eight years, she had always been uncomfortable when she thought about credit. That was something she had gotten as part of the settlement after her failed marriage.
Kevin had been an optimist. When the marriage had ended, the extent of Kevin’s optimism had become apparent. He had been running up the balances on his credit card accounts for a long time, on the theory that his future salary increases would make the overruns seem tiny. After Catherine divorced him, the credit companies had been quick to inform her that the growing balances on debts he had incurred before the divorce were her responsibility as much as his. It had taken time for her to legally separate her portion of the debt from his, get a second mortgage on the house she had bought in Portland, and pay off the credit companies.
It had been a painful process for Catherine, and not only because it was a time when she’d needed money, but because she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about where the debt had come from. Kevin had assured her that he had gone into debt only to spend money on her. He had not been very specific, so she looked at two years of old bills. The credit cards had been used for lunches and dinners at restaurants where she had never been, and hotels in Palo Alto, the town where they had lived. Cheating on Catherine had been expensive.
Today, when Catherine read the three credit reports, she was relieved to see that her credit was extremely good. She supposed that paying off her half of Kevin’s debts must have healed whatever wounds her marriage to him had inflicted on her rating. Maybe she’d gotten a few extra points for being a sucker.
She went carefully down the list of open accounts. There were a couple of department store charge cards that she had forgotten. She had accepted them years ago because they had been offering large discounts to customers who opened charge accounts. They had approached her when she was buying her first bed after the marriage. It had cost eleven hundred dollars, and getting the card had saved her about two hundred. The other occasion was when she was still in the academy and making practically nothing, and was forced to agree to go out to dinner with a visiting couple from the days when she had been married to Kevin. She had known that they were still in touch with him, and she’d needed to have them tell him that she looked magnificent, so she had bought a dress, coat, and shoes that she couldn’t really afford.
There was one account that she could not remember opening. It was a Visa. She looked for the issuing company. The issuer was the Bank of the Atlantic. Her stomach dropped: Kevin? How could he have done that to her? She had already paid for his girlfriends. She repeated the question to herself. How
She kept staring at the entry. It wasn’t right. The social security number wasn’t hers. And it said, “Additional card.” What did that mean? Could this be somebody else’s credit card that had been added to her credit report by mistake?
She looked at the reports from the other two services. The card was listed on all of them. The one from Experion said, “Primary cardholder SSN” and listed a second social security number. That explained the “additional card” business. The Catherine Hobbes Visa card was on someone else’s account. Her eyes widened as all of the implications began to pass through her consciousness at once. A person on the run could get a credit card in her own name and an additional one in a false name. She could travel under the false name, and any business that ran the credit card would get the response that it was genuine.
Catherine reached for the telephone, then stopped, her hand in midair. It was too late to reach the captain anywhere but at home, and she wasn’t sure what she believed, what she wanted to tell him. She decided what she was going to do, half-stood to go to her spare room to turn on the computer, then remembered that she wasn’t in her house anymore, and the computer wasn’t fifty steps away in that direction. She was in a small apartment, and the only computer was the laptop she had signed out from work. She went to the big briefcase she had brought in, unlocked it, and took out the laptop.
She plugged it into the telephone line, turned it on, and waited for the connection to the Internet. It took a very long time, then failed to connect, so she started the process over again. She was so impatient that she almost unplugged the computer to reconnect the telephone, but she forced herself to wait. It would not do to make a lot of fuss over what might amount to a relatively harmless credit reporting error.
She got connected, then found the Web site of the Bank of the Atlantic. She clicked on credit card accounts, then “Access your account,” then gave the account number that was on her credit reports and the social security number of the primary cardholder. A box appeared that said, “Password.” She swore under her breath, but then thought for a second. She typed in “none.” A new page appeared, asking, “Would you like to create a password?” She had been right: there had been no password entered before. She clicked on the “yes” box. She typed in “Steelhead,” the name of her first dog.
What appeared next was the current month’s charges for the account. There were two women on the account, Laura Murray and Catherine Hobbes. Under “Charges for Laura Murray” there was nothing. Under “Charges for Catherine Hobbes” there was plenty: “Stahlmeyer’s Dept. Women’s Wear, $2,436.91. Sybil’s, $266.78. The Mine, $93.08. Tess’s Shoes, $404.00. La Mousse, $56.88.” All of the charges had been made within the past couple of weeks. Catherine copied the bill into an e-mail and sent it to herself, then studied it one more time.
All of the stores were in Portland. They were all on the west side of the river, downtown. Catherine was sure she knew who this was. Tanya had made her mistake.
Catherine was operating now on an intuition. The part of it that was defensible was something that all cops were aware of and that the captain would understand: cops knew that coincidences existed, but not in the convenient numbers that people in trouble usually claimed. When coincidences turned up in the course of an investigation, they had to be viewed with skepticism. It was possible that even though there was no other Catherine Hobbes registered to vote in Oregon, and none besides her who had a telephone number, listed or unlisted, it didn’t mean that one had not arrived in the past month. But that was unlikely.
The part of what she intuited that was not quite defensible would be difficult to explain to the captain, and it was the part that seemed most compelling. Catherine had a feeling about Tanya Starling. She had noticed that Tanya changed her identity more often than circumstances required. She seemed to change her name every time she arrived in a new city, every time anything happened that she considered unpleasant or unsuccessful. It reminded Catherine of the urge some people had to take a shower and change their clothes whenever they had a bad experience. Catherine was sure that she found it exciting, maybe even amusing. Tanya was getting very good at making or obtaining false identification.
Another thing that Tanya had done repeatedly was try to hurt Catherine Hobbes. Could a mysterious credit card in Catherine’s name come up now and not be connected with Tanya Starling? It could, but it was unlikely. But how had Tanya done it? One possibility was that Tanya had been posing as the woman listed as the primary cardholder.
Catherine called the Denver Police Department and spoke with a woman who identified herself as Detective Yoon. The detective listened attentively to Catherine’s story and agreed to find out whether there was a woman named Laura Murray living at 5619 LaRoche Avenue in Alameda. If there was, Detective Yoon would try to discover whether she had some knowledge of how her record and social security number had been used to get a credit card in the name Catherine Hobbes.
Detective Yoon called Catherine Hobbes the next afternoon at the police bureau. She said, “There is a Laura Murray, and she’s sitting in front of my desk right now.”
“She is?” said Catherine. “Is she somebody who might have helped apply for the card, or just a victim?”
“She doesn’t know anything about it. She’s twenty-two, with no criminal record—no record of any kind except two old tickets, one for speeding and a parking violation. She’s got a good job, and has lived here all her life.”
Catherine said, “Let me fax you a set of pictures. See if she recognizes them.”
Five minutes later, they were on the telephone again. “She remembers her,” said Detective Yoon. “They met at a nightclub about two months ago in Denver, near Larimer Square. She says that when the girl in the picture danced with a man, she asked Laura to guard her purse. Then when Laura danced, the girl in the picture held Laura’s purse.”
“Thank you,” said Catherine. “This is a big help. Do you mind letting me speak with Laura?”
A moment later, a new voice came on the phone. It was young and nervous. “Hello?”
“Hello, Laura. This is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes, Portland Police Bureau. I want to thank you for your cooperation. It’s very important to us. I need to ask you now for a little more help.”
“What do you need?”
