Naked Prey

is theft—guys dipping coins out of other people’s coin buckets,” Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. “See, like this lady, she’s pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you’re on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can’t see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads.”
    He led them to a cubicle at the back of the room, where an Indian man with two careful red-ribbon-tied braids was poking at a computer. “Les, are we still on last night’s tapes on Number Twelve?”
    “Yeah. That’s good for another couple of days.” The man looked curiously at Lucas and Del.
    “State police,” Hoffman said. “Looking into the Jane Warr thing.”
    “Hanged,” Les said. He toyed with the end of one of his braids. “That sort of freaked me out when I heard it. She won’t be on Twelve, though . . . ”
    “We’re looking for another fella. Go to ten o’clock. Start there.”
    The computer guy typed in a group of codes, and they waited, fifteen seconds, then twenty, and finally awide-angled color film came up. The people in the film moved in a herky-jerky motion, indicating that the camera was shooting at a super-slow rate. “There he is,” Hoffman said, tapping the camera.
    The camera was looking down a long row of slots from slightly above. Two-thirds of the way down the row, a tall man in a dark coat, watch cap, and glasses was playing one of the machines.
    “Can we get a closer shot of him?” Lucas asked.
    “Not from that camera—we could have zoomed in if we thought he was up to something, but he never did anything,” Hoffman said. “I just noticed him when I was down there because he didn’t seem right. I forgot about his glasses, though.”
    “How about another camera?”
    “The overhead won’t help, but we’ve got a camera coming across from the side, but it’s gonna be partly blocked by the machines.”
    “Number twenty-eight,” Les said. “I can get it if you want it.”
    “Get it,” Lucas said.
    Number twenty-eight showed slices of the man’s face, only marginally more clearly than the first camera. “Is that the best there is?”
    “Probably got him walking in or out on number thirty-six, but I don’t know when he arrived. Leaving, we’d only get the back of his head . . . It’d take some time. I don’t know how much better the shot would be,” Hoffman said.
    “We could take the flashes we got of him on twenty-eight, freeze the shots, and then stitch them together and we’d have his whole face,” Les said. “I could do it in Photoshop.”
    “How long would that take?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never done it, but I think I could. I could print the best partial shots, too.”
    “Let’s try it all,” Lucas said to Hoffman. “We can get a subpoena to make it all legal.”
    “That’d be good,” Hoffman said. “It’d help publicity-wise, if somebody asks—but we could get started right away. Look, look where he keeps looking.”
    “What?”
    Hoffman tapped the monitor. “See, he keeps looking over the top of the machine, sideways. That’s where Jane is. She’s out of the picture, but he keeps looking over there. Here comes Small Bear . . . ”
    A woman pushing a change cart moved into the picture. When she got to the man, she stopped and spoke to him. He nodded, took out his wallet and gave her a bill. She gave him a stack of coins, said a couple more words, then pushed on down the aisle.
    “Who’s that?”
    “JoAnne Small Bear. Been working here since we opened.”
    “We need to talk to her,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna need all the tape you’ve got of this guy. Even the overheads. He might be wearing a ring or a watch, and that could be a good thing to know.”
    Hoffman nodded. “Sure. I’ll have Les pull out everything we’ve got. You’re a hundred percent sure it’s him?”
    “No. Only about ninety percent,” Lucas said. “Ninety and climbing.”
    “How about this Small Bear?” Del asked. “Where can we get her?”
    Hoffman looked at his watch. “She’s gotta be checked in by now—she works the three-to-eleven. Let’s go find her.”
    J OANNE S MALL B EAR looked nothing at all like a bear—she looked more like a