“Yes, and cities.”
“Where they live or where they did the invention?”
“Don’t know.”
“Anybody named Lincoln?”
“No.”
“Anybody from Cleveland.”
“Didn’t check by city, yet.”
“Okay.”
Jesse looked at the donuts.
“Boston cream?” he said to Molly.
“You know, like Boston cream pie, except it’s a
donut.”
“And Boston cream pie is a cake, isn’t it?”
“Technically.”
Jesse took a Boston cream donut from the box and put it on a napkin in front of him and looked at it.
“I bet it would be easy to get this all over you,” he
said.
“Easier than you can imagine,” Molly said.
“It may be that only
women can eat them.”
“The neater species,” Jesse said.
“Exactly.”
They were quiet while Jesse took a careful bite of the donut.
He
chewed and swallowed and nodded slowly.
“Good body,” Jesse said, “with a
hint of
insouciance.”
“Insouciance?” Suit said.
“I don’t know what it means
either,” Jesse said. “Suit, you get
hold of Healy. Tell him we need the names of everybody who rented a car the day of the shooting. He’ll have a list.
They’ve already
told me there’s no one named Lincoln.”
“And I’ll see how many ocular scanners are listed from
Cleveland,” Molly said. “It might narrow the cross-referencing.”
“Don’t bother,” Jesse said.
“We’ll have to check every name
against the list of car rentals, anyway. They might not have patented it from Cleveland, or in Cleveland, or whatever the hell one does to get Cleveland mentioned.”
“And when we’re done?” Suit said.
“If we get a match we might have their new identity.”
70
Before he went to work, Jesse drove out to the Neck to see Candace and the dog. It was early March and still wintry with the ugly snow compacting where the plows had spilled it. The sky was overcast. As he drove across the causeway, the ocean, off to his right, was a sullen gray, with a few seabirds wheeling above it.
When he got out of his car at the top of Candace’s long curved
driveway he could smell the approaching snow. It hadn’t taken him
long, when he’d come from Los Angeles, to learn the anticipatory
smell of it. There were cars in the driveway when Jesse arrived, so he parked on the street and walked up. A sign hanging from the knob on the front door read OPEN HOUSE, BROKERS ONLY, PLEASE COME IN.
Below the invitation was a small logo with a house in it, and the words “Pell Real Estate.” Jesse went in. A woman sat on a folding
chair at a card table in the hall. She had a pile of brochures on the table in front of her, and a guest book. Jesse could hear voices and movement elsewhere in the house. The sound had the kind of echoed quality that one gets in
