this time, the one of the pale-haired man. His hair looked white in the photo. White or a very, very pale blond. There wasn't much background to help me judge his size. It was a full-face shot, up close, only his upper body showing. He was leaning over a table, talking. This was a better photo, more detailed, but I still couldn't place him.
"Was this taken with one of those concealed spy cameras?"
"Why do you ask?"
I moved the photo so she could look straight down on it. "It's an odd angle for one thing, up, like the camera is low, about hip level. You don't usually take photos from the hip. Second, he's talking but not looking at the camera, and it's too natural. I'd bet good money he doesn't know he's being photographed."
"You could be right." She took the photo from me and looked at it, turning it a little to get a better angle on it. "Why does it matter how the photo was taken?" Her eyes had gone nice and cold, good cop eyes, suspicious, wanting to know what I knew.
"Look, I've watched you guys try to question Heinrick and his friend. They sound like a fucking broken record. You can hold them for seventy-two hours, but they can spend every hour of that time saying nothing."
"Yeah," she said.
"We could go fishing. Tell Heinrick that his friends really need to watch themselves better. You can't tell where these photos were taken. The blond is just in a room."
O'Brien shook her head. "No, we don't know enough to go fishing, not yet."
"If I remember where I've seen these guys, we might," I said.
She looked at me, as if I'd finally done something interesting. "We might," her voice was cautious.
"Even if I don't remember where I saw them, if it gets close to the seventy-two hours, can we try bluffing?"
"Why?" she asked.
I crossed my arms over my ribs, and fought the urge to hug myself. "Because I want to know why this bugger is following me. Frankly, if he wasn't following me specifically I'd be more worried about St. Louis in general."
She frowned. "Why?"
"If Heinrick and crew were in town in general, then I'd say we have terrorism to worry about. Probably something with a racial bent." I touched the folder without opening it. "Though he's worked a few times for people of color, as the saying goes. Wonder how he justified that to his white supremacist friends?"
"Maybe he's just a mercenary," O'Brien said. "Maybe the fact that he's worked for the white supremacist is coincidental. They were the people who had the money at the time he needed it."
I looked up at her. "You believe that?"
"No," she said, and smiled. "You think more like a cop than I thought you would, Blake, I'll give you that."
"Thanks." I took it as high praise, which it was.
"No, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, and his dossier reads like he's a white supremacist that isn't above taking money from the very people he wants to destroy. He's a racist, not a zealot."
I nodded. "I think you're right."
She looked down at me for a second or two, then nodded, as if she'd made up her mind. "If the seventy-two hours gets close, you can come and we'll play go fish, but I think we're going to need better bait than a couple of grainy photos."
I nodded. "I agree. I'll do my best to come up with more before we have to beard the lion in its den."
"Beard the lion in its den?" she shook her head. "What have you been reading?"
I shook my head. "I have friends that read to me, if there aren't pictures, I'm pretty much lost."
She gave me another of those looks, half disgust, half trying not to smile. "I doubt that, Blake, I doubt that very much."
Actually, Micah, Nathaniel, and I were taking turns reading aloud to each other at night. Micah had been shocked that neither Nathaniel nor I had ever read the original Peter Pan,so we'd started with that. I'd then discovered that Micah had never read Charlotte's Web.Nathaniel had read the book to himself as a child, but no one had ever read it to him. In fact, he didn't ever remember being read to as a child. That was all he said, just that he'd never had anyone ever read aloud to him when he was small, but that one bit of knowledge seemed to speak