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“Well then, that’s where the cost comes in. You’ll need to grease the right palms or have a skill with hacking, and an unregistered. So you’d be switching the fingerprints all the way back, replacing with your own. And that means transferring them from childhood on, if you want to be thorough—and he did. It’s the first change where the hitch is most easily tripped. After that, it’s you, isn’t it? In your new skin.”
She frowned up at him. “How many forged IDs have you provided and/or used in your shady career?”
He smiled. “It’s a good living for a young lad with certain skills and considerable discretion, but was hardly my life’s work.”
“Hmm. Yeah, I ran the prints. They come up Flores, so he went deeper and hacked, or paid someone to hack, into the database to change them. The rest is pretty standard identity theft.”
“To do otherwise, to save a few pennies, would be foolish.”
“Having the face work though, that adds coin, time, trouble. That’s long haul.” She pushed away from her desk, to think on her feet, to move through it. “That’s major commitment.”
“To go to those lengths, and for that amount of time, means you’d be giving up yourself, wouldn’t it? Your name, your face, the connections. You’d have to strip off your own skin to slip on someone else’s. A commitment, yes. Maybe your victim wanted a fresh start. A new life.”
“He wanted more than that. I think he came back here, to New York, to that neighborhood specifically. He picked this place, so he knew this place. He was hiding, and needed to change the face—and he was patient.” She thought back, murmured, “ ‘And thus, having had long patience, he got the promise.’ ”
“Is that so?”
“I figure the patient get run over in Promiseland more than half the time, but the Bible says no. He had that passage highlighted in his. And this other one . . .” She had to walk back to her desk to look it up. “ ‘With me are riches and honor, enduring wealth and propriety.’ ”
“A promise of money, respect, stature,” Roarke speculated. “Yeah, all of that fits, and for some all of that’s worth killing for, and waiting for. It’s nice to have familiar surroundings while you wait—and maybe you even get a charge out of seeing people you know, and knowing they don’t recognize you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “People tell priests stuff, right? Intimate, personal stuff. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”
“I had an acquaintance once who sometimes posed as a priest.”
“Because?”
“Cons. As you say, sins are confessed, which is handy for blackmail, and collection plates are passed regularly. I didn’t like the gambit myself.”
“Because?”
“Well, it’s rude, isn’t it?”
She only shook her head. She knew the things he’d done, and yet understood he was the kind of man who’d find bilking sinners rude.
“Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe he blackmailed one of the sinners, and he or she sent him to hell. It’s got a nice rhythm to it. Fake priest using collar to con marks, mark uses priest ritual to off fake priest.”
She turned away from the desk, wandered around the room. “But I’m not going to get it, not going to get the thing, until I get him. Who was he? I need the tat. I need the lab to push through the reconstruct of the tattoo. That’s something. Figuring he had it removed and the face work done around six years ago, and getting a bead on where the actual Flores was last alive and well will give me an area to focus on.”
She looked back at Roarke, who simply sat where he was, watching her. “There’s always echoes, right, always shadows? That’s what you e-geeks say about the hacking, the layering, the wiping data. And there’s always a way to get down to those echoes and shadows.”
“Almost always,” Roarke replied.
They wouldn’t find yours, Eve thought. But how many had Roarke’s resources or skill? “If he was as good as you, or could pay someone as good as you, he wouldn’t have been playing priest in Spanish Harlem. He’d have been hiding out and waiting for whatever it was on some balmy beach.”
“I can’t fault your logic.”
“It’s all speculation. It’s all projection. I don’t like working that way. I’ll get Feeny and EDD digging into this tomorrow.”
“And you? What will you do tomorrow?”
“I’m going back to church.”
He rose, moved to her. “Well then, let’s go sin first.”
“Even I know it’s not a sin if you’re married.”
He leaned down, nipped her bottom lip. “What I have in mind might be.”
