Harlan stood. He came around the desk.
The screen now showed two photographs side by side: on the left, the driver of the sedan as he sat at the curb this morning, his face captured in three-quarter profile through the windshield; on the right, an older photograph, slightly grainier, of the same man in a different jacket and with shorter hair, standing in a line outside what looked like a courthouse.
Below the photograph was a name: Lukas Petrov, Frank read.
"Where is that from?"
"A court appearance in Newark eighteen months ago. He was a witness, not a defendant. The case was a kidnapping for ransom."
Harlan looked at the photograph for a long moment. The man on the screen had the unremarkable face of someone who had learned early in life that being remembered was a kind of liability. He looked at the camera the way a man looks at a wall.
"What was the case?" Harlan asked.
Frank's fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling up the docket. "The defendants were three men who had abducted the adult son of a real estate developer in Bergen County. They held him in a warehouse for eleven days before negotiating a payment. The son was returned alive; the defendants were convicted. Petrov testified for the prosecution in exchange for immunity. The file says he was a low-level participant who turned on the others when the federal charges came down."
"Where has he been since?"
"There is nothing in the public record after the trial. No employment, no address, no court appearances. He went quiet."
"He did not go quiet," Harlan said. "He went professional."
He looked once more at the screen, then turned toward the front of the lobby. The sedan was still there; Lukas Petrov was still in it. Through the glass doors, Harlan could see that the man's posture had changed slightly in the last few minutes: his shoulders had drifted forward, his head was tilted toward the phone on the passenger seat. He was a man waiting for an instruction that was not arriving on schedule.