She took them through her father's case first, and then Ocampo, and Feingold, and Asante. Four shops. One high-value item each. Four charges of receiving. No convictions that stuck, no items returned. She'd printed the dockets at a twenty-four-hour copy shop on her way over, and she laid them out on the counter in a row, and Ray read them standing up, one after another, his lips moving very slightly the way some men's do when they read something they don't want to believe.
"Feingold," he said. "Towson."
"York Road," Nadia said.
Ray tapped the complainant's appraisal, which he'd also printed. Linden & Hale Fine Jewelers, York Road, Towson.
Nadia was already typing. After a minute she turned the laptop around. "There's no Linden & Hale. Not on York Road, not in Towson, not in the state business registry, not anywhere. There's no gemologist named R. Hale in the GIA directory."
"There was a Linden Jewelers on York Road," Walt said slowly. "Old Morris Linden. He closed in 2009. He died in 2012. I went to the funeral." He picked up the appraisal and looked at the letterhead through his loupe. "This is his old letterhead. The typeface. He had it printed at a shop in Hamilton, the same one that did my business cards. Somebody's taken it and added a name."
"Somebody who knows old men," Nadia said.
Ray had pulled out his own phone and was typing into it with his thumbs. "The names on your father's case," he said to Nadia. "The complainant."
"Curtis A. Lyle."
"Ocampo?"
"I don't know. The public docket doesn't show complainants. I'll call him Monday, he opens at ten."
Ray stopped typing and looked at her with an expression she couldn't read. "You know if I went into our system and ran those, without a reason, without it being my case, and somebody noticed, I'd be in a lot of trouble."
"Yes," she said.
"You know that's exactly what I'm going to do anyway."
"I was hoping."