Wild Card

Valentine leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and described the john he’d seen inside Resorts picking up the beautiful Puerto Rican hooker the week before. He saw the john clearly: Five-eight, one hundred and sixty-pounds, with a paunch, stooped shoulders and thinning hair that he parted on the left side of his head. The face was hard to remember, but that was only because the video tape had been poor. Had he seen the john in person, he was sure he’d remember him perfectly.

Valentine opened his eyes when he was done. Ernie was facing him, and he guessed by the wide motions of Ernie’s hand that he was doing the john’s hair. Finished, Ernie turned the easel around.

“What do you think?”

The face in the drawing looked a lot like the one stored in his memory. The nose, which Valentine had struggled to remember, was thick, the nostrils slightly flared. It wasn’t perfect, but renditions never were.

“That’s him,” Valentine said.

Banko called his secretary into the office, and got her to take the sketch to the Xerox machine downstairs to make copies. While they waited, Romero said, “You said you recognized the Puerto Rican hooker the john picked up. Can you describe her?”

Valentine started to do, then had a thought. Banko had been running sweeps of hookers every week. As a result, hundreds of girls had been booked in the past few months.

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said.

He led the FBI agents downstairs to the basement where the records were stored, and had the clerk on duty pull out the files of every hooker that had been arrested on the island in the past two months. There were over two hundred. Each girl’s mug shot was stapled to her record, and Valentine put them on a desk, and began sorting through them. Within minutes he was holding the Puerto Rican hooker’s record in his hand.

“You sure this is her,” Romero said.

“She was hard to forget,” Valentine said.

Her name was Maria Sanchez. Twenty-three, dark brown hair, five-foot five, originally from San Juan, she’d come to the U.S. a few years ago and immediately started turning tricks. Unlike a lot of girls, who looked frightening without a coat of make-up, Maria was a beauty.

Fuller took the file, and Valentine walked the agents outside to their car. What had started out as a pretty morning had turned ominous, and dark, muscular clouds filled the sky. Fuller and Romero shook Valentine’s hand again, then glanced at the sky.

“Think it’s going to snow?”

“Sure feels like it,” Valentine said.

“How come it feels so much colder here?”

“It’s the humidity. It cuts to the bone.”

The agents climbed into the Chevy. Valentine started to walk away, then stopped at the entrance to the station house. Sometimes the most obvious things were the easiest to miss. He caught Fuller as he was backing the car out of its space. The driver’s window came down, and Fuller said, “You think of something else?”

Valentine stuck his hands into his pockets. He’d come out without his coat and was freezing. “The Dresser is picking up hookers inside the casino. That’s his MO. Hookers think he’s a tourist, and they let their guards down.”

“So?”

“Chances are, he picked up all these girls inside the casino.”

He paused, and let Fuller think about it. Romero leaned over from the passenger side so his face was visible. “You think he might be on another surveillance tape?”

“I’d bet dollars to doughnuts on it,” Valentine said.

“Never thought of that,” Fuller said. “Can we look at those tapes?”

“We’re talking about hundreds of hours.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“I work in Resorts’ surveillance control room. I’ll show the composite to the techs who watch the monitors, and have them review the tapes. If those guys are good at anything, it’s picking a face out of a crowd.”

Fuller looked at his partner. It was an angle they’d missed. They climbed out of the car, shook his hand, and thanked him one more time.

Chapter 12

The sky had opened up like a busted feather pillow, and Romero stared gloomily at the falling snow while Fuller drove back to their motel. Stopping at a traffic light, Fuller threw the car into park and glared at him.

“What’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” Romero said.

“It’s written all over your god damn face.”

Romero blew out his lungs. He’d stopped playing cards with Fuller because his partner always knew what he was holding. “We should have talked to the rank-and-file cops the moment we got here.”

Fuller continued to glare at him. “We agreed that we wouldn’t talk to the cops until we were sure the Dresser wasn’t one of them. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Then why bring it up now?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, stop thinking it.”