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“Another beer?”
Simpson glanced at his ale glass. “Yes, please. Same one.”
“And you, ma’am?”
“Uh . . . I’ll have the . . . ,” she hurriedly scanned the menu, “ . . . the . . . uh . . . seafood pasta, salad with vinaigrette, and another glass of wine.”
“Thank you. I’ll bring the soup, salad, and drinks right away.”
When the waitress was out of earshot, Greta sighed. “Quite a story. The obvious question is . . . is any of it true?”
“I think you pretty well believe it already. However, here are a couple of people you can check with.” He laid a piece of paper on the table and pushed it toward her. She picked it up and read the names, titles, and phone numbers of the head of the Oregon State Police and the Western U.S. head of the Marshal Service.
She felt a little lightheaded. “I think these might be reasonable references. Of course, I’ll look up their names and numbers myself. Not that I don’t trust you, of course.”
“Of course you don’t trust me and shouldn’t. Not at this stage. The expectation is that once you’re satisfied, you’ll forget that Robert Simpson exists. While M-two may not have handled this too well, he was not exaggerating the consequences if higher powers decide you’re a threat to some very important cases.”
“Assuming this checks out, I’ll crawl back into my hole and be a good little girl,” she assured him. Now she was starting to feel like an idiot for stirring up things that had no connection to the Toompas murder. “Maybe there is something to the stereotype of the rube rural cop.”
“Nonsense. You were following up on an open case and accidently stumbled into something else. Like that abalone poacher you caught.”
“How the hell do you know about that?” she blurted out.
Simpson gave her the first smile that she trusted was genuine. “Once you mentioned the name Toompas, it wasn’t hard to check it out. Toompas isn’t a common name, and I didn’t even have to use official channels. An Internet search on Toompas and Greta Havorsford led to your homicide case and the contribution a certain Deputy Havorsford had in the apprehension of a major abalone poaching and interstate transport ring. Can I speculate that your murder and the abalones had some connection?”
She burst out laughing so hard, the table shook. Nearby patrons looked their way and smiled. “It was a phase of the investigation when we were checking out some of the items found in his car.” She went on to outline the case without realizing she had accepted his story and was treating him like a fellow officer.
“So, the Fish and Game person identified half a dozen likely places he thought regular poaching could proceed unobserved, and we kept an eye on them.” She explained her use of the motion-activated camera borrowed from Fish and Game to identify a car suspiciously active at one of the presumptive sites.
Simpson nodded approval. “Nice piece of work. Clever using the camera that way, and it shows patience to follow through on the identification.”
Greta felt herself flushing. Compliments were still difficult for her to receive, though she was secretly pleased with herself, even if abalone poaching had not been the original goal.
They continued talking about the case. He asked questions, and she answered. By the time their dinners arrived, Simpson knew as much as she did. As they ate, he asked a casual question that had major consequences.
“The thing I’m wondering, how did you get my fingerprints?”
Greta shifted uneasily in her seat. “Do you remember eating at the Ocean Brewery last week? You were sitting with another man.”
“Yes. A local preacher or something. He just sat down and was trying to recruit me to come to his church. I forget his name or what church he was from.”
“Josiah Balfour, pastor of the Church of God Arising in Bay City, north of Tillamook City.”
“That sounds right. I was polite, but fortunately I was about finished anyway. I got the impression he could be pretty pushy.”
“I’ve only met him once, so I don’t really know him. From what I hear, the church has been growing, and he’s one of those fire-and-brimstone types. Anyway, I waited until the two of you left and then pilfered your water glass, lifted the prints, and dropped them at our office in Tillamook to run the prints.”
He frowned. “That shouldn’t be right. My prints and all other records that might identify me were supposed to be removed as part of the undercover. If you ran my prints, it should have come back as no match.”
She shrugged. “All I know is that Jasmine, the person who ran the prints, said that at first she got a felony record from Ohio. Before she could print out the record, it disappeared and was replaced by a message about ‘Restricted Access.’”
He frowned. “I’ll have to check into this. It should have said ‘No Match.’ Refusing access impli
es a match being hidden for some reason. To a suspicious mind, that would be a major red flag.”
“Yeah, but you’re out of it now.”
“Maybe okay for me, and maybe not. If it’s a glitch in our system, we need to fix it before someone gets in trouble. And you say a felony record came up? That shouldn’t be since I have no such record. I’ve never been to Ohio, except to drive through. I may have been over the speed limit, but unless Ohio is really anal about speeding, there shouldn’t be any record because I wasn’t stopped. Are you sure about all this?”
