"What of it?" she said, hands clasped over the file folder on her desk like she was shielding it from me, as if I'd snatch it and run with it.
"He was following me, O'Brien, why? I've never been out of the country. What does an international bad ass like this want with me?"
She gave a small frown. "You really don't know why they were following you, do you?"
I shook my head. "No, and would you want someone like that following you around?"
"No," she said, and her voice had softened, was uncertain. "No, I wouldn't." She looked up at me, eyes hard, but not as hard as they had been. She didn't apologize, but she did hand me the file folder. "If you really don't know why they're after you, then you need to know just how bad a man you've dug up . . . Marshal Blake."
I smiled. "Thank you, Detective O'Brien."
She didn't smile back, but she did send Detective Webster for fresh coffee for both of us. She also told him to make a fresh pot, before he poured our cups. I was liking Detective O'Brien more and more.
37
His name was Leopold Walther Heinrick. He was a German national. He was suspected of almost every large crime you could think of. And by large I mean not petty. He wasn't a purse-snatcher, or a con artist. He was suspected of working for terrorist groups worldwide, mostly those with a decided Aryan bias. It wasn't that he'd never taken money from people that weren't out to make the world safe for bigots, but he seemed to prefer to work with them. He'd been linked to espionage that specialized in helping paler people either stay in power or get power over people that were less pale.
The file contained a list of known associates, with pictures of some of them. A few of the pictures were the equivalent of mug shots, but most were grainy faxes of surveillance photos. Faces in profile, faces caught dashing to cars, into and out of buildings in distant countries. It was almost as if the men knew they were being photographed, or feared they would be. There were two faces that I kept coming back to--two men--one in profile wearing a hat, and the other a blur of face staring out at the camera.
O'Brien came over to stand beside me, looking down at the two pictures that I'd laid side by side on the edge of her desk. "Do you recognize them?"
"I'm not sure." I touched the edge of the pictures, as if that would make them more real, make them give up their secrets.
"You keep coming back to them," she said.
"I know, but it's not like I know them-know them. More like I've seen them somewhere. Somewhere recent. I can't place them, but I know I've seen them, or two people very similar." I peered down at the grainy images, gray and white and black, made up of little dots, as if the fax was a copy of a copy of a copy. Who knew where the original had come from?
O'Brien seemed to pick up what I was thinking, because she said, "You're working from faxes of bad surveillance photos. You'd be lucky to recognize your own mother in these."
I nodded, then picked up the one with the big dark-haired man in it. He was about to get into a car. There was a generic older building behind him, but I wasn't a student of architecture, it told me nothing. The man was looking down as if watching his step off a curb, so I didn't have a full front view even. "Maybe if I could see a front shot. Or did they send us all they had?"
"They sent me all they had, or that's what they said." The look on her face said she wasn't sure she believed that, but she had to act as if she did. "They're pretty worried that more of Heinrick's friends might be in the states. We're going to be giving a stack of these photos to the patrol cops, with orders to follow and report, but not to apprehend."
"You think they're that dangerous?" I asked.
She gave me a look. "You've read Heinrick's resume, what do you think?"
I shrugged. "Yeah, he sounds dangerous." I went over the list of known associates again. "None of these rings a bell." I closed the folder and laid it behind the two pictures. I picked up the second photo