“No. What?”
“That sign.” Her tongue printed it from short-term memory: “Brixton, Nebraska. Childhood home of pro football’s Jimmy Spears.”
“Well, we’re in the right place, then,” Davis said as they passed a gas station with pumps so old they counted off gallons with rolling odometer-style meters. “Damn, look at that.”
Jesus, what am I doing here? Davis asked himself. When he first received it in his e-mail inbox, he thought this lead actually held some promise, unlike the half dozen others he’d followed up on over the last two years. Its appeal was probably only relative, however; he hadn’t received nearly as many tips as he’d expected. One thing Davis had learned was that most of these crime-fighting Web sites barely had an audience outside the webmaster’s bedroom. The whole world might be on the Internet, but the Internet was a lousy way to reach the whole world.
What is Joan doing here? he thought. The reasons he’d asked her to come were obvious. Joan had an internal device that alerted her to poisonous character the way a Geiger counter clucked at decaying uranium, and he had been waiting for the chance to lure her deeper into his conspiracy. Selfishly, he knew the more he involved her, and the less she rebuked him, the better he’d feel. The search for AK’s killer had become the most significant thing in his life, and Joan was the only person with whom he could talk about it. If he were still seeing a marriage counselor, of course, the therapist would tell Davis that every relationship he had with a woman was somehow related to his marriage. In this case, he knew it was true.
The tips didn’t arrive in his e-mail very often, but Davis checked his anonymous Internet mailbox once in the morning and again every evening. The messages were typically from an untraceable account, with a lead or a suggestion, or just words of encouragement. Most of them were crackpots, fishing blindly for the twenty-five- thousand-dollar reward. He collected and cataloged them all.
The composite of AK’s killer got better with every new batch of photos he received from the private investigator, or so Davis hoped. He had the help of new technology – a beta version of software used to enhance and age ultrasounds for the purpose of identifying birth defects – and it had sharpened details in the image. In reality, he had no way of knowing whether the picture was becoming more like the face of the man he sought. It was looking more human, more realistic, however, and after he had plugged in all the variables, the FaceForger software (which he had upgraded twice now, and become more skilled in manipulating) spit out fewer and fewer possibilities.
There were dozens of Web sites devoted to true crime, and Davis found several willing to publish some version of his story. He omitted many of the giveaway details, including location, to protect his identity, but the composite picture was out there and so was the reward. To date twenty people claimed to know this man, or to have seen him, usually on the bad guy’s way out of their town.
Several leads he eliminated for one reason or another, incoherence being the most common. Others he pursued from home with searches of public records. Following one tip, he drove to Milwaukee and snooped around a Toyota dealership to meet a salesman named Dave DiBartolo, who looked spookily like FaceForger’s imagining of the killer. He even test-drove a Corolla and received a travel alarm, after which he put DiBartolo at the top of a sad group of potential suspects mostly labeled “too young” or “not a chance.”
Then he received an e-mail from Ricky Weiss of Brixton, Nebraska.
“The fellow you’re looking for is from here,” Weiss wrote. “His name is Jimmy Spears. He’s famous.”
In an exchange of messages, Davis learned that Jimmy Spears didn’t actually live in Brixton anymore, although his parents did. Spears was a third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, and in telecasts could be glimpsed most often on the sidelines, wearing a headset and a baseball cap, gesturing to the huddle: a high- salaried turquoise-and-orange signal flag transmitting coded messages from the offensive coordinator to the line of scrimmage.
Photos of Spears were easy to come by and Davis collected them all, even going so far as to send away for a Dolphins media guide so he could add the most recent official mug shot. Blond, handsome. Davis agreed that he looked very much like the FaceForger composite – not so much the hair and nose, but certainly the eyes and chin and around the corners of the mouth – and if he put the composite side by side with pictures of Justin, it was easy to imagine one being a younger version of the other.
What interested Davis most, however, was a biographical detail first provided unsolicited by Ricky Weiss and later confirmed by Spears’s media guide biography.
“Jimmy was a great college player,” Weiss wrote. “He finished sixth in the Heisman voting the year Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl.”
Davis was not a football fan, but he remembered a big to-do about Wildcat football across several seasons some years back. Joan was a college fan (though partial to her alma mater, Cal) and Gregor was a Northwestern grad, insufferable and often clad in obnoxious purple when the Cats were winning. Still, Davis shivered when he turned to Spears’s bio:
Jimmy Spears
QB-12
AGE: 29
COLLEGE: Northwestern
Ten years ago, at the time of AK’s murder, Jimmy Spears was attending school less than five miles from downtown Northwood. And while the campus was shuttered for Christmas break that week, Davis confirmed that the players would have been in Evanston, practicing for the Gator Bowl.
Good enough to make Jimmy his best lead. For now.
They drove in a circle following a downloaded map with a less-than-thorough accounting of Brixton’s streets. Eventually, Davis backtracked to the gas station they had passed on the way in.
At the counter Davis paid in advance for fifteen dollars of unleaded, and shouted through Plexiglas so scratched and dirty the burly and bearded attendant on the other side looked like a trial witness whose identity had been obscured for television. “I’m looking for the elementary school?”
“Elementary school, high school, same difference,” the attendant replied, his voice muffled and lowered an octave by the bulletproof barrier. “Both at the end of Clifton.” He told Davis how to get there from here.
“What do you think the chances are that it’s him?” Joan asked when Davis had finished fueling and restarted the car, initiating a conversation they’d had dozens of times in the past week. “Seriously.”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Davis said, not wanting to prejudice her with his doubts.
“He looks like Justin, I’ll admit.”
Davis recalled both a recent photograph of Spears and a printout of the composite, and his eyes drifted up and to the left while his mind compared them. “It’s so hard to know.”
Brixton Elementary (constructed, appropriately, of red brick) sat at the end of Clifton Street, separated from the high school by a cinder running track and a field shared by freshly painted football uprights and soccer goals with chain nets. A pair of five-tiered bleachers sat parallel to one sideline.
There was no designation for faculty or guest parking, so they left the Taurus in a space next to an aging but clean Honda Civic, and made their way to the principal’s office, according to a plan they’d formulated shortly after buying plane tickets.
“Hi.” Joan smiled at the receptionist, who operated an enormous old phone with square plastic buttons representing each line in and out: some labeled with the appropriate number; some lit white, some not; all depressed only with great effort from a locked finger. “My husband and I are considering a move to this area and were wondering if we couldn’t take a quick look around the school.” Davis noticed an involuntary shiver along his arms and back when he heard Joan refer to him as “my husband.”
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “Welcome to town – that is, if you decide to move here. Where do you live now?”
“Saint Louis,” Davis interrupted, unsure if he and Joan had covered that beforehand, although he was certain as soon as he said it that Joan would have been capable of a good or better lie. On second thought, it might have been better to have just said Chicago. It might have helped them keep their stories straight.
“Well, I wish you had called ahead so we could have arranged for a formal tour.” As the receptionist looked about the room – for what, it was difficult to say – the door behind her opened and another woman emerged, younger and more sternly dressed, in a tan suit with a paisley scarf covering her neck and clavicle, and her hair piled and styled in a knot above her head.
