Chapter 9
The pictures that Lynn took were quite good, though at first, Mike wasn’t sure that she would actually hand them over. It was only after he paid for dinner, apologized profusely, and told her about his near-death experience that she relented.
Like always, he was impressed with her intuition about the situation, yet it didn’t change the fact that he didn’t want her getting involved.
It was going to be a problem. He knew that she wouldn’t be satisfied for long. Mike needed to work quickly.
The pictures of Mrs. Benzini inside the gallery were clear shots, showing not only who she spoke to, but also the people who hovered around her. Mike worked tirelessly into Tuesday night trying to identify everyone in the pictures.
He was able to use facial recognition for everyone in the photographs. The program wasn’t as sophisticated as the FBI’s, but it was still quite good – frighteningly good for being available to the general public.
Mike didn’t trouble himself with that, though. He had other things to worry about. He created a board that listed all of the people’s information, but nothing jumped out at him. There were no red flags, and no one was particularly interesting.
The woman herself – Lorraine Benzini – was interesting. According to Lynn, the suit that she was wearing that night was worth more than four thousand dollars.
That was a detail that Mike wouldn’t have picked up on. He had no eye for fashion. Yet the fact that she flaunted her wealth so openly told him something: Mrs. Benzini was Mr. Benzini’s biggest liability.
She might be his only liability. The man himself seemed impenetrable. His record was clean, and nothing ever linked back to him.
Oh, except his kid Chet, the goofball trying to drum up support for another zombie movie. He was a problem, despite being mostly innocuous.
Still, the kid was a mess. And now there was the wife, showing up like she was the Queen of Seattle.
Liabilities. And a way in.
The car was a red flag, too. That particular Rolls-Royce clocked in at about half a million dollars. When Mike ran the tags, he found that it was indeed registered to Mr. Benzini. How did a political consultant have that much money?
Despite Lynn’s heroic, albeit dangerous, efforts inside the car, there was nothing interesting in there. There were no documents or letters – or anything, really. The car was clean.
Mike kept cycling through the pictures, studying them again and again, until he thought he’d lose his mind. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, but he was sure there was something there. If only he could look at it the right way, like an optical illusion, he could find the missing piece.
On Tuesday night, he finally gave up and left his post to take his old dog Biggles on a long walk. Afterwards, as he lay in bed, unable to sleep, a thought hit him: the only person that he hadn’t run through his recognition software was the driver.
He leapt out of bed, got onto his computer, and ran her through the system. It didn’t take long to identify her. Stacy Collinsworth, assistant policy director at the Washington Department of Natural Resources.
Bingo. There it was. That was what he needed.
He had no idea why a state employee would be driving a socialite around. It was definitely off.
Mike dove into her history. His first concern was figuring out if there was a chance that the woman needed extra money and drove luxury cars on the side.
It was a weak theory, but he needed to investigate. From what Mike could find, Stacy didn’t have financial concerns. Her salary was public and listed online – well into the six figures. Her husband was an engineer at Boeing. They lived in an attractive, but by no means extravagant, home in Olympia. They had two children who attended public school, and their taxes were paid on time every year.
This did not seem like a woman who needed to hustle for extra money. So why was she doing this?
The Department of Natural Resources wasn’t an exciting place, not by a criminal’s standard. It wasn’t flush with money or ripe for corruption. They restored forests, reduced the risk of wildfires, and developed salmon-saving strategies. Not the stuff of Hollywood movies.
But for a state employee to be chauffeuring the wife of a political consultant? That alone could be a huge scandal.
Mike needed to know more. He needed proof. Would Stacy talk? If he put the pressure on in the right way?
She might also be too entrenched, and as the person stuck driving Lorraine Benzini around, she probably didn’t have any semblance of power.
It would be a delicate thing. Mike was awake for half the night, researching everyone in the office and trying to figure out a way to get to Stacy.
When he saw the sun’s rays peeking through the windows, he decided to take a break and get a few hours of sleep. He didn’t have the stamina to power through the night researching anymore. What a shame.
He woke up around eleven, surprised to see that he had a missed call from Lynn.
