“What kind of machine?”
“I’m sketchy on the details, Pete. I saw the show a while back…couple of years. But I remembered it because it was so different. They took X-rays and used the X-rays to make the three-dimensional copy of the skull. The police took the skull to the judge and the judge allowed it to be used for forensic purposes. The forensic artist used the copy skull to put a face onto the bones.”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah, someone recognized the face and they caught the guy.”
“Do you remember the case?”
He thought a long time. “It was an African woman who was living in the U.S., so she didn’t even have relatives that reported her missing. I think it happened somewhere in the middle of the country. Sorry, but I don’t remember names, but I’m sure there’s a copy of the show somewhere. It was either Forensic Files or Cold Case Files.”
Decker was writing furiously. “What is that? Court TV?”
“Forensic Files is on Court TV. I think Cold Case Files is A and E.” Mike took another bite of his food and chewed it slowly. “You could call up someone at the station that works with the shows. Maybe they would remember.”
“I’m sure I could order a copy of the show, if we could figure out what show you were watching and what case you saw. I’m thinking that the episodes might be listed online.” He looked at Hollander. “We could check it out. Would you mind coming back to the station house?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
16
T HE SQUAD ROOM was two-thirds empty, the majority of the detectives out in the field investigating the ever-flowing tide of felonies. Like the ocean, there was a rhythm to crime, a high period followed by a low period that seemed to correspond with the phases of the moon.
The open space was divided up by groupings of desks with placards hanging from the ceiling to reveal the detail of the detectives working below the signs. The areas encompassed the usual divisional felonies-burglary, GTA, CAPS, juvenile and sex crimes, bunco, etc., with homicide tucked into a corner-private and rarefied. Shelving filled with casebooks lined a good portion of the wall space with several dog-eared district maps pinned at random spots along the drywall.
Marge Dunn had just received a packet of Roseanne Dresden’s phone records. The last call made from the missing woman’s cell originated in San Jose-12:35 A.M.-and she had connected to her house number, the line engaged for thirty-five seconds. Roseanne’s records begged the question: what was she doing in San Jose a little after midnight when WestAir said that she was on a flight from Burbank to San Jose the next morning at eight-fifteen?
It was possible that Roseanne flew into Burbank from San Jose on an earlier flight that morning, and never deplaned-which would explain why Erika Lessing never saw her.
Did an earlier flight even exist?
Logging on to WestAir’s Web site, Marge looked up flight schedules. The former flight 1324 had been retired. Instead there was a new flight-247-with the first departure from Burbank to San Jose now leaving at eight-thirty instead of eight-fifteen: a very thin sugar coat on a bitter pill, but who could blame WestAir for trying to make the public forget. More important, there was an earlier flight-246-that flew from San Jose to Burbank, it’s first departure at five o’clock in the morning. That meant that Roseanne could have come down from San Jose to Burbank and then turned around and gone back on the doomed flight 1324.
But why would Roseanne do a quick turnaround on a commuter flight unless she was working actively as a flight attendant? Marge circled Roseanne’s last call and wrote in the margins: Roseanne in SJ and trying to locate hubby? Did she talk to him?
Ivan could verify that. Then Marge noticed that the call was only thirty-five seconds. She wrote on the margins of Roseanne’s phone records.
Answering machine?
Did Roseanne’s husband get any message about her working agenda? Was that why he put her on the flight from Burbank back to San Jose? Had she left a message on the machine that she was in San Jose and was now working the route?
But that didn’t sync with WestAir’s story.
Marge stared at that final call. No matter how many times she did this task-retraced the last moments of someone’s life-it always gave her pause, seeing a marker that pinpointed one of a person’s final acts before the trip into the great void. Marge knew that in Roseanne’s case, there was a faint possibility that she wasn’t dead, that she had deliberately walked away from her current life to start up again as someone else, but that was stretching credulity.
She looked up just in time to see Decker and an elderly companion walk into the squad room. She did a double take.
“Hollander!” she cried out. “Is that you?”
“Feels like me.” Mike patted his chest and arms. “By God, I think it is me!”
Marge got up from her onerous task, walked over, and slapped him on the back. With a wide smile, he gave her a quick hug and regarded her at arm’s length. “Dunn, you still look as good as the day you deserted Foothill for this clown. And now I find out, pouring salt on the wound, that you outrank me.”
“Yeah, well, I promise I’ll use my power for the good of mankind. What brings you into enemy territory?”
“Him.” He crooked a finger in Decker’s direction.
“By personal invitation,” Decker told her. “We’re going online. Hollander remembered seeing some kind of technique that could help us identify our Jane Doe from the apartment building fire. Care to join?”
“I just got Roseanne Dresden’s phone records. I need to go over them, but keep me posted.” To Hollander: “Great seeing you, Michael. Don’t be such a stranger.”
“Last thing you need is an old fogy like myself bothering you.”
“It’s never a bother and I might even learn something from a veteran.”
He tapped his temple. “I collected a lot of stories working in the Naked City. Sometimes I remember my cases as if it were yesterday. Other times, it’s like working a cold case. My memory’s in deep freeze until some clue reopens the file and it all comes back to me in a rush.”
“I’m like that now,” Marge said. “I can only imagine what I’ll be like at your age, Mike.”
“Well, lucky for you that when you reach my age, you’ll probably forget this conversation.”
SITTING AT DECKER’S desk, both of them in front of the computer monitor, they logged on to Court TV, methodically going through the Forensic Files cases: over one hundred episodes, each with a thumbnail description. As Decker brought up each show, Hollander repeated the same phrase. “No, that’s not the one.”
An hour later they had exhausted the entire list.
Hollander got up and stretched. “I’m sure I remembered it from somewhere. I’m just not that smart or creative enough to make it up.”
Decker had his doubts. With age, sometimes recollections get confused, although Mike appeared to be sharp. “Do you want to go through them again?”
“No point to it, Rabbi. It’s not any of the episodes we looked at.” He scratched his head and sat back down. “Maybe it was a Cold Case File.”
“Let’s have a look.” Decker logged on to A &E and then on to the Web site for Cold Case Files. There were over one hundred episodes for that series as well. As with Forensic Files, each show came with a thumbnail sketch. Unlike Forensic Files, a half-hour program, Cold Case Files was an hour, sometimes divided into two half-hour cases; sometimes one case occupied the entire hour.
Decker brought up episode number one.
“No, that’s not it.”
Thirteen episodes later, they struck oil.
Mike exclaimed without hesitation, “That’s it.”
Decker was surprised, expecting another dead end. “‘Reconstructing Murder/Fire Flicks?’”
“It’s the first one,” Hollander said. “There’s a trailer tape. Does your computer have sound?”