you and your companion weren’t the same color.
“Jamie’s video tape.”
“Really?”
“My son the celebrity. CNN made dubs of his tape for editing, but Jamie got his original back. Then the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department asked if they could get a look at the tape, and of course my good little citizen was happy to cooperate with law enforcement.”
“I’ll bet he was having the time of his life.”
“You bet he was. Well, they got the Coast Guard into the act and studied some of the landmarks in the background of the tape, studied their precious maps and decided that the helicopter crashed in Nevada.”
The waitress was back with their drinks. The glass containing Lindsey’s Irish coffee was hot. He wrapped his fingers around it, savoring the heat. He looked at Marvia Plum and smiled, then looked past her at the bay, remembering the time he’d gone overboard from a powerboat near the San Rafael Bridge, a bullet in his foot. That was the first time he’d worked with Marvia Plum, the first time he’d got to know her. It was just a few years ago, but he remembered himself as another man living in another world. That had been a series of experiences that had changed his life. It had ended with a young man dead in an alley in Berkeley, a young woman in a wheelchair in Richmond, a strange man named Francis Francis dead in San Francisco Bay, and an individual whose seething envy of those more talented than himself had led to those tragedies, in prison. That man, a former university professor named Nathan ben Zinowicz, still haunted Hobart Lindsey’s dreams.
But that had been years ago. Lindsey looked at Marvia Plum and felt a warmth inside his chest. He reached across the table and touched her cheek, lightly.
“Is Washoe County in charge of the case, then?”
Marvia smiled. “It’s a can of worms. Turns out that initial jurisdiction is federal. Airspace is federal, especially on an interstate flight. NTSB is interested in the cause of the ’copter crash, but other than the safety kids, the feds are delighted to hand off to anybody else who’ll take the case. So —- it may wind up in California, it may wind up in Nevada. For the moment, Nevada has it.”
Marvia sipped at her hot toddy, then lowered it to the tabletop. “They’re trying to get that fiber-optic scanner down to the chopper. If they do, they’re going to need a top computer graphics analyst to help them with it. They’ve already called one in to try and sharpen up Jamie’s tape. See if they can get an image inside the ’copter bubble before it hit the water. One guess who the designated genius is.”
“Fabia Rabinowitz.”
“Bingo! Your old friend from Cal, right here in town. And guess who’s the designated liaison officer between all of these entities.”
“That’s great. It means we can talk about this project, feed each other information without having to sneak it out the back door.”
“Yep.”
“How did you fall into that job?”
Marvia laughed. “You know there are only nine people in the world, right? And all the rest are just holograms.”
“I’ve had the feeling a few times.”
“The phone rings at McKinley Avenue this morning and it’s a sergeant from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department calling to set up liaison with BPD. I catch the squeal—”
“I love it when you talk cop.”
“—and the voice I hear sounds strangely familiar. Turns out it’s Willie Fergus.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“We were in the army together. We were MP’s in Wiesbaden.”
“Colleagues? Friends?”
“We dated a couple of times. Before I got mixed up with the wonderful Lieutenant Wilkerson. I wound up pregnant, then married, then discharged, then divorced, then back in school, then a cop.”
“Ah yes, I remember it well.”
“Willie joined up young, did his twenty and out, and now he’s US Army retired and a sergeant for the Washoe County Sheriff. And you know what?”
Lindsey didn’t know what.
“Willie thinks there’s something fishy about this whole case.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Lindsey watched Chicago grow through the window of a 757. O’Hare would be a madhouse, O’Hare was always a madhouse, but it was all part of the job. He felt better about the Vansittart case knowing that Marvia Plum was involved in it at the California end, and he felt good about leaving Mother in the capable hands of Gordon Sloane.
Sloane was the best thing that could happen to Mother. She’d been robbed of her husband at the age of seventeen by a tragedy at sea off the coast of North Korea. She’d spent the better part of forty years in a mental fog, devoting what little sense of reality she’d retained to raising the son her husband never lived to see.
It was only when Lindsey started, ever so cautiously, to untie the apron strings and move away from her, that Mother began to discover herself. She was not yet sixty. She was healthy, intelligent, even attractive. There was still time for her to have a life.
Lindsey recognized the Sears Tower, then Lake Michigan, the pale sun of a late winter’s afternoon glinting from its surface. Lindsey shivered. January in Chicago might be no colder than it was in Tahoe, but somehow he knew it would feel colder.
Before leaving California, Lindsey had posted a message on International Surety’s KlameNet/Plus system, addressed to his friend and onetime roommate Cletus Berry, now a SPUDS agent in New York. The message included a sketchy rundown on the Vansittart case and the information Lindsey had got from Scotty Anderson. He asked Berry to check on Lovisi in Brooklyn and see what light he could shed on the matter, especially regarding the inquiry Lovisi had received about Paige Publications.
The Boeing touched down and rolled to a stop. Lindsey waited obediently for the captain to signal, then stood up and retrieved his heavy coat and hand luggage from the overhead rack. He was wearing his official cold weather traveling suit, with a cloisonné potato pin in the lapel. He’d had enough of airline baggage checks.
He’d phoned the SPUDS rep in Chicago, Gina Rossellini. They’d never met, and he wondered what she was like. Her name conjured up the image of a glamorous Italian actress, surely a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. Yes, Lollobrigida as she’d appeared opposite Bogie in Beat the Devil. And Loren—well, there could be no question. Boy on a Dolphin opposite Alan Ladd. Lindsey’s fantasies took a detour when he heard Rossellini speak. She sounded like a character out of Death in the Ditch.
Lindsey had Scotty Anderson’s Paige Publications bibliography in his pocket. It was also in his computer and in the electronic case file he’d transmitted to SPUDS headquarters in Denver. Whatever happened to him on this case, the information was safe.
When Lindsey came through the gate he spotted a woman holding a placard with a picture of a potato on it, identical to the one on his lapel. That was the SPUDS logo. She looked like an Italian actress, all right, but not like Lollobrigida or Loren. She looked more like Anna Magnani, Rose
