Only Child

were long straight hair and a prominent nose. “And here’s a still from the tape. The Mole hooked it up with some cables so we could just—”

“Sssh,” I said.

“Do you know what calipers are?” I asked Cyn.

“Sure. To measure. In school, we had to—”

“In the room where we keep the equipment, on the long table, there’s a whole set of them. Little ones, with metal points at both ends. They’re in a leather case, blue plush lining. Could you get them for me?”

“What do you need them for?”

“I’ll show you when you get back.”

“Okay.” She walked over to where Rejji was kneeling and lifted her thick dark hair with one hand, revealing a red collar and a short length of chain. Cyn grabbed the chain and pulled it sharply, forcing the brunette’s head all the way down until her nose was in the corner. “Stay!” she said.

“Was she a good bitch while I was gone?” Cyn.

“Perfect.”

“I doubt it,” Cyn said, taking a leather riding crop from a dresser drawer and walking purposefully over to the corner.

“What are you doing?” Cyn demanded, a few minutes later.

“It’s a very good match,” I told her. “And whoever thought to make the two blowups the same scale knew what they were doing—”

She leaned over, very close. “That was Rejji,” she whispered. “But she’s still being punished, so I’ll tell her later.”

I nodded, went on: “But we’re comparing a relatively sharp photo, from the yearbook, with one that has a lot more grain, from the videotape. And they weren’t taken at exactly the same angle, so I’m trying to narrow things down.”

“With those?” she asked, meaning the calipers I was holding.

“Yeah. There’s things about your appearance you can change—hairstyles, gum in your cheeks, a mustache— but there’s some things that always stay the same. A guy named Bertillon discovered this a long time ago. Way before fingerprints. The distance between the pupils of the eyes, that’s one of them.”

“Your eyes, they...”

“Yeah, I know. But that’s one in a million, Cyn. For most people, even with plastic surgery on other parts of their face, like, say, a nose job, that distance would stay the same. Nobody’s going to get their eye muscles severed just to change their appearance. You lose your—”

“I didn’t mean...”

“It’s okay. Here, look: this thing is measured in tiny units. Every time you move the points, there’s a little click.... See?”

“Oh!”

“So we lock it in like this...one tip in the center of each of her eyes, okay? Now we move it to...here, and...”

“It’s the same!”

“I think it is, girl,” I said cautiously. “I think it is.”

“You hauling the load, you get to pick the road, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

He had just finished telling me how he and Clarence had run down a couple of members of the crew that had beaten the Latin kid. “Our boy, he don’t just pop up on the set, bro. This video guy, he pulls one of the gang aside. Says he knows they jump in new members; maybe they want a tape of the next time they do one? The guy he speaks to, he goes back to the whole crew. Or maybe just to the boss, I don’t know. Anyhow, he gets permission. I asked the ones we spoke to, why didn’t they just kick the video guy’s ass and take his tape when he was finished? One of the boys, he says, yeah, that’s exactly what he would have done. But the leader, he put the kibosh on it.”

“Sure,” I said. “The boss wanted to be in a fucking movie.”

“That’s what I say, too, mahn.” Clarence. “It is true what you tell us from the start. These young ones, they are insane for this.”

“You get anything on the video man?”

“Same as you, Schoolboy. White man, nothing special.”

“They didn’t know him? From around?”

“Nope. They said he was a little older than what your guy said, but I figure that’s just in the way people see things, right? Your man Ozell, probably Mr. Video looks like a punk kid to him, so he comes up younger in his eyes. The kids we talked to, they were—what?—nineteen, tops. So a guy twenty-five, he’s old, to them.”

“Not even his car?”

“Zero, bro. Never saw it.”

“Out here, if he’s driving some generic, nobody in that age group would see it. Unless he’s trying to make his wheels stand out, they’d be invisible.”

“That’s why it’s your play to say, son. You want to use those obey-for-pay broads, it’s your call, that’s all.”

“There’s only so many ways to get people to talk,” I told them. “We’ve got a lot of cards in our hand. And we can put most of them on the table. But we can’t make people tell us what they don’t know. And if Cyn and Rejji are right, and it is the same girl, she knows more than anything we’ve got so far.”

“You’re incredible,” I said.

“That’s the consensus.” Michelle smiled. “Besides, we already had her name, from the yearbook. The rest was as easy as a crack whore.”

“Where’s this camp, exactly?”

“Up in Dutchess County,” Terry said. “We could pick up Ninety-five North at—”

“We can’t take a whole convoy up there, Terry.”

“But...”

“Anyway, I need you here. You’re our best bet at getting some of these kids to talk. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t even have the yearbook.”

“He’s right, honey.” Michelle.

“Pop?” the kid appealed.

The Mole caught Michelle’s eye, quickly ducked his head and concentrated on his equipment.

“She was a senior in that yearbook, and that was over three years ago. So she’s at least twenty now.”

“Michelle said she’s a junior in college. That sounds right,” Cyn said.

“This camp, it’s just a summer job. Supposedly, she’s done it every year since she was fifteen. Pretty fancy place.”

“We’re not just going to walk up to Administration and ask for her, are we?” Rejji said.

“Last resort,” I told them. “The map says there’s a town about ten, twelve miles from the camp. I don’t know what’s in it, or even if the counselors get weekends off, but it’s worth a shot first.”

“You’re going to pass yourself off as a college boy?” Cyn laughed.

I reached over to where she was sitting, pinched the top of one smooth thigh, hard. “I’m a casting director, you stupid bitch,” I said.

Cyn squealed...a lot more than the pinch merited.

Rejji giggled from the back seat.