“Russell, thank you. I’ll keep you up to date.”
“Stay safe,” Forte said. “I don’t like the sound of that thing from last night.”
—
LUCAS TOOKthe elevator down, ate breakfast, took the elevator back up, and found forty-seven driver’s license photos attached to an email. Twelve were women, which, if not irrelevant, wouldn’t match any of the faces either he or the hotel security man had seen.
He flipped through the forty-seven, returning a couple of times to the image of a James Harold Ritter, age thirty-nine. Heresembled the man whose mask he’d pulled down. He’d been wearing a green tennis hat low on his forehead, so Lucas wasn’t positive about the ID, but the chin and mouth looked right. He got on the phone and called Schneider, the hotel security chief, and asked if Jeff Toomes was on duty. Toomes had seen the man he thought might have come from Lucas’s hotel room.
Toomes was in the hotel, and Schneider said he’d send him up. He arrived ten minutes later, smelling faintly of onion rings. Lucas let him in, sat him at the desk in front of Lucas’s laptop, and let him scan the photos.
“I don’t think so,” he said eventually. “Photos aren’t so great, but none of them ring a bell.”
—
AS LUCAStook him to the door, Toomes turned, and said, “Let me show you something.”
He swerved into the bathroom, where a box of facial tissue sat on the sink counter. He pulled out a sheet, tore off a quarter-sized piece, dropped the rest of it in the toilet, touched the small piece to the tip of his tongue, wetting it, wadded it into a small spitball, and pressed it into the peephole of the door.
“These peepholes work both ways,” he said. “There was this freak who’d go around making movies of famous women who were walking around their room naked. He was shooting through the peephole. I’m told that you can buy special lenses for that specific purpose, on the Internet. Unless you want to take the chance that somebody’s looking at you, keep the spitball in it.”
“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “You’re good at this hotel security stuff, huh?”
“Yeah, I am,” Toomes said. “A lot of weird shit happens in hotels. It’s interesting.”
—
WHEN HE WAS GONE,Lucas called Forte. “I need everything you can find on James Harold Ritter. You’ve got his license info, so that’s a good start. Nothing’s too small.”
“I’m in a meeting. Give me a couple of hours.”
“Fine. I’m going to go scout his house, see what I can see,” Lucas said.
“Easy, boy.”
He did not leave immediately. Instead, he called Smalls, and said, “You’ve got a woman working for you at the cabin. Janet Walker...”
“Yes, she runs a caretaking service for absentee landowners.”
“I need her phone number,” Lucas said.
Smalls went away for a while, then came back for the number. “Her cell phone; she usually answers right away.”
She did. Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you have access to the Internet?”
She said, “I live in West Virginia, not on the friggin’ moon.”
“Great. Do you have it handy?”
“I’m in the yard. I’d have to walk into the house.”
“I’m going to send you eight or ten photographs. Tell me if any of them look like the guys you saw driving the F-250.”
The whole round-trip with the photographs took five minutes. Lucas sent ten, and, after examining them, Walker said, “The third photograph—that looks like the driver. I’m not sure I could swear it was him, if it went to court, but it looks like him.”
“Thank you,” Lucas said. “Keep this under your hat, if you would.”
—
