“God,” Chris said, looking pale. “It’s like nothing ever happened. It’s like Casey might just walk in on us.”
The bizarre outline on the floor and up onto the front of the couch said otherwise. Because Shannon had been slumped with his head forward, the outline had a ghastly decapitated look.
“Chris,” I said, “I don’t want to toss the place. Pros have gone over it. We won’t be gutting cushions or dumping out bureau drawers onto the floor.”
“No need,” his partner said. “I know Casey’s ways. He kept private files on open cases, even when the rest of us had moved on. Photocopied stuff he shouldn’t have. Made his own notes. Took his own pictures.”
I nodded. “And Pat and the forensics bunch weren’t necessarily looking for any such file. They were processing a murder scene. But if our assumptions are right, the file on that pair of unsolved homicides, and any notes on Vincent Colby, could be here.”
Chris held his hands out, palms up. “Worth a look. Worth a damn good look.”
The corner with the roll-top desk seemed a good place to start.
“I’ll go over this thing,” I said, opening it up, “and see if I can find any hidden compartments. These old behemoths have more secrets than a haunted house.”
The remark lingered oddly. We were, in a way, in a haunted house right now.
The nearby file cabinet was a dark-stained oak vertical four-drawer affair. Supervising above were three framed items — two commendations for valor on either side of the color framed 8” by 10” of President Reagan, signed to Casey.
“Take a look at those,” I said.
Chris took them down; all three were sealed in with brown paper, nothing taped to the backs. I told him to hang ’em back up, and he did.
“You go through the file cabinet,” I said. “I’m sure they checked everything, but maybe Casey had a system where he filed things under names that didn’t match their contents.”
He checked each drawer. Every one was empty.
I said, “Damn. Pat must have confiscated them.”
“I’ll out take the drawers and see if anything’s taped in back, in the cabinet itself.”
That seemed a little desperate to me. Casey would have wanted easy access to that particular file and that made for a lot of trouble getting to it. Maybe it lay under the bottom file drawer, though. All you’d have to do is pull the drawer out and underneath would be the secreted file.
But no.
Nothing.
I fared little better. I did find a secret compartment but only family photos were within, Casey’s late wife, his kids when they were... kids. I collected these and dropped them in my suit coat pocket. The grown versions of those youngsters would be coming in for the services, in a few days. Shannon would get the complete police funeral with honor guard and a sea of blue in attendance.
There’d be an End of Watch call, officers from Casey’s division gathering around a car’s police radio as a dispatcher issued a call to Lt. Shannon with silence the response. A second call would go out and get the same silent response. Then an officer who’d worked with him — probably Chris or maybe Ben Higgins — would respond that Lt. Shannon could not answer because the officer had fallen in the line of duty.
I swallowed and abandoned the roll-top search. Chris had finished the file cabinet as well, with equally unsuccessful results. We started in on the bookcase and went through every page of every book. We occasionally found a random piece of paper — a receipt from Coliseum Books, a bookmark, a slip of paper with a grocery list or some work reminder on it.
Nothing worth finding, really, just the routine detritus of a life lived.
I sat on the couch with Casey’s body outline next to me. Chris stood in front of me, eyes avoiding the ghost of his partner.
“Fool’s errand?” he asked.
“Too early to know.” I sighed. “We’re going over ground the forensics guys, and for that matter Pat Chambers, have already gone over good. We have only one advantage.”
“What?”
“You.”
The young cop gestured to himself, frowning, then said again, “What?”
“You worked with the man. You worked with him on this case. Casey knew he was poking around in the dirty secrets of a powerful Wall Street firm. Politics stink sometimes, but they’re real and they have an impact on cops. The Commissioner says, ‘Drop it.’ When you don’t, the Chief of Police says, ‘We’ve got a nice beat for you to walk in Staten Island. You’ll love it.’”
His arms were folded but a hand was up rubbing his chin. “You mean, if anybody anywhere knows what Casey Shannon was thinking, in the weeks before... before this happened... it’s...”
“It’s you, kid.” I stood. Gestured toward the rest of the apartment. “Let’s look at the places the pros wouldn’t think of.”
He frowned. “There can’t be many of those.”
“Well, hell, let’s try anything that strikes you as a possibility. Then we’ll look everywhere else, harder than the pros did. You’re the one whose partner got killed, not them.”
We went through the cupboards. On our hands and knees, we sorted through the area under the sink where cleaning products were kept. Checked to see if there was a plastic bottle that was empty but had something rolled up in it. When that was a no go, we tried the refrigerator, where the dead man’s food was waiting never to be eaten. I figured maybe the box of frozen pizza, still in its plastic wrapper, might give up a prize, and it did.
A frozen pizza.
Back into the freezer it went, while we headed into the bedroom. We gave it a thorough going over, even though I knew everything we were doing had been done before by an experienced team and a certain captain of Homicide. We looked under the mattress and the bed itself, like maybe a cuckolded husband was hiding under there. Went through the nightstand, pulling out the drawer, checking every damn thing and place you could imagine.
A linen closet had us going through towels and sheets like Lawrence of Arabia after a new look. The bathroom had the usual supplies and bath towels and clothes; the medicine cabinet contained everything from a few prescription meds to razor blades and corn pads. A clothes closet gave us nothing special, just more of the specially-cut-for-a-cop suits and some sports clothes, including an ill-advised Hawaiian shirt. A cubbyhole above the closets had suitcases, which we dragged down and went through and found lots of empty.
All these closets reminded me I hadn’t bothered with the front one. We wandered back into the living room, feeling defeated, and I looked in at fall and winter coats and a shelf with a collection of hats that put Casey on the same dinosaur list as Pat and me, only Casey was already extinct.
In the bottom of the closet were galoshes and sandals, but also something else.
I knelt. Two good-size unopened boxes — one low-slung, longer than it was wide, much like the one Velda’s VCR had come in; the other was a cardboard cube with something heavy inside. Both were from Radio Shack.
“Tandy 1000 TX,” I read from the lower-riding box. “Computer?”
“Yeah.” Chris was kneeling too. “And that’s a monitor to go with it. I think the keyboard’s in the box with the computer.”
“The packaging looks new. Did Shannon know how to use one of these gizmos? Velda has a word processor at the office.”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, he had one at work, too.” His brow furrowed. “You know, if Casey’s file was on a floppy disk, all that material would be in Pat’s hands by now. I think we’re on that fool’s errand we talked about.”