“You said if I thought of anything, let you know. I thought of something,” Case said.
“Yeah?”
He pointed across the street, to the house next to his: it was an imposing place, faux-Colonial with white pillars hovering over a circular front drive. “That’s the Smith place...”
“Talked to them two hours ago,” Bob said.
“They tell you about the wedding last year?”
Bob, Rae, and Lucas exchanged glances: hard to tell where this might be going. Rae asked, “The wedding?”
“Their daughter got married. About time, in my opinion, she was getting long in the tooth and had sort of passed herself around town. But that’s neither here nor there. They got married down at St. John’s and then they had a reception out to the country club and then they had an ‘at home’ pool thing for members of the wedding party.” He pointed again at the Smith house and the circular drive.“The wedding party was all in limos, maybe ten, twelve black limos, and they all came up that circular driveway, one at a time, two or three minutes part. All the people were getting out, kissing each other, going inside. A wedding photographer was out taking movies of them coming up and getting out of the cars.”
Bob said, “Yeah?”
Lucas said, “The cameras were looking across the street to this driveway.”
The old man jabbed a finger at Lucas: “Bingo. They didn’t invite me to the wedding, but they invited me over to the at-home reception because they thought I was lonely, my wife being gone, and also because they planned to play loud rock music all night and they didn’t want me complaining to the police. I was standing there on the porch watching them make the movies and I distinctly remember Will Robb coming and going in his truck.”
Bob said, “I’ll go get the movies,” and headed across the street at a trot.
Rae said, “Mr. Case, you are a sweetheart.”
—
BOBDID EVENTUALLYget the movies, but it wasn’t all that simple. At first, the Smiths weren’t at home anymore, but Case told them that Emily Smith was a realtor, and they managed to locate her. She came home and gave them a compact disc with the wedding movies on it, and watching on the Smiths’s high-resolution television, they could see license plates on Poole’s white pickup, but the movies were not quite steady enough to make out the numbers. The plates were white, so almost certainly from Texas.
Bob and Rae wanted to send the movies to the FBI’s digital imaging experts in Washington, but Lucas suggested that they first try the wedding photographer.
The photographer wasn’t working that day, but agreed to meet them at his studio. He turned out to be a short, stout, solemn-looking man who dressed all in black, including a black fedora and a black string tie with an onyx slide. He brought the movies up on a computer screen, grabbed several frames of each instance where the license tags appeared, and began enhancing them in Photoshop.
The numbers never did get particularly clear, but enough numbers were clear enough in the different frames that by putting several frames together, they pieced out a good tag number.
“If the FBI has the capabilities that they’re rumored to have, they should be able to get them a lot clearer,” the photographer told them. “But remember this—I hold the copyright on these photos, not the Smiths. You can use them, but you can’t publish them. I don’t want to see these on TV.”
“You’re being less generous than you might be,” Rae observed.
“I gotta eat. If somebody’s going to put them out to the TV stations, it’s gonna be me and I’m gonna get paid.”
“Don’t do it without talking to us first,” Lucas said. “If you put them out there, and the suspects see them, they’ll ditch the plates and we’ll come bust you for interfering with a federal investigation and maybe accessory after the fact.”
“I’ll talk to my attorney about that...”
“Sure, do that,” Lucas said. “If he needs further clarification, tell him to call me.”
—
BACK IN THE CAR,Lucas called the Rangers at the Poole/Robb house, gave them the tag number, and they promised to wallpaper the entire state with it, and all the adjacent states. Lucas warned the Rangers that the people in the truck were armed and willing to kill.
“So are we,” the Ranger said.
“Before you do that—kill them—I’d like to talk to them,” Lucas said.
“We’ll do what we can,” the Ranger said. “I’m making no promises.”
—
WHEN LUCASwas off the phone, Bob asked, “What are the chances?”
