Lost Light

across the desk with currency numbers on it, she puts them into her computer, adds them to the data bank. She can run cross-matches, things like that. It was a new program she was working on. She’d been doing it for a few years and had a lot of numbers in the box. Tell you what, I need some water. My throat-too much talking.”
    “I’ll go get Danny.”
    “No, no, that’s not-tell you what, just go to the sink and put some water in that thing you got and I can drink from that. That’ll be fine. Don’t bother Danny. She’s been bothered enough.”
    In the bathroom I filled the flask halfway with water from the faucet. I shook it and brought it out to him. He took it all. After a few moments he finally continued the story.
    “She said one of the numbers on our list was on somebody else’s list and that was impossible.”
    “What do you mean? I’m not tracking this.”
    “Let me see if I remember this right. She said that one of the hundreds that was on our list had a serial number that belonged to a hundred that was part of a bait packet taken in a bank robbery about six months before our movie set robbery went down.”
    “Where was the bank robbery?”
    “Marina del Rey, I think. I’m not sure about that, though.”
    “Okay, so what was the problem? Why couldn’t the hundred from the earlier bank robbery get recirculated, land back in a bank and then become part of the two million sent to the movie set?”
    “That’s what I said and Jack told me that it was impossible. He said the agent said the guy who took that bill in Marina del Rey in the first place got caught. He had the bait pack on him and he went to the federal clink and the bill was held as evidence.”
    I nodded and thought about this, trying to get it right.
    “You’re saying that she was telling you that it would have been impossible for the hundred on your list to have been part of the movie delivery because at that time that hundred-dollar bill was in evidence lockup in regard to the Marina del Rey bank robbery.”
    “Exactly. She even went in and checked the evidence to make sure the hundred was still there. It was.”
    I tried to think about what this could mean, if it meant anything at all.
    “What did you and Jack do?”
    “Well, not much. There were a lot of numbers-six pages’ worth. We figured maybe we just got a bad one. You know, maybe the guy who recorded it all had messed up, transposed a number or whatever. We were running on a new case by then. Jack said he’d make some calls to the bank and Global Underwriters. But I don’t know if he did. Then, soon after that, we walked into the shit in that bar and everything else sort of drifted away… until I thought about Angella Benton and called you. Things are starting to come back to me now, you know?”
    “I understand. Do you remember the agent’s name?”
    “Sorry, Harry, I don’t remember the name. I might’ve never had it. I didn’t talk to her and I don’t think Jack even told me.”
    I was silent while I considered whether this was a lead worth pursuing. I thought about what Kiz Rider had said about the case being worked. Maybe this was the angle. Maybe the people she told me about were FBI agents. While I was working it over, Cross started talking again.
    “For what it’s worth, I got the idea from Jack that this agent, whoever she was, sort of came up with this thing on her own. It was her own little program she was running. Almost like a hobby. Not on the official computer.”
    “Okay. Do you remember if you ever got any other hits on the numbers? Before this one?”
    “There was one but it didn’t go anywhere. It came up pretty soon, in fact.”
    “What was that?”
    “It came up in a bank deposit. I think it was Phoenix. My memory’s like Swiss cheese. A lot of holes.”
    “You remember anything about that one at all?”
    “Just that it was a deposit from a cash business. Like a restaurant. Something we weren’t going to be able to trace any further back.”
    “But it was pretty soon after the heist?”
    “Yeah, I remember we jumped on it. Jack went out there. But it was a dead end.”
    “How soon after the heist, can you remember?”
    “Maybe a few weeks. I don’t know for sure.”
    I nodded. His memory was coming back but it still wasn’t reliable. It served to remind me that without the murder book-the case documentation-I was severely handicapped.
    “Okay, Law, thanks. If you remember or think of anything else, have Danny call