Lynch handed Starshak an 8x10, nice clear shot of a slim, well-dressed, olive-skinned man in the Stadium foyer.
Starshak looked at the picture from the Feds, then at the new one. “So that’s al Din,” he said.
“Gotta be,” said Lynch.
“OK, so have them run that against the other scenes.”
“Which is what Lynch said.” Bernstein chiming in. “They’re already on it. But that might be a problem.”
“Problem how?”
“The picture,” Lynch said. “The tech guy, before he could even run what the Feds gave us against the Stein shooting, he had to clean up the image quite a bit. Enough, he says, that, if we tried to take it to court, it might get tossed. Get a defense with a good budget, they could bring some digital image expert in and claim we doctored the original enough to get a match.”
“And,” Starshak said, “if the original gets tossed, then anything we found using it gets tossed. Fruit of the poisoned tree.”
“Right,” Bernstein said.
“What else?” Starshak asked. “You said questions.”
Lynch set the grainy surveillance shot that Hickman had passed out down next to the clean shot they’d pulled from the stadium camera.
“We already know that Corsco, Hernandez, and al Din have access to our surveillance system,” Lynch said. “So we know the system isn’t secure. You seriously think that Hickman and those suits from DC don’t have a way in?”
Starshak sat back, the look on his face telling Lynch he could see where this was going.
“Meaning they could have pulled all the clean shots of al Din that they wanted right off of our own system, probably already knew for certain he did Stein, yet they hand us this crap picture to work with, junk that might queer a case if we ever manage to bring one.”
“Yeah,” Lynch said. “That.”
Starshak sat back, mouth tight, then sat forward again.
“Your witness from the stadium, the waitress chick, she hasn’t seen these pictures yet, right? Either of them?”
“No,” Lynch said.
“OK, we got a physical description of al Din, right? And we got the piece of junk picture from Hickman. So go back to the techies, give them that, have them run a new search, no doctoring, give ’em a time spread maybe five minutes each side of the good picture, and hope that this pic pops up in the pile. Then we show the whole pile to your waitress chick and hope she picks out al Din. Then we’re legit.”
“It’s still dodgy,” Bernstein said. “It would be a problem if anybody hears how we got the clean picture the first time.”
Starshak took the good picture; put it in his desk drawer. “What picture?”
“Ah,” said Bernstein.
“So let’s hope your waitress is good with faces, Lynch. Then we put a BOLO out on al Din. Hickman said not to chase Hardin and Wilson. Fine. He didn’t say anything about this fuck.”
“You didn’t ask,” said Lynch.
“Not gonna, either. Anything else?”
“Fenn,” Bernstein said. “Got a call from Northwestern. He’s starting to show some brain activity.Doc thinks he may come out of it in the next day or two.”
“How many cylinders is he going to be running on if he does?” asked Starshak.
“No way to know,” said Bernstein.
“They still keeping it quiet?” Lynch asked.
Bernstein nodded. “Yeah. Still handing out the daily update to the celebrity press. No change, no reason to expect any change. But you gotta figure it will leak eventually – nurse, orderly, somebody.”
“OK,” said Starshak. “I’ll make sure our security at the hospital’s still good. For now, we keep it under wraps.”
“And if it leaks, we watch and see what Corsco does,” said Lynch.
CHAPTER 71
“At least that sad little bear is gone,” Wilson said.
She and Hardin were at the Phillips Park Zoo on the east side of Aurora, small municipal zoo, but a decent sized park, and had an eighteen-hole golf course. A park Hardin knew pretty well from his childhood, knew the topography at least, had an idea on the sightlines, egress points. Type of place a sharp operator might want to set up a meeting if he had to have a meeting with guys who just maybe wanted to kill him.
“God,” Hardin said. “I forgot about the bear.”
When he was a kid he used to walk down to the park a lot. One of the few places on the East Side where you’d see a lot of West Siders, kids wearing new clothes, not hand-me-downs, place where you could imagine some other kind of life.
They used to have a bear at the zoo, not a very big bear. Brown bear, Hardin guessed. He was no expert on bears. Fake stone grotto with metal bars in the front and a cement floor that was always puddled with urine and bear shit. Floor of the cage was maybe as big as a decent-sized living room and that bear had been locked inside since the day it arrived. Thing never seemed to move, just lay on the cement, dead eyes staring straight ahead, while kids tossed rocks and sticks at it through the bars trying to get it to do something. Bear had been there the first time Hardin could remember coming to the park, he figured he was four or five. It had still been there two decades later when he left for Africa.
“I hated coming here,” Wilson said. “That bear, it broke my heart.”
Some things had changed. The golf course had a makeover, new clubhouse. Nice little visitors’ center at the zoo, educational stuff for the kids. Big new water park on the south end, on Montgomery Road, place that used to be a big, empty field, place where Hardin and Esteban and some of the other guys from the neighborhood could get up a sandlot game while the little leaguers from the good neighborhoods played real ball on the real diamonds a little to the east. Mastodon Lake was still there, place where some WPA guys had found mastodon bones back in the Thirties when they fixed up the park on the Feds’ dime.
And cameras. Of course cameras. Security cam on the visitors’ center, another at the parking lot, more probably.
Hardin stood next to a white Camry in the parking lot, turned to face the camera, took off the broad-brimmed hat he’d been wearing everywhere and wiped his brow, did a slow turn, checked all the roads in and out.
He hoped that was enough.
“You sure this is the best idea?” Wilson said. “Our hometown? Seems like the kind of place they’ll be watching.”
“Fouche gets us a deal, we’ll have to make the handoff someplace. Maybe I want a home field advantage.”
“And maybe not.” Wilson said, smiling.
“Maybe not,” said Hardin.
They walked out of the park and down Ashland to the parking lot in front of the taco stand where they’d left the Honda. No cameras there. Not the kind of place that could afford them. But the food was good.
CHAPTER 72
Munroe sat up in bed, reached for his phone. He lifted his head from the desk, felt the knot behind his right ear. That little bastard al Din. Munroe’s head was going to be sore for a while. The cell buzzed again. He picked it up, looked at the screen. The surveillance guys.
“Yeah,” he said.
“We picked up a hit on Hardin,” said the voice on the other end.
“Where?”
“In Aurora. Got it quick because we have a priority feed running on any cams out there. Him and Wilson. They were poking around a big park on the east side, Phillips Park.”
“Get it in time to angle anybody in?”
“No. Even with those cams at the top of the pile, there’s still like a ninety-minute processing lag.”
“What was he doing?”
“Recon’s my guess, unless you think he had a sudden urge to go to the zoo.”