him.
The moment of uneasiness had felt almost like guilt. Tom switched on the copy machine. It began to hum. Deep in its interior, an incandescently bright light flashed once.
Tom took a wad of yellowing paper six or seven inches thick out of the satchel. The top page had long tears at top and bottom that looked like they had been made by someone trying to check the pages beneath without removing a rubber band, but there was no rubber band. Part of my mind visualized a couple of stringy, broken forty-year-old rubber bands lying limp in a leather crease at the bottom of the satchel.
He put the documents on the copy machine. 'Better err on the side of caution.' He lifted off the top sheet and repaired the rips with tape. Then he squared up the stack of pages and inserted the whole thing face down in a tray. He twisted a dial. 'I'll make a copy for each of us.' He punched a button and stepped back. The incandescent light flashed again, and two clean sheets fed out into trays on the side of the machine. 'Good baby,' Tom said to it, and turned to me with a wry smile and said, 'Don't put your business on the street, as a wise man once said to me.'
Clean white sheets pumped out of the copier. 'Do you know Paul Fontaine or Michael Hogan?' I asked.
'I know a little bit about them.'
'What do you know? I'm interested.'
Keeping an eye on the machine, Tom backed away and reached for his glass. He perched on the edge of the chesterfield, still watching the pages jump out of the machine. 'Fontaine is a great street detective. The man has an amazing conviction record. I'm not even counting the ones who confessed. Fontaine is supposed to be a genius in the interrogation room. And Hogan's probably the most respected cop in Millhaven—he did great work as a homicide detective, and he was promoted to sergeant two years ago. From what I've seen, even the people who might be expected to be jealous are very loyal to him. He's an impressive guy. They're both impressive guys, but Fontaine clowns around to hide it.'
'Are there a lot of murders in Millhaven?'
'More than you'd think. It probably averages out to about one a day. In the early fifties, there might have been two homicides a week—so the Blue Rose murders caused a real sensation.' Tom stood up to inspect the progress of the old records through his machine. 'Anyhow, you know what most murders are like. Either they're drug-related, or they're domestic. A guy comes home drunk, gets into a fight with his wife, and beats her to death. A wife gets fed up with her husband's cheating and shoots him with his own gun.'
Tom checked the machine again. Satisfied, he sat back down on the edge of the couch. 'Still, every now and then, there's something that just smells different from the usual thing. A teacher from Milwaukee in town to see her cousins disappeared on her way to a mall and wound up naked in a field, with her hands and legs tied together. There was an internist murdered in a men's room stall at the stadium at the start of a ball game. Paul Fontaine solved those cases—he talked to everybody under the sun, tracked down every lead, and got convictions.'
'Who were the murderers?' I asked, seeing Walter Dragonette in my mind.
'Losers,' Tom said. 'Dodos. They had no connection to their victims—they just saw someone they decided they wanted to kill, and they killed them. That's why I say Fontaine is a brilliant street detective. He nosed around until he put all the pieces together, made his arrest, and made it stick. I couldn't have solved those cases. I need a kind of a paper trail. A lowlife who stabs a doctor in a toilet, washes the blood off his hands, buys a hot dog and goes back to his seat—that's a guy who's safe from me.' He looked at me a little ruefully. 'My kind of investigation sometimes seems obsolete.'
Tom took the original stack of papers from the copier and put them back into the satchel. One of the copies he put on his desk, and the other he gave to me.
'Let's leaf through these quickly tonight, just to see if anything will set off some sparks.'
I was still thinking about Paul Fontaine. 'Is Fontaine from Millhaven?'
'I don't really know where he's from,' Tom said. 'I think he came here about ten-fifteen years ago. It used to be that policemen always worked in their hometowns, but now they move around, looking for promotions and better pay. Half of our detectives are from out of town.'
Tom left the couch and went to the first workstation and turned on the computer by pressing a switch on the surge protector beneath it with his foot. Then he moved to the second and third workstations and did the same at each and finally sat down at his desk and bent over to turn on the surge protector there. 'Let's see what we can come up with for that license number of yours.'
I took my notebook out of my pocket and went over to the desk to see what he was going to do.
Tom's fingers moved over the keys, and a series of screens flashed across the monitor. The last one was just a series of codes in a single line. Tom put a plastic disc into the B drive—this much I could follow from my own experience—and punched in numbers on the telephone attached to his modem. The screen went blank for a moment and then flashed a fresh C prompt.
After the prompt, Tom typed in a code and pushed ENTER. The screen went blank again, and LC? appeared on the screen. 'What was that number?'
I showed him the paper, and he typed in the plate number under the prompt and pushed ENTER again. The number stayed on the screen. He pushed a button marked RECEIVE.
'You're in the Motor Vehicle Department records now?'
'Actually, I got to Motor Vehicles through the computer at Armory Place. It runs on a twenty-four-hour day.'
'You got directly into the police department central computer?'
'I'm a hacker.'
'Why couldn't you just get the Blue Rose file from the computer?'
'The computerized records only go back eight or nine years. Ah, here we go. It takes the system a little while to work through the file.'
Tom's computer flashed READY RECEIVE, and then displayed: ELVEE HOLDINGS, CORP 503 s 4TH ST. MILLHVEN, IL.
'Well, that's who owns your Lexus. Let's see if we can get a little farther.' Tom pushed enter again, rattled through a sequence of commands I couldn't follow, and typed in another code. 'Now we'll use the police computer to access Springfield, and see what this company looks like.'
He bounced past a blur of options and menus, going through different levels of state records, until he came to a list of corporations that filled the screen. All began with the letter A. The names and addresses of the officers followed the corporate names. He scrolled rapidly down the screen, reducing the names and numbers to a blur, until he got to E. EAGAN CORP EAGAN MANAGEMENT CORP EAGLE CORP EBAN CORP. When we got to ELVA CORP., he bumped down name by name and finally reached ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP.
Beneath the name was the same address on South Fourth Street in Millhaven, the information that the company had been incorporated on 23 July 1973, and beneath that were the names of the officers.
ANDREW BELINSKI 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, P
LEON CASEMENT 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, VP
WILLIAM WRITZMANN 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, T
'Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,' Tom said. 'Who is the fugitive LV? I thought one of these guys would be named Leonard Vollman, or something like that. And does it seem likely that the officers of this corporation would all live together in a little tiny house? Let's take this one step further.'
