“Continue,” Schoon said.
“That’s it.” Spider shrugged. “I been here ever since.”
“Living as Al Lapasa.”
“Keeping clean. Paying taxes. Even got a pooch.”
“Your real identity, sir?”
Face Mask looked at Epstein.
Epstein nodded.
“John Charles Lowery. Born March twenty-first, nineteen fifty, in Lumberton, North Carolina. Father Plato. Mother Harriet.”
I knew. Still, hearing it sent an electric charge through me.
“Look, I gotta eat,” Spider said. “How about you scare up some sandwiches, maybe a couple sodas.”
Schoon looked momentarily undecided. Then, “Perhaps we do need another break.”
Nickie’s lawyer rose and walked off-camera. I suspected he’d decided it was time to phone his client.
I turned to face Ryan and Lo.
For a full thirty seconds no one ventured an opinion. Lo went first.
“My gut says this asshole’s full of shit.”
“It has to be Spider,” I said. “Who else would know about Long Binh? The Huey crash? Xander’s reason for traveling to Vietnam?”
“How could Xander have been on a military chopper?” Lo asked.
“Civilians hitched rides all the time,” I said.
“He look right for it?”
I pulled two pictures from my purse. The snapshot I’d found in Jean Laurier’s desk drawer. The team photo Plato had taken from his album.
The three of us studied the face of young Spider. That of the man on the screen.
Both had the same dark eyes and heavy curved brows.
“Hard to tell with the mask,” Lo said. “Plus this guy’s circling the drain.”
“The eyes seem right,” Ryan said.
“If the man’s lying, what’s his motive?” I asked.
No one had a theory on that.
“One thing bothers me,” Lo said. “How’d this Spider, not being Samoan, hook up with SOS?”
Or a theory on that.
“If he is legit, that would explain Spider’s dog tag turning up with Xander Lapasa’s body,” I said.
“It
“No,” I agreed. “But it would explain why DNA showed that that man could not be Harriet’s son.”
“Anyone thirsty?” Lo rose.
“Diet Coke,” I said.
“Coffee.”
“Don’t start without me.” Lo disappeared through the door.
To pass the time, I looked again at the photos. There was Spider leaning on the Chevy. There he was, a scrolly number 12 on his chest.
I wondered what position Spider had played. If he’d enjoyed baseball. How often the coach had sent him into a game.
Plato said a cousin got Spider to join the team, that his son mostly rode the bench.
What was the cousin’s name?
Reggie. Reggie Cumbo.
I looked at Reggie, down on one knee, unsmiling. The resemblance to Spider really was uncanny.
Plato said the boys were related through Harriet.
I pictured the old man as he spoke of his wife. Again felt his grief.
What had Plato said? Harriet had pretty eyes, one brown, one green as a loblolly pine.
A minute particle popped into being in my brain.
Fingerprints said the man who died in Hemmingford was Spider Lowery.
