Scam

you’ve seen it before. Remember when we were sayin’ Belcher couldn’t frame you on this one, because you hadn’t touched anything, and how could he frame you with a fingerprint lift? Well, this is better than a lift. You take an identical piece of evidence from one place and drop it in another.”
    “You mean ...?”
    “Sure. You’re at the talent agent’s going over resume photos. And guess what? When you look at photos, you touch ’em. You saw this at the talent agent’s, but you’re a moron, it don’t mean nothin’ to you, so you leave it there with the rest. Then you find this dead girl. Belcher looks at the crime scene, sees the stack of resume photos, and, bingo, light bulb goes on. A photo like that, why wouldn’t her talent agent have it? Well, what if she did and the photo was different enough from the girl to have been overlooked.” MacAullif snapped his fingers. “Bingo. Jackpot. Perfect frame.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “Even if Belcher made that leap of logic, it took me hours to go through those photos. How would he have the time?”
    “Easy,” MacAullif said. “You didn’t know what you were lookin’ for. He did. Laura Martin. I don’t know about the photos at her home, but weren’t the files in her office alphabetical?”
    I sighed. “Christ, yes.”
    “There you are. He goes to her office, looks under M . Ten minutes later he’s lookin’ at this. He dusts it for fingerprints, lookin’ for yours. Bingo, he gets a match.”
    I rubbed my head. “I’m starting to feel sick.”
    “I don’t blame you,” MacAullif said. “You know how I got this stuff? You know how it came to me? Well, I know this ADA, good guy, who happens to know the ADA handling this. Belcher came in with the shit after your arraignment went down, saying new evidence had come in and they should push to rescind bail. Same old song. Old news, and not gonna happen, but there you are. Belcher would like nothing better than to go out and drag you back in handcuffs again. Because I’m stickin’ up for you, so gettin’ you would humiliate me. That’s the way he sees it, that’s the way he’ll play it, that’s the way it’s gonna be. Meanwhile, he’s runnin’ around manufacturing evidence like there was no tomorrow.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    “Yeah. So how’d it go?”
    “What?”
    MacAullif jerked his thumb. “You and them. The boys at the company. Did you get arrested or what?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Well, that’s something. But you went up there?”
    “I sure did.”
    I filled MacAullif in on the events of the afternoon. As he listened, the frown lines on his forehead grew deeper and deeper.
    “So,” he said. “The babe gets it all. Interesting.”
    “Yeah. But not what I was looking for.”
    “How do you know it’s not? She could be the answer just fine. You look at the thing, you say, who gained the most?”
    “Yeah. But not from his death. The shares went to the widow, who voted the other way.”
    “Yeah, but could she know that?”
    “She doesn’t have to know that. She’d have to think some way they’d come to her.”
    “Maybe she did.”
    “Unlikely. Plus, if it’s her, what’s the original scam?”
    “How should I know?”
    I made a face. “Well, it’s your damn theory, MacAullif. I mean, you wanna throw these things out, you can at least defend them. But if it’s her, how does setting up Cranston Pritchert make sense? What, does she think he’s her most likely rival? How does she know that? She knows nothing about the company. Of course, that would explain how she could get such a wrong idea. But even so. Of all people, why the hell hustle him?”
    MacAullif spread his arms. “Once again, we have no facts from which to make deductions. You have a brand-new development here to check out. Which is good. This morning you were upset ’cause all you had was a dead girl. Now you got a live one.”
    “It’s not the same thing.”
    “You’re hard to please. So anyway, you did all that and didn’t get arrested?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Interesting. You talk to the same people as last time?”
    “Actually, no. I talked to Rothstein—that’s the one made the play for the widow—and Jenkins—he’s the bookkeeper. I didn’t talk to Kevin Dunbar.”
    “Why not?”
    “I dunno. When this thing came up about the girl, Amy Greenberg, I wanted to talk to her.”
    “Uh-huh. And how was she?”
    “Hostile. She kept backing away and