The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,66

that. As expected with a contract investigator, Levin had larded the file with everything found in the net he had cast. He even had copies of the parking tickets and speeding citations Roulet had accumulated and failed to pay in recent years. It annoyed me at first because there was so much to weed through to get to what was going to be germane to Roulet’s defense.

I was nearly through it all when the waitress swung by my booth with a coffee pot, looking to refill my mug. She recoiled when she saw the battered face of Reggie Campo in one of the color photos I had put to the side of the files.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

I covered the photo with one of the files and signaled her back. The waitress came back hesitantly and poured the coffee.

“It’s work,” I said in feeble explanation. “I didn’t mean to do that to you.”

“All I can say is I hope you get the bastard that did that to her.”

I nodded. She thought I was a cop. Probably because I hadn’t shaved in twenty-four hours.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

She went away and I went back to the file. As I slid the photo of Reggie Campo out from underneath it I saw the undamaged side of her face first. The left side. Something struck me and I held the file in position so that I was only looking at the good half of her face. The wave of familiarity came over me again. But again I could not place its origin. I knew this woman looked like another woman I knew or was at least familiar with. But who?

I also knew it was going to bother me until I figured it out. I thought about it for a long time, sipping my coffee and drumming my fingers on the table, and then decided to try something. I took the face shot of Campo and folded it lengthwise down the middle so that one side of the crease showed the damaged right side of her face and the other showed the unblemished left side. I then slipped the folded photo into the inside pocket of my jacket and got up from the booth.

There was no one in the restroom. I quickly went to the sink and took out the folded photo. I leaned over the sink and held the crease of the photo against the mirror with the undamaged side of Reggie Campo’s face on display. The mirror reflected the image, creating a full and undamaged face. I stared at it for a long time and then finally realized why the face was familiar.

“Martha Renteria,” I said.

The door to the restroom suddenly burst open and two teenagers stormed in, their hands already tugging on their zippers. I quickly pulled the photo back from the mirror and shoved it inside my jacket. I turned and walked toward the door. I heard them burst into laughter as I left. I couldn’t imagine what it was they thought I was doing.

Back at the booth I gathered my files and photos and put them all back into my briefcase. I left a more than adequate amount of cash on the table for tab and tip and left the restaurant in a hurry. I felt like I was having a strange food reaction. My face felt flushed and I was hot under the collar. I thought I could hear my heart pounding beneath my shirt.

Fifteen minutes later I was parked in front of my storage warehouse on Oxnard Avenue in North Hollywood. I have a fifteen-hundred-square-foot space behind a double-wide garage door. The place is owned by a man whose son I defended on a possession case, getting him out of jail and into pretrial intervention. In lieu of a fee, the father gave me the warehouse rent-free for a year. But his son the drug addict kept getting into trouble and I kept getting free years of warehouse rent.

I keep the boxes of files from dead cases in the warehouse as well as two other Lincoln Town Cars. Last year when I was flush I bought four Lincolns at once so I could get a fleet rate. The plan was to use each one until it hit sixty thousand on the odometer and then dump it on a limousine service to be used to ferry travelers to and from the airport. The plan was working out so far. I was on the second Lincoln and it