day? Do you remember?”
“No, I wasn’t. That was a Wednesday and I taught at 10:00.”
He tapped the picture. “And you? Do you know where you were on that Wednesday?” He leaned forward and read the date stamp. “At 12:30 in the afternoon?”
“Hell, I probably slept in.” I took the picture and studied it. The guy was wearing clothes that could have come out of my closet, which proved nothing: jean jacket and blue jeans, white shirt.
“I don’t have boots like that,” I said, not expecting him to be impressed. “Wait, though… I looked it up, and a gun like this costs $2,600 new. I don’t have that kind of money to spend on anything. You can check my bank and credit card records.”
“We have, of course.” He slid over another sheet, with a scanned copy of a receipt. “You paid cash. There’s no record of your having withdrawn that amount, but…” He shrugged.
“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” I supplied. “But if this were a publicity stunt, why didn’t I try to get some publicity?”
“I never used that word,” he said. “Many of the people who come through this office have done things for reasons I don’t understand—reasons they don’t understand.”
“So now I’m crazy.”
“That’s a layman’s term, Mr. Daley. Not very useful to us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Are you a shrink as well as an agent?”
He almost smiled. “In fact, I am an ‘analyst,’ but not a psychoanalyst. And all I meant was that perfectly reasonable people do things that are not reasonable—literally not for reason.
“In the absence of further evidence…” He took a business card out of a tray and handed it to me. “I’m afraid Mr. Occam has raised his razor. Do contact us if you have evidence of a law being broken.”
“It’s a sniper weapon, for Christ’s sake! You’re not concerned about a sniper weapon appearing and disappearing?”
“It’s a hunting rifle, a very popular model.” He leaned forward and put the card in my shirt pocket. “It has been returned to your trunk.”
“Along with a bug of some kind, I trust?”
“That’s not my department, Mr. Daley, but I sincerely doubt it. We have a lot of work to do without making more.” He peered into the desk screen. “Do let us know if you have a change of address or phone number. Good day?”
“You think this is some kind of a gag I set up?”
“Your words, Mr. Daley. Do you need help finding your way out?”
“You can’t…” A big black guy in a tight dark suit was walking toward us. “No. We’re outta here.”
“One thing, please,” Kit said in a strained voice. “How can you say for sure that this photo isn’t a fake? Please?”
He picked it up and scowled at it. “Any electronic image could be manufactured from the ground up, Ms. Majors, pixel by pixel.” He tapped the date stamp in the corner, with its bar code. “This part would be almost impossible, though. You would have to know the security protocols of the company that made the camera, just to start.”
“You could do it.”
“Homeland Security? No, we don’t have any facilities for that—or none that I know of. I suppose some other agency might—but the cost, to make a counterfeit security image that we couldn’t detect? Unless you’re a closet millionaire, or indeed some kind of super spy, no.” The black guy loomed next to him. “Thank you for your concern. You have been good citizens, bringing this to our attention. We’ll keep our eyes open.” His own eyes looked back down into the screen. The black guy’s eyes gestured toward the elevator.
The shimmering oven of the parking lot was momentarily a relief, after that huge tax-funded refrigerator. The asphalt was so hot it felt spongy.
“Do you think that’s it?” Kit said.
“I hope not. I mean, the guys who’re after us must know we’ve been here. That might up the ante.”
“Or they might decide to give up,” she said. “Rather than risk the wrath of James ‘Pepper’ Blackstone.”
“Whatever. I guess we want to drive slowly and leave a trail of bread crumbs.”
We paused in the shade of a tree, incongruously planted in the middle of the lot, and stood on its grass. “Suppose we’re wrong,” I said, “in assuming that your car is bugged.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how could they have bugged it in Iowa City? They might have followed me to the Hamburger Haven. But there’s no way they could’ve known you’d stop there and drive off with me a few minutes later. Mess with your car in broad daylight. So it’s me they’re following, my body.”
“Or they were at the time,” she said. “They’ve had plenty of time to work on the car since.”
“Yeah. They probably buy bugs by the six-pack.” I suddenly felt nauseated. “What if it is my body? Like they put it in my food and it attached itself to my stomach.”
“Could they do that?”
“I don’t know. They can make them really small.”
“I mean, it would pass on through. Really. If something attached itself to your stomach or intestines, it would make you sick, wouldn’t it?”