The councilman pulled the folded print out of his inside jacket pocket and thrust it before the developer. Greenway opened the Caddy door so the dome light would come on and examined the picture. Rick leaned in for a look.

“I always said Stef had nice tits,” Rick said. “Do you have more of these?”

“Well, Roger, how did you happen to come into possession of this?” Greenway asked.

“Walker. He gave it to me. Said he’s got the negatives. How would he have these? Is he working for you? Did you have these taken? Walker said there was a camera in the ceiling.”

“That is interesting,” Greenway said, thinking. To Rick: “Does any of this make any sense to you?”

“I haven’t really had a chance to update you, Mr. Greenway. But you know how you sent me out earlier, to try to find Stefanie and see if she’d run off with the ledger—”

Ledger?

“—I went by her mom’s house, and she said this guy had been by looking for her, said he had something of hers, which kind of sounded like bullshit, but I also thought it sounded kind of suspicious, so I tracked this guy down through his e-mail address, and it turned out to be this asshole who wanted his shower fixed? Remember you sent me out there to have a look at it?”

Greenway’s head went up and down slowly. “The obnoxious man who came by the office, when Mr. Spender dropped by.”

Obnoxious? I was the one who was obnoxious?

“Yeah, same guy, I guess. So I go see him, and he hands me Stefanie’s purse.”

“What was he doing with Stefanie’s purse?”

Stretched out on the plywood floor, my head tucked low, I thought, Man, this is confusing.

“Said he’d found it, was trying to give it back. So I dumped it out, right, but there’s no ledger there. It’s too big to fit in it, I think. But you know what was in there?”

Greenway shook his head.

“Money. Two envelopes, stuffed with fifties. Tons of them. Looked like the stuff we make up on the photocopier sometimes, to pay off inspectors and stuff. But these bills, they didn’t look like they’d been weathered at all like we usually do them. It’s like she’d just made them.”

Greenway took this in. “She must have been doing a lot of photocopying. It’s like she was planning to make a run for it. Grab the ledger, print up some cash, head for the hills. Something spooked her.”

“She was talking to me yesterday,” Carpington offered, “about going away someplace. She was mentioning lots of different places, like she hadn’t decided where to go, but she was going to go someplace.”

“Did you notice anything else in the purse?” Greenway asked Rick.