I reminded her about the FBI. “Thomas is already on their radar for sending e-mails to the CIA and Bill Clinton. Say we call the New York police, or even the Promise Falls cops. That’ll probably trigger some sort of alarm, and the FBI’ll be notified. And when the FBI brings everyone up to speed on my brother’s activities, that he’s been writing the CIA with all his street memorization updates, just how seriously do you think anyone’s going to take him? Especially when what he claims to have seen is no longer on Whirl360?”
Julie’s shoulders slumped. “Shit. But there’s more than just what Thomas saw, and you still have the earlier printout. And there’s that missing woman.”
“Who may or may not still be missing,” I said.
“Yeah, but that can be checked. Ray, I get your hesitation here, and being worried that the cops will think there’s nothing to it, but I gotta tell ya, this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I’m going to call Whirl360 and talk to whoever’s in charge of muddying images on the site and ask if someone hacked into it. Or if they changed it themselves for some reason.”
“And you think I should call the cops,” I said.
“I think you should call the cops.”
I raised my hands in defeat. “Fine, I’ll call the cops. Which ones?”
“NYPD,” Julie said.
“I don’t even know what precinct that would be.” Using Dad’s laptop, we concluded it was the seventh. I entered a number on the Web site into my cell phone. “Here goes,” I said to Julie while I waited for the connection.
“Yeah, hello,” I said when someone picked up. “I need to talk to a…I guess I need to talk to a detective.”
“Is that an emergency call, sir?”
“No, it’s not. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not an emergency.”
“Hold on.”
A few seconds later, someone else picked up. A man with a gruff voice. “Simpkins.”
“Hi, my name is Ray Kilbride. I’m calling from Promise Falls.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Okay, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I just need you to hear me out. My brother may have witnessed a homicide. Or something.”
“What’s your brother’s name?”
“Thomas Kilbride.”
“And the reason you’re calling and he isn’t?”
“I think he’s more comfortable if I do this.”
“And that’s because?”
“Look, that really doesn’t matter, and the thing is, he’s not really the only witness.”
“Who else is a witness? Are you a witness, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Sort of. The thing is, there could be a great many witnesses. There’s a record of the crime on the Internet. At least, there was.”
A pause at the other end of the line. “I see. Who got killed, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Okay, I don’t know for certain that anyone did, but it looks like someone being killed in a window. And it might be a woman named Allison Fitch.”
“Is this something you saw posted on YouTube, sir?” the detective asked, his voice already filled with skepticism.
“No, it was on Whirl360, where you can—”
“I know what it is. You telling me your brother thinks he saw a homicide on that site?”
“That’s right. Listen, at first I thought he was imagining it, but—”
“Why would you have thought he was imagining it, sir?”
“Because my brother has a history of psychiatric problems and—”
Click.
I looked at Julie.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I’d have hung up, too. Could you have laid it out for him any worse?”
“I told you it was a bad idea.”
Julie threw her hands up. “Okay, you were right, I was wrong. You want to stay out of this, not get Thomas involved, I suppose that makes perfect sense. You’ve got no stake in this personally. And even if someone did see you with that printout, they’ve got no idea who you are.”
“That’s right. I didn’t give anyone my name.”
“Well, there you go,” Julie said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
FORTY-TWO
“LET me have a look at the picture again?” the woman behind the counter said.
Lewis Blocker handed her the printout at the art store in Lower Manhattan. It was a screen-capture image from the surveillance video shot through the door of the Fitch apartment. It was the best image he’d been able to get of the man who’d come knocking with the Whirl360 image in hand. The face was slightly fish-eyed, but Lewis thought it was good enough for someone to make an identification.
She’d already glanced at it once and said she didn’t know the guy, then decided she wanted to have another look at it.
“So what’d this guy do, exactly?”
“Credit card fraud,” Lewis said. “Identity theft.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s a big problem.”
Lewis guessed the woman was around thirty. Jet black hair, skin like Morticia Addams, ruby red lipstick. She had studs in her ears, one through her right nostril, and another just below her lip. Lewis wondered how many other piercings she had that weren’t visible, where they might be.
She held the sheet in her hand and cocked her head to one side. “His face looks kind of puffy.”
“That’s just the way the camera makes it look,” Lewis explained.