The girl looked at it. “Oh. Yes,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

Leah took the glass. “You’re welcome. But it wouldn’t look good if you went out there carrying this.”

They both left the ladies’ room and walked back toward their respective places. Leah could see the waiter had left a glass of wine for the date and a glass of ginger ale for the girl.

Hours later, after Leah had been to three different bars and returned to her hotel, she thought back on the conversation with the girl. Fake licenses for underage drinkers didn’t seem to be the kind of business a professional would take. Three hundred dollars wasn’t what pros got paid. It was tip money. Still, the work was too good for anybody but a pro. It had magnetic tape on the back, perfect printing and sizing.

And she had seen odder things in her career. Sometimes dishonesty had no limits, either on the high end or the low. Crookedness wasn’t just a bad quality. It was a disease that acted like a philosophy. And there was also a name, and the name had been Reggie. What did Regina Varga call herself?

16

Leah went online that night to find the business that had produced the girl’s driver’s license. She had said the place was in Kenmore, a small suburb pressed up against Buffalo that called itself a village. Leah found no businesses called Varga’s This or That, or Regina’s This or That. There were a few printing shops and a couple of stationery stores that advertised printed wedding invitations and business cards and advertising mailers. There were photography shops that offered specialty printing of the sort that might extend beyond passport photos into the rest of the passport, but the girl had said a print shop, not a photographer.

Leah knew she was going to have to go from one to another asking questions and hoping for answers that she couldn’t quite ask for. She knew that when she had been to all of them she probably still wouldn’t know if any of them were making fake identification, because all she would see was a counter and a cash register and a woman who would not volunteer any information. There were no photographs of Regina Varga in the material the FBI had shared with her department.

Leah made some of these visits the next day, and they went just about the way she’d expected. Nobody appeared to know what she was talking about when she asked about getting licenses or other identification, and the only Reggie who turned up when she asked for one was a Canadian man.