“I didn’t see it,” Lucas said.
Capslock: “Neither did I.”
Sherwood said to Noah, “Rewind. Slo-mo.”
Noah rewound, started playing it forward in slow motion. Sherwood picked up a pen on the desk and put it on the back of a young blond woman in a dress that appeared pale in the black-and-white video. She was dancing several feet away from Bernie, with another man. She started backing toward Bernie, hands over her head most of the time, or reaching out to the unknown man she was dancing with, her head back, laughing.
Then her hands came down and she turned and seemed to randomly bump into Bernie, and she bounced away and continued dancing.
“Boy, she did it well,” Sherwood said. “She’s had training.”
“I still didn’t see it,” Capslock said.
Lucas, James, and Noah didn’t see it either, but Sherwood was sure. “Classic move,” he said. “Right out of the book. Believe me…I’ll tell you what. She’s having a good time, dancing her little ass off, but she’ll be out of there in less than five minutes.”
More like three minutes. She edged off the dance floor, smiled at the man she’d been dancing with, patted him on the chest, stopped for a coat, had to wait another minute, and disappeared through the door.
James and Noah had never seen her before; if she’d been in, they didn’t remember it. Sherwood said to Noah, “We need that video. Can you put it on a flash drive?”
He could.
When they had it, Sherwood said, sincerely, to James and Noah, “If you speak one word of this to anybody, ever, a man will come to your door and kill you. Look at my face. Do I look like I’m joking?”
James swallowed once, and said, “No.”
Noah shook his head.
• • •
Out on thestreet, Capslock said, “Would somebody come to their door and kill them? If they talk?”
Sherwood frowned, shook his head: “Of course not. We don’t do that.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever. But it’s sometimes nice that people think we do.”
Lucas: “Let’s show the video to Lawrence Bell. Maybe he’ll know the girl.”
“I’m going to ship it back to my office,” Sherwood said. “By the time we get to Bell’s place, we should have some enhanced stills of her. Almost like mug shots…Better than the video.”
Capslock said, “Can I come?”
“Sure. The more the merrier.”
“If that piece of junk you’re driving can keep up,” Lucas said.
24
They had to drive south across downtown Minneapolis, got clogged up in traffic a couple of times, and arrived at Bell’s house just before noon. Sherwood brought his iPad and showed them a series of still photos of the woman, which CIA photo experts had pulled from the video, enhanced for detail and colorized. The CIA thought the woman’s dress was a shimmery light green; or the CIA’s AI did.
“Better than I’d hoped,” Lucas said. “She pretty, but she’s tough.”
“Gotta get that gear for the BCA,” Capslock said. He flipped through the photos, back and forward, and said, “I don’t know her. She’s not part of the regular club scene, I don’t think.”
They spent another minute looking at the photos, then walked up to Bell’s door and pushed the doorbell. The same woman who answered the door on their first visit, answered on the second, and said, “Mr. Bell…I find him. You wait.”
She shut the door and Capslock said, “Maybe I should run around back.”
