The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [89]
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Nope. Dead serious. This guy has a photographic memory for that sort of stuff. He estimates the odds at about a thousand to one that the girlfriend and the hooker are the same person.”
“Wait. You’re telling me it never occurred to the cops who investigated Munoz’s murder that the hooker and the girlfriend might be the same person?”
“Two biggest differences between good police work and bad police work,” Reggie said, shaking his head. “Doing your leg work and double-checking your assumptions. The guy behind the counter at the motel said the girl was a hooker, and the homicide dicks took his word for it. They must have figured he was an expert on hookers.”
“I don’t get it,” Kate objected. “Munoz sounds like a slick guy. Why would he take his girlfriend to a fleabag motel?”
Reggie looked embarrassed again. Claire intervened before Kate could get huffy.
“It’s okay, Reggie. Really.”
“Guys get turned on by all kinds of stuff,” he muttered. “Although if we’re right that the girlfriend set him up, the motel was probably her idea. She tells him she has this hot fantasy about being a streetwalker, and he hits the bait. It’s not a difficult scenario to imagine.”
Kate looked a little pink. It didn’t make me unhappy to learn that she was still naïve about some things.
“You have a picture of the girlfriend that you can match up against the footage from the motel security camera?” I asked, breaking the awkward silence.
“Of the girlfriend, yes,” he said, reaching into his jacket. “Munoz had one in his desk at work. But nothing to match it to. Munoz registered for the room, and the girl kept her face turned away from the camera.”
He handed me a snapshot of a young woman in a bathing-suit top and cutoff jeans. She was wearing dark glasses and looked considerably younger than she had when I met her, but I recognized her immediately. The girlfriend was Theresa Roxas.
30
“Run it down for me again,” Reggie said.
I was at the chart on the wall, walking him through the connections while Claire and Kate listened. My weariness had vanished.
“Theresa was the one who passed me the Saudi information,” I said, touching one of the boxes Kate had drawn earlier. “She was introduced to me by Alex. Walter and I suspect the Saudi information actually came from the U.S. government, by way of Senator Simpson. Narimanov confirmed the government link and said that Alex had been trying to back-check the information through Washington.”
Reggie rocked backward in his chair, fingers laced behind his head.
“I like the fact that this Roxas woman is a direct link between Munoz and what’s happening now.” He gestured to the chart. “It tells me you’re on the right track with all of this. But I still got a big problem understanding the logistics of what happened to Kyle.”
“The logistics or the motive?” Claire asked.
“Both, but let’s stick with the logistics. I’m going to start by assuming that Munoz was a good guy. Anyone have a problem with that?”
I glanced at Claire and Kate, and then shrugged.
“Fine. Then I’m further going to assume that it wasn’t Munoz who moved the car. You lure a guy into a motel room to whack him, you don’t let him run out for cigarettes. All the parking-lot camera saw was a big guy in a camel-hair coat. Could have been anyone.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So, these people have got