Into the Fire(105)

“Check this,” Max said, and hovered his thumb over the black square of the fingerprint reader. A green laser scan started up with a calming hum, mapping his print. The light blinked red. “You don’t touch it. It uses the laser to read your print in midair.”

“That can be more precise,” Evan said. “Sometimes when you press a print, it distorts the ridges.”

“Great. So there’s no way we can get in there.”

Evan said, “How do you know it reads your right thumb?”

“You can see finger smudges where he gripped the side of the safe to position his thumb. Look.”

The steel edge featured four dapples of oil corresponding to the four fingers of Bedrosov’s right hand. Evan looked at Max, impressed.

Max knocked the wall around the safe. “Sounds like it’s concreted in there between the slabs. I’d need a whole lotta gear and a whole lotta time to pry it out if we want to work on it in another location. Even then, I’ve never cracked a safe before.”

Evan scanned the room. A single nightstand with a single drawer. He opened it, hoping for a remote control. He got something better.

An iPad mini.

Touching only the edges, he lifted it carefully and set it on the bedspread. Then he crouched to eye the screen at a slant.

The alkali-aluminosilicate glass, expressly designed to capture touch, was marred by a beautiful thumbprint.

Evan turned to Max and said, “Don’t touch that.”

He walked back to the garage and retrieved wood glue from the cabinet beneath the workbench. Next to the telephone in the kitchen, he located a pencil. Back in the master bathroom, he found a shampoo heavy in glycerin and grabbed a few Q-tips. He returned to the bedroom where Max waited. Using the iPad as a palette, Evan squeezed a dab of wood glue onto the surface well north of the print. Then he stirred in a drop of shampoo to moisten and putty up the glue.

He smashed the pencil and used his fingernail to scrape graphite dust from the core, sprinkling it onto Bedrosov’s fingerprint. He blew the excess away, a layer of raised graphite clinging to the print.

Max said, “You are an insane person.”

Evan said, “Thank you.”

Scooping up a lump of the glue mixture with the Q-tip, he smeared a thin layer carefully over the print.

“Certifiable,” Max said. “Stark raving.”

The concoction dried quickly, and Evan peeled free the hardened slug of glue. The underside held an impression of Bedrosov’s print.

“Now you can just hold it up to the laser,” Max said.

“Not yet,” Evan said. “It’s reversed. A mirror image.”

He laid the dried glue on the floor with the print side up. Then he turned on the iPad. Bedrosov had turned off the password feature, a stroke of luck that meant Evan wouldn’t have to hack it.

Using the iPad camera, he took several close-up photographs of the fingerprint impression. Then he went to the app store and downloaded high-end photo-editing software. Using the program, he flipped the print from left to right, then reversed the color so the print was white and the background black. Using a digital enhancer, he brought the image to 2400 dpi, then sat back and admired his work.

“No way,” Max said. “No. Way.”

Evan crossed to the wardrobe, held up the iPad image before the safe’s scanner, and waited for it to initiate. The green laser scanned the digital print top to bottom, and then the door clicked open.

Evan and Max exhaled simultaneously.

Inside rested a single thumb drive. And nothing else.

Evan withdrew it. He and Max looked at each other.

The mission had begun with a thumb drive. Looked like it would end with one, too.

Evan jogged out to the truck, checked up and down the street, then retrieved his laptop. Back inside, he fired up the computer and plugged in the thumb drive.

He sat at the deco letter desk in the corner, Max hovering at his shoulder.

A profusion of spreadsheets invaded the screen.

The figures on these dwarfed the numbers they’d seen in Grant’s files.

Evan scanned the documents. Wires, dates, withdrawals, bank statements, multiple sets of doctored books, meeting minutes, shell-corp formation papers, LLC articles of organization and operating agreements.

And this time: names of the players at the top.

As Evan google-searched the names, Max made a dry noise in his throat.

Bedrosov and everyone who’d come before were nothing compared to this.

A city councilman. The city treasurer and the finance director. The economic-development director and a leading city-admin officer. The public-works director and the comptroller. An assistant officer in charge at LAPD’s Criminal Investigation Division. An LLC manager by the name of Stella Hardwick.

All stakeholders in a fund with the impressively forgettable name of the Los Angeles City Reserve Fund. Its balance, held in Bedrosov’s captured bank in Singapore, was two hundred and twelve million.

Evan read until the throbbing in his head grew almost unbearable, then leaned back in the chair and pressed his fingers to his eyes. He thought of the potholed city streets, the film of pollution wrapped around downtown, the ragged metropolitan facilities crumbling where they stood, desperate for cash allocations that never seemed to come.

A perennial shortfall.

City budgets had checks and balances to safeguard against embezzlement by segregating duties across a variety of departments. But it seemed Stella Hardwick had found a way around those safeguards.