corky, just remembering the journo thornton saying something about the shooter maybe getting a paper cut from one of the table ads at the frog place. i didn’t put it in the 302 cause by then he was going on about a heat ray that sounded like his meds talking. but seeing how now we’ve got shinola …
Lamont hadn’t seen a table ad or placard or anything of the kind listed on the FD-192, the crime scene unit’s evidence list. That form had long since been FedExed to the lab at Quantico along with all pertinent items found at the Au Bon Pain. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that an exhausted investigator had bagged the ad and labeled it as something else fired up Lamont like five cans of Monster Energy. An error like that was a decent possibility, he thought. To complete an FD-192, you had to detail every item thoroughly, including an estimate of its dollar value, and you had to do it by hand, meaning the form wasn’t available digitally. As Musseridge always said, “Expect to see time travel before you see a paperless Bureau.”
Twenty minutes later, Lamont returned to his cube with a copy of the FD-192, obtained from the rotor clerk, the secretary who maintained pending case files in a giant circular cabinet.
Lamont read the itemized list like it was a potboiler, before reaching an unhappy ending: The closest thing to an advertisement from the restaurant was a paper napkin.
On an off chance, he paid another visit to the rotor clerk, netting an FD-1004, the record of chain of custody for additional evidence requiring special handling.
It told the same story as the first form.
“Shinola,” Lamont said to himself.
As he slumped in his desk chair, his gaze wandered to a printout of a photo, pinned to the side of his cube, from his going-away party in Cleveland. They’d taken him to a dingy pub off Market Avenue whose name he couldn’t remember. It was the first and last time he and his colleagues had gone out after work — two pitchers of beer split between nine guys. He could just make out a dog-eared card on the grimy table, advertising the BRAT OF THE DAY.
Maybe the crime scene team had simply ignored a trampled placard lying on Au Bon Pain’s floor, he thought. What if, once the restaurant reopened, someone just picked the thing up and stuck it back on a table?
He shot up in his chair, hammering his name and password onto his keyboard, then filling in the text boxes at the top of his screen and keying in a request for the Emergency Response Team’s Au Bon Pain crime scene photos. A slug of Monster and a check of his in-box later, he saw that his security clearance had been verified by the Bureau’s antiquated system. After a minute of churning, the monitor displayed a photo of a table with a tented advertisement for Au Bon Pain’s new cheddar and corn chowder. Three more clicks showed almost identical ads on the three nearest tables. Thirteen more clicks revealed the same ad at each of the restaurant’s twenty-six tables.
Except for one, the two-top closest to the men’s room.
As if on cue came a raspy voice, grumbling that a large coffee used to be just fifty fucking cents. Peering over the workstation wall, Lamont spotted Musseridge shuffling from the elevator bank, balancing his usual cup of coffee — big enough to douse a fire.
Lamont bounded over, meeting Musseridge outside his office.
“Good morning,” Lamont said.
“You’re like my family,” replied his official mentor.
“Thanks?”
“I get home and before I can take off my coat, they start in clamoring for me to fix this or pay for that.” Musseridge elbowed his way into the office.
Lamont remained in the doorway, undaunted, while Musseridge took an excessive amount of time setting things down and carefully hanging up his overcoat. It was probably the first time in his life that Musseridge had put a coat someplace other than in a heap. Finally he said, “Okay, Corky, for the love of fucking Christ, tell me we got something.”
“Tented ads were on all twenty-six tables — except the one nearest to the shooter.”
“The ad got knocked onto the floor.”
“It’s not on the FD-192.”
“Then it was so worthless, they left it on the floor.”
“Suppose they didn’t check it.”
“They did.”
“How do you know?”
“They expose every last square inch of the crime scene to blue light checking for blood spatter.”
“I was thinking that the edges on the table placards aren’t that much thicker than a hair, so maybe the Emergency Response Team missed the blood,” Lamont said.
“If the murder had taken place on a farm, I would bet on the ERT one-ninety-two-ing a needle in a haystack. And then they’d bag the whole fucking pile of hay.” Musseridge slurped his coffee. He drank audibly only when he had an audience. “So what, you want to go there today?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you why not. Even if we find the magic flying placard, bringing it to a courtroom would be pointless. A piece of evidence that was left sitting for a week in a fast-food place is a defense attorney’s wet dream.”
“Still, if we find some DNA, we could narrow the list of suspects from three billion to one.”
Musseridge switched on his computer and waited for it to come to life.
“And lunch is on me,” Lamont added.
“I’ll take that, but no way we’re eating at Au Bon Pain.”
“What’s wrong with Au Bon Pain?”
“Nothing. But I thought you wanted to go there today.”
“We need an EC for that?”
“What do you think?”
Lamont recited another Musseridge maxim: “You can’t fart at the Bureau without first filling out a request form.”
Musseridge nodded. “You’re finally learning.”
Returning to his cube, Lamont clicked the EC — electronic communication — macro in the keyboard’s top row. The monitor gradually filled with a document template changed little since its WordPerfect inception in the early 1990s. He entered his name, his office location, and the eleven-character case ID, three times apiece. Before beginning his communication, he provided the requisite synopsis of it.
REQUEST TO RETURN TO LOCATION OF CASE 88A-NY-32478-7 SCENE FOR GENERAL INVESTIGATION
Finally he began the communication itself, referring to himself as THE WRITER per one of many Bureau directives whose purpose was lost to time.
THE WRITER SEEKS PERMISSION TO TRAVEL BY FBI VEHICLE TO
He paused to go online in order to collect the physical address of the Au Bon Pain as well as its telephone number.
By noon, he’d sent the completed EC to the division’s supervisor, who, along with the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, had responded. The “mission” was a go. Just as soon as Lamont printed a hard copy of the EC, obtained the required signatures, photocopied the document three times, and, of course, filed the original.
At two fifteen, he and Musseridge stood in the parking garage. In Manhattan, the FBI needed to subcontract a valet service because, as Musseridge put it, “Finding a public parking spot around here takes longer than solving a case.” Since the valets operated government vehicles, they had to undergo extensive vetting. Unlike in other parking garages, tipping wasn’t permitted here, so turnover was high. New and inexperienced valets were the norm.
Following a wait of eight minutes — not bad — Musseridge hung a left out of the dark garage and into an explosion of daylight, making his way across Centre Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Below the bridge, tugs and barges turned the East River into swirls of browns and grays, the view blurred by exhaust from stop-and-go traffic. Musseridge smiled, a rare occurrence. Lamont knew that after twenty-something years of driving the sort of American-made cars that ID’d you as a Fed sooner than your shield (Caprices and Crown Vics were known internally as G-cars), Musseridge savored the dealer-fresh white Cadillac Escalade SUV, part of his cover in an ongoing mob sting up at a Connecticut casino. Sitting in its leather sports seat was the only time he didn’t complain about his back. Lamont attributed this to the thrill of the perk.