The Art of Deception

A Good Shooting

LaMoia spotted Janise Meyer from a concrete bench within a few yards of the plaza fountain across from Westlake Center, his heart pounding with the possibility of what she carried. She wore an ankle-length khaki trench coat, the waist belt not fas-tened, but tied like a robe. Brown flats with bare brown ankles.

Hair the color of midnight with matching eyebrows and lashes.

Green eyes that screamed improbably of an Irishman somewhere in her African American heritage. Thick lips that curled into a provocative smile that he’d liked from the first time he’d met her. She adopted that same smirk now as she sat down on the bench next to him, a leather briefcase on her lap.

“So why the cloak and dagger, Cowboy?”

“You’re smuggling out confidential paperwork there, Janise.”

“Printouts of confidential paperwork,” she reminded, passing the half ream of paper to him. “I could have e-mailed them to you, for Christ’s sake. It would have saved me walking the six blocks over here.”

“True story.” LaMoia leafed through them. It had been a while since he’d ridden patrol. It took him a moment to orient himself to the small forms-citations for everything from speeding to parking violations. “Our e-mails are watched, right?” he asked the pro. “Listen, if I get in trouble for this, I wanted it on my head, not yours.”

She accepted the closest coffee, lifting it out of his lap. She sipped through the small hole in the lid, savoring it. He remembered that about her-she treated a cup of coffee like it was an elixir. Treated a lot of things that way, come to think about it.

A pair of teenaged boys raced by on skateboards, testing new moves.

She said, “I don’t know why you want this-him going over to Sheriff’s and all, but that’s what you got.” She informed him, “Metro used to archive the traffic ‘cites’ on microfiche. Now it’s all digitized.”

LaMoia flipped pages while Janise enjoyed the coffee.

She said out of the side of her mouth, “Double-check stub number thirty-five MN seven thirty-two.”

In trying to convert LaMoia to a love of jazz, Boldt had once told him that good music was as much about what was left out-what wasn’t there-as the notes one heard. A true connoisseur of music learned to listen for what was missing. To LaMoia, that advice had been an oxymoron until the moment he turned to the citation Janise had mentioned. Prair’s citation records from two years earlier were missing an entry for 35MN-732.

“You’re shitting me,” he let slip. The copy of 35MN-733, the next in sequence, carried ghostly images familiar to any cop who’d ever used a “carbonless” ticket book-the ballpoint pen impression from the missing carbon of 732 had carried through to 733, the result of forgetting to insert a divider ahead of the next record. The same thing happened to LaMoia with his check-book. It took a moment for his eyes to decipher one entry from the next. The fainter impressions slowly began to stand out in his mind’s eye.

A minute later an excited LaMoia was on his cell phone to the Department of Licensing, reciting a tag number to a bored bureaucrat on the other end. “I need it A-SAP,” he said.

Janise Meyer pulled the coffee away from her lips and said, “Damn, Cowboy, you get any more worked up, you gonna blow a valve or something.”

LaMoia made eyes at her, not wanting to speak with the open line.

She said, “What’s so special about a missing citation, other than it’s against regs to tear one from a book?”

The woman on the phone calmly read the name of the owner of the vehicle back to him. LaMoia thanked her and disconnected the call.

“Dana Eaton,” he said, his brain locked on the name.

On hearing the name, Janise spilled the coffee down her front and wiped it away quickly, cursing him. “The Dana Eaton?”

There wasn’t a cop on SPD that didn’t know that name-a name beaten into the entire population by a media feeding frenzy.

Janise yanked the pages out of LaMoia’s lap and flipped back and forth, checking the dates of the traffic citations immediately before and after the one that was missing. “Can’t be right,” she said. “This is like two months before the shooting.” It took a moment to sink in. “Are you telling me he knew that woman?”

LaMoia couldn’t get a word out. He’d sensed it all along; only now could he actually prove it hadn’t been a “good shooting” after all.

Nathan Prair was going to jail.