Chapter 29

They took us to police headquarters after courteously (I thought) allowing me to alert our friendly neighbors to care for Brownie. The dog had been a nagging worry to me; I hadn't wanted her carted off to a pound, but neither had I felt comfortable saying anything to the neighbors ahead of time. It was a small comfort, especially since Brownie was visibly nervous as they began searching the house.

Once at headquarters they took the usual photos and, of course, fingerprints, Lee's and mine. Then they herded us into separate rooms and left me, at least, alone for a while, presumably to stew about my situation.

I didn't stew, I just sat calmly. I wasn't concerned about Lee, she'd be out pretty quick. I'd told her to admit to her maiden name but say nothing else, nothing at all, except to demand her lawyer. And Spook had already put a call in to the lawyer I'd retained; his first job would be to spring her loose. I reckoned he could manage it fairly expeditiously, there were no meaningful charges against Lee and holding a seven-months-pregnant woman on bullshit would make them look God-awful in the media.

The room where they'd sat me appeared to have some soundproofing, but it wasn't proof against the kind of sounds I heard coming from the hallway a few minutes later.

"Goddammit, of course they match!" Richard was yelling at someone. "I know what I'm talking about!"

"And I know fingerprints, and I'm telling you there's no match," a tenor voice replied, just as forcefully. "It isn't even close! Here, look for yourself."

The voices dropped to an indistinguishable murmur for a couple of minutes and then there was silence again for a little while as they apparently walked off down the corridor. It was about ten minutes later that Richard finally came into the room, a grim look on his face.

"You changed the prints, didn't you, Jack?" he said abruptly as he walked over to sit down opposite me across an empty table. He slammed down a folder.

"Prints?" I asked disingenuously.

"Fingerprints," he snapped.

I looked down at my hands curiously. "I didn't know that could be done," I said, deliberately misunderstanding. "Has plastic surgery become that advanced?"

He glared at me. "The records, not your fingers," he said. "You changed them, didn't you?"

"How would I do that, sir?" I asked politely.

He heaved a weary sigh. "Jack, it's just not good enough," he said. "I know it's you. Your wife admits who she is, how about saving us all this silliness and doing the same? We have more than prints, you know, you gave us a DNA sample when you started at..."

He trailed off as he saw me shaking my head gently, and sighed again. "Shit. You got that, too. We'll do it anyway, but I guess..." Another sigh.

Then he brightened up. "There's more, though, a lot more. Photographs—" his face fell abruptly, remembering. He opened the folder and pulled out the paper I guess he'd had at the house. He pushed it over to me; it was the altered ID picture. "This is you, right?"

I pretended to study it. "Seems a perfectly presentable young man," I said, passing it back to him. "But of course it isn't me, as you can see yourself."

That earned me another glare, but no argument; the changes I'd coached Spook into making that first day were subtle enough that there was still a passing resemblance, but nobody could pretend it was a good likeness.

"There are voice-prints, too, you know," he said abruptly. "We have every one of your phone calls to me, even the first ones; we recorded them all."

This one bothered me a little, more than I cared to show him. For the last three years I'd been having Spook alter my voice just a bit on my calls to Richard, not enough to be noticeable but plenty to throw off any digitized comparison. But there were a lot of earlier calls, before I'd thought to take the precaution; I knew I'd have to count on the normal way a person's voice changes over time to protect me there.