Forensic scientist Rachael — or “Rake,” as Win calls her — places the letter on top of a porous metal platen called a vacuum bed. She hits a switch and begins vacuuming down the box.
He has watched her work the electrostatic imaging system before, and sometimes they’ve been lucky, most recently in a kidnapping case, the ransom note written on a sheet of paper that obviously had been under one the kidnapper had used earlier to jot down a phone number that led the police to a Papa John’s Pizza where he had placed a take-out order and paid for it with a credit card. Rake wears white cotton examination gloves, was happy when Win told her he hadn’t touched the letter with his bare hands. After they’ve finished looking for indented writing, the letter the man in the red scarf left for Win at the Diesel Café will go to the fingerprints lab to be processed with ninhydrin or some other reagent.
“How’s Knoxville?” asks Rake, a nice-looking brunette who started out with the FBI lab in Quantico but decided after 9-11 and the Patriot Act that she didn’t want to work for the Feds. “You gonna start talking with a dueling-banjo twang?”
“That’s North Georgia, Deliverance country. No dueling banjos in Knoxville, just blaze-orange everywhere.”
“Hunting?”
“UT football.”
Rake covers the letter and the platen with a clear plastic imaging film that reminds Win of Saran Wrap.
“Win?” she says without looking up. “Sounds trite, but I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Thanks, Rake.”
She passes what she calls a corona discharge unit over the surface. Win always smells ozone when she does it, as if it might rain.
“I don’t care what anybody says. You did the right thing,” she adds. “I don’t see how anybody can even question it.”
“I didn’t realize anybody was,” he says, getting one of his uneasy feelings.
She tilts the tray and cascades toner-coated beads over the image film — covered document, says, “Heard it on the radio during a coffee break.”
The electrostatic charge causes the toner to migrate to indentations that aren’t visible to the unaided eye, areas of the paper with microscopic damage caused by handwriting.
“Go on. Tell me,” Win says, already knows.
He’s being screwed.
“Just that Lamont said you’re being investigated, like maybe it wasn’t a good shooting. A big story’s being run tomorrow and they’re already promoting it with teases.” She looks at him, adds, “How’s that for grateful?”
“Maybe what I expected,” he says as latent images appear in faint black, partial words, confusing.
Rake isn’t impressed, points out something on the threatening letter the man in the red scarf left for Win, decides, “Think we’d better try three-D enhancement.”
Toby Huber is cold, shivering as he sits on his balcony of the Winnetu Inn in South Beach, Edgartown, smoking a joint, looking at the ocean, at people in long pants and jackets walking along the beach.
“I’m sure it’s gone, just not where, exactly,” he says over his cell phone, annoyed but with a nice buzz going. “Sorry, man. But at this point, it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s not for you to judge. Try to think for once.”
“Look. I told you, okay? It must be when I threw out everything in trash bags, whatever. And I mean everything, including any food in the fridge, any beer, anything. Even hauled the trash about five miles away to a Dumpster behind… some restaurant, can’t remember which one. Damn it’s freezing here. I’ve checked and rechecked and it’s not here. Man, you need to chill before you have a stroke….”
A knock from inside the one-bedroom suite, and then the door opens, the housekeeper is startled as Toby steps inside and glares at her.
“What is it you don’t understand about Do Not Disturb!” he screams at her.
“Sorry, sir. The card’s not on the door.” She quickly vanishes.
Toby returns to the balcony, takes a toke, almost yells into the phone, “I’m out of here. You got that? Where it’s warm. Boring as goddamn hell here. You’ve put me through enough and it’d better be worth it.”
“Not quite yet. It will look suspicious if you’re suddenly flying off to L.A. You need to stay put a few more days. We’ve got to make sure it’s not someplace where it might be found and cause us a lot of trouble. Think, Toby!”
“If it’s anywhere, it’s still inside the damn apartment. I don’t know….” Something glimmers. He’s not sure he checked under the bed, mentions that, adding, “You know, when I was reading it, could have stuck it there. Why don’t you go check your goddamn self?”
“I already have.”
“Then you’re so spazzed out about it, go check again!”
“Think! Where did you have it last? You sure you didn’t leave it at the office….”
“I told you. I took it with me, know that for fact because I was reading it.”
“I didn’t tell you to take it so you could read it!”
“Yeah, so you’ve said about a hundred times by now, so you can just shut up about it, okay?”
“You put it in your car, drove it there? What? Reading it in bed? So you could look at the damn pictures? Are you insane! Where did you have it last!”
“I told you to shut up, don’t act like such a hysterical old woman. It’s not like I can exactly go look. So you help yourself, look ’til the cows come home. Maybe I missed it, okay? I had it all kinds of places when I was there. In a drawer, maybe in a pile by the bed, under the pillow. At one point I had it in a basket of dirty clothes. Or maybe it was in the dryer….”
“Toby, are you sure you didn’t take it with you to the Vineyard?”
“How many times you going to ask me! What difference does it make. So what if it’s gone? Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, anyway.”
“Well, we don’t know it’s gone, now do we? And that’s a problem, a very serious problem. You were supposed to leave it where it would be found. The last thing you did before you left. But you didn’t. You completely ignored my orders.”
“So it probably ended up in the trash, okay? That’s probably what happened when I cleaned things out.” He takes another toke. “You know, it’s not like I didn’t have a lot on my mind, right? And he kept wanting to know about the money, said I’d better give it to him in advance, and I said half of it up front, and then you took forever getting it for me….”
“How the hell did I end up with someone like you?”
Holding in smoke. Exhaling. “Because you’re lucky. So far. But that can change, you know.”
Rake is lost in a software world of pixels and Z ranges and histograms, panning, zooming, rotating, manipulating light angles, surface reflection, contour enhancement while Win stares at the big flat screen, looking at shadowy shapes in magnified 3-D.
He starts seeing a word, maybe numbers.
“An e, an r, a w, lowercase?” he suggests. “And three and ninety-six?”
There’s more. She keeps working, the words and numbers materializing. Odd-looking, almost overlaid.
“More than one note that’s left indented writing?” Win considers.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Rake says. “Could very well be indentations from different writings on different sheets from the same pad of paper. You know, you write a note, then another page down, write another one, and the pressure of the pen or pencil pressed against the paper is sufficiently strong to create an indented image multiple sheets down.”
She works some more and they make out what they can: three-year market exclusivity, and okay, and partly overlaying that, suggesting it was a separate writing on a separate sheet of paper, is $8.96 and what appears to be up from an earlier forecast of $6.11.