Read 2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 for Free Online Page B

nothing more in his pockets than a key ring, twenty-seven dollars plus change, a driver’s license, and a library card. But that’s all they found on Waldo Templeton. And the driver’s license looked a little quirky. Ike turned it over and peered at the back, then again at the front. Wisconsin licenses did not cross his path very often. This one had all the characteristics of a fake—the kind you find on college campuses carried by underdrinking-age students. He had some experience with fakes, this kind and the professional ones he’d used in his other life. Over the years he had confiscated enough of them from Callend College women and their dates to fill a small filing cabinet. The library card was real.
    Sam Ryder stepped out of her office, ducking her head in order to keep from bumping it on the door frame. Sam was taller than Ike by at least three inches, which put her in the stratosphere at six feet five.
    “It’s installed,” she said. “Do you want to test it?”
    “Sure. Get a set of prints and run them.”
    “Whose?”
    “How about Billy’s.”
    “How about yours,” Billy said. “You don’t want to go running my prints through that machine.”
    “Why not?”
    “Do we have a John Doe we can try?” Sam said. “We ought to have a control. Billy we know is in there and so are you, Ike.”
    Ike wondered about that last part. The Agency had funny ideas about its people, even when they no longer worked for them, but he didn’t want to find out this way. Maybe he’d have Sam look later, but not with anybody else around.
    “We’ll do Billy and a John Doe, just to be sure,” he said. “I’d have you run Templeton, but we don’t have his back from the coroner yet.”
    “How come it’s always me?” Billy said. “Why not Sam here, then?”
    “I already ran mine, if you must know.”
    “And you found out you’re wanted in five states—”
    “Sam, dig around in the files. There’s bound to be something in them you can use.”
    Sam pulled open a file drawer and leafed through a stack of old cases. The original plan had been to put them on microfiche, but before the Picketsville Sheriff’s Office could acquire the technology to do that, it became obsolete. Now they were waiting to be scanned into one of Sam’s new databases.
    “Well, here’s something we can try. It’s a print from a nickel bag of dope we took from a student last June. We never prosecuted and never ran the print.”
    “Give it a whirl. Go on, Billy. Give the nice deputy your print.”
    The two deputies retreated into Sam’s digital den and Ike picked up the magazine Billy had brought out with him. Nobody ever accused Ike of being stupid, and he felt sure if he applied himself, he could master the intricacies of computers. He read one complete article and put the magazine down. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d read and the concept embedded in it. He couldn’t. He could play chess against a computer with more than moderate success. He could recite several of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and he’d read and understood most of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, although the black hole bit still remained a puzzle. But when it came to computers—he knew how to turn them on and off. As for the stuff inside, the buses and the bytes, the RAMs and the ROMs, they danced away from his comprehension like fireflies in May.
    “Ike, you might want to have a talk with Billy,” Sam said as the two emerged from her office.
    “You said you wouldn’t say nothing, Sam.”
    “But this is a very serious matter. You’d better come clean, Billy. After all, you are a law enforcement officer—”
    “Billy?”
    Billy Sutherlin clenched his jaw and glared.
    “He owes over forty dollars in parking tickets in Virginia Beach,” Sam said triumphantly.
    “You’re on my list, Ryder,” Billy said and flopped down in a chair and put his tooled cowboy boots up on the desk in front.
    “Ike, you should see the