light into the crack between the door and the jamb, turned the knob as far as he could, then turned it back.
'Can you open it?'
'Yeah.' He took the wallet, a trifold, from his pocket. He opened it, laid it flat on the floor and slipped out a thin metal blade.
'What're you doing?'
'Magic,' he said. He put the blade in the crack between the door and the jamb, and rotated the blade downward; the bolt slipped back. 'Shazam.'
The office was small, untidy, with lime-green walls, a metal desk with a phone, four chairs, a bulletin board and file cabinets. A faint smell of mildew and old cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Lucas put his lock set back into his pocket, Cassie stepped to one of the file cabinets and pulled open a drawer. Hundreds of eight-by-ten photos were jammed into manila folders. She took out two, a bulging pair, and laid them on the desk.
'He'll be in these,' she said. She started going through them, tapping Druze's face wherever she found it. 'Here… here… here he is again.'
'He's good at avoiding the camera,' Lucas said. He took several of the photos and held them under the light. Druze was always in stage paint or makeup. Sometimes his face was obscured by a hat; at other times by a hand gesture.
'Here's the best one so far,' Cassie said, flipping a photo out to Lucas.
Troll, he thought. Druze had a round head, too large for his body. And although he was wearing makeup, there were obvious changes in his skin texture, as if his face had been quilted together. His nose was shortened, ruined.
'That's the best,' Cassie said, finishing with the pictures. 'But, ah…' She glanced at another file cabinet.
'What?'
'If we can get this other cabinet open, we could look through the personnel files. There may be a straight head-shot… The cabinet's always locked.'
'Let's look,' Lucas said. He glanced at the lock on the cabinet, took a pick out of the wallet and had the lock open in less than a second.
'That's fast,' Cassie said, impressed.
'For office file cabinets, you get more of a master key than a pick,' Lucas said. 'I'm not that good with the picks.'
'Where do you get them?' she asked.
'I know a guy,' Lucas said. He pulled open the top drawer and found a file labeled 'Druze.' Inside was a block of what once had been eight wallet-sized photos, headshots, straight on, no makeup. Two of them had been cut away with scissors. 'Passport shots. And he does look like the cyclops, kind of,' Lucas said. He went to the office desk, found a pair of scissors in the top drawer, cut out one of the photos and showed it to Cassie.
'Uh-huh.' She glanced at it, then went back to the file she was holding.
'What's that?'
She looked up, a piece of notebook paper in her hand, a sad smile on her face. 'It's my file. There's a note from Elizabeth. It says my work has to be evaluated in case financial circumstances worsen.'
'What does that…?'
'She was going to fire me,' Cassie said. A tear trickled down her cheek. 'Fuckin' theater people, man…'
Lucas used the pick to lock the cabinet. The office door locked from the inside, then simply pulled shut. On the way out, they turned off the lights.
Cassie had taken Armistead's note, and when they were back in the car again, she reread it under the dome light. 'I can't believe it,' she said. 'I can't believe she'd do this.'
'Well, she's gone-things have changed,' Lucas said. 'I've seen you act, and you're good…'
'But she was supposed to be my friend,' Cassie said, wadding up the note. 'We talked together. We were always talking about what we wanted to do.'
'Your friends… are sometimes different people than you think they are. Most of your friends are halfway made-up. They're what you'd like them to be.'
'Do you mind if I sit here and cry for a couple of minutes?'
'C'mon,' said Lucas, 'that'd really bum me out.' He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead, and she grabbed his jacket lapel and buried her face on his shoulder. 'C'mon, Cassie…'
He stroked her hair and she cried.
CHAPTER 24
Daniel, looking from the photograph to Lucas, was stunned. 'We got him? Like that?'
'Maybe,' Lucas said. 'He fits what we know about the killer. He looks right, he acts right, and my friend says he's something of a sociopath. He had reason to kill Armistead. And Bekker gave me those tickets, which suggested that his wife had something going at the theater…'
'We've had two guys full-time on that and as far as they can tell, nobody ever saw her there-or remembers it, anyway,' Daniel said. He looked at the photo again. 'But this guy looks like the cyclops.'
'And we've got those American Express charge slips…'
'Yeah, yeah.' Daniel scratched his head, still looking at the photo of Druze.
'I think we need to put a team on him…'
'We'll do that, definitely. Since we pulled the team on Bekker…'
'The problem is, if Druze saw that story, he might have thought we were watching him.'
A thin smile creased Daniel's ruddy face. 'So for the past two days he's been slinking around with his back to the wall, seeing spies.'
'I was thinking…'
'Yeah?'
'You could accuse Channel Eight of damaging the investigation, saying they tipped an unnamed suspect to the surveillance and the police have been forced to pull the surveillance after the suspect confronted a departmental officer… that being me.'
'Yeah. Hmm. It'd back off the TVs a little, too,' Daniel said. The grin flicked across his face again. 'I'll have Lester do it. He'll enjoy it.'
'And if there's a political kickback, you can always blame it on him,' Lucas said, grinning himself.
'Did I say that?' Daniel asked innocently, his hand over his heart. 'About this guy, Druze… maybe we could get some video on him, walking at a distance, show it to this kid out in Maplewood.'
'Yeah, good,' Lucas said.
'We oughta do that today,' Daniel said. He walked around his desk, staring at the photo as if it were a talisman.
'I still think Bekker's in here somewhere,' Lucas said. 'If Druze and Bekker are talking, maybe we can come up with some phone records.'
Daniel nodded. 'We can do that, too. All right. Make a list for Anderson, tell him to do it,' Daniel directed. 'Now, how're you planning to get this picture to Stephanie Bekker's lover?'
Lucas shrugged. 'I haven't got that figured…'
'Try this,' Daniel said. He sat behind his desk, opened his humidor, stared into it and snapped it shut. 'I've been thinking about it. Channel Two still goes off the air sometime after midnight. We ask them to go back on at, say, three o'clock, with the photo. Just for a minute. Nobody'd see it, unless they were accidentally clicking around channels. And the lover would be safe. He could get it on any TV in the metro area, cable or no. And if he's got a VCR, he could record it.'
'Great. Have you got any clout with Two?' Lucas asked. Channel Two was the educational station.
'Yeah. Shouldn't be a problem.'
Lucas nodded. 'Sounds perfect. I'll have an ad in the StarTribune tomorrow morning. When he calls me, I'll try to talk him in. If he won't come, I'll tell him when to watch.'
'Until then, we treat Druze as though he was the one. And let's get with the other people on this, so everybody
