Chapter 13
“It’s not going to do anything, no matter how long you stare at it,” Denny told her after finding Maggie standing in front of the fume hood, looking down at the letter David Carlyle had received.
“I know. But I don’t know how to proceed.”
This admission must have made him curious, because he paused to stare at the letter with her.
“There’s some indentations in the upper right-hand quadrant. It would be really nice if we could see if there’s anything legible there, but—”
“You also need to process for prints. I thought you were on your way to Columbus.”
“I thought you were home with the fam.”
“Giving a TED talk at Case Western in an hour.”
“Oh. Well, I’m going but I wanted to get this started first. Whether it’s anthrax or not, we still need to know who sent this note.”
“You think it’s that important—I mean, assuming it’s not anthrax?”
“Either way, yeah, I’m a little concerned for this guy. Someone executes a U.S. senator on her own doorstep, and the same day—or maybe the day before—someone drops a letter to the EPA guy who had conflicted with her? Two bizarre events so close together can’t be a coincidence. Can they?”
“But if he and the senator were in opposite corners, wouldn’t whoever killed her be on the EPA guy’s side?”
“Excellent question. I have no idea.”
“Or her murder has nothing to do with the EPA issue, and maybe in that case this isn’t anthrax and he’s safe.”
“Maybe that, too. Denny, I thought the financial firm was confusing—but at least they all had the same goal.”
“Money.”
“In this group, everybody has different goals.”
“Plus the kind of nuts who electrocute people and mail anthrax. You know that even if we get the answer, there’s no guarantee it will actually make sense.”
“You’re not making me feel better,” she told her boss.
“Sorry.”
“But that’s why I’m not ready to downplay this letter. We have the indented writing kit with the solutions, but if I soak it with those, I’m probably destroying the ridge detail I’d get by treating it with ninhydrin or DFO. But if I use those first and get the prints, they’ll have made the paper wavy enough to alter the indentations.”
“Obviously the ‘rubbing it with the side of a pencil tip’ technique is out.”
“Obviously.”
“Too bad. It always looks so cool in the movies.”
“I tried the ALS but didn’t get anywhere. Different wavelengths work great on inks but not so much on plain paper. I—oh, crap!”
Her outburst made her boss jump. “What?”
“Iodine!”
“Ah,” he said. “Best of both worlds.”
She could process the paper by packing iodine crystals into a tube and blowing through it to expel the fumes onto the paper, careful not to inhale the potentially carcinogenic fumes. They would turn the amino acids in any fingerprints to a brown color she could photograph before it faded. Once the prints were saved for posterity, she could use the indented writing solution. “I can’t believe it took me so long to figure that out!”
“Well, you’re distracted.”
She glanced at him as she clipped the letter and its envelope to clasps suspended from the top of the fume hood.
“Or so Carol says. Don’t glare, it’s no big deal. You know I won’t pry. Not much, anyway.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“But is the tall homicide detective going to be driving you to Columbus? I have a legitimate reason to ask, I swear! I was going to take the city wagon to the TED talk. No big deal, I can donate a few miles on the Dadmobile to the PD.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m sure he’s not. I mean, a senator just got murdered on her doorstep—the powers that be will expect him to be finding clues and questioning suspects rather than playing chauffeur for his . . . um . . .”
“Girlfriend,” Denny supplied. “It’s okay, you can say so.”
But that’s it, she thought. I can’t. “What’s the lecture about?”
“Dadmobile it is. And you don’t have to change the subject, I can take a hint. No prying.” He pushed himself off the counter and crossed to the doorway into the main lab, where he turned again. “Not even a little.”
She pulled out the iodine fuming kit; a plastic box with an old glass tube, open on both ends; and even older rubber plugs and latex hosing. She stuffed in some fiberglass wool, desiccant, iodine crystals, more desiccant—
“Not even the tiniest bit,” Denny, still in the room, added, causing her to spill some beads of desiccant onto the counter, swear, and order him from her presence, all of which made them both laugh. “You know you can do the baggie method.”
He meant she could simply place the paper in a zip-top plastic bag with the iodine crystals—much easier and should produce the same result. But she had never had much luck with it.
“I’m old-fashioned,” she told him.
“Apparently.” His voice imbued the word with a double meaning, but when she turned, he really had gone.
Fumes the color of burnt sienna swirled over the piece of white paper, turning it to a light brown color. This faded instantly in most areas but persisted in others, and when she looked more closely she could see the distinct lines of friction ridges. There were several around the edges, where one would usually hold a piece of paper, but also some in the center of the page where the baggie had been attached. A fairly clear one straddled both the paper and the piece of tape, which had held the baggie. The sender had had to press down on the tape to make sure it adhered to the paper.
She repeated the process on the back of the paper and the envelope, then moved both to the photography setup to record them. She gently positioned each print underneath the camera with a scale and a magnetic bar to weight it down to the metal stage underneath. This not only kept the paper from moving with any shift in the air but also kept it flat so that all the ridges would be in focus at the same time. Photographing prints on paper was easy. Prints on, say, the surface of a Pepsi can, not so much.
From the placement she would bet money that they belonged to Carlyle. One would hope that anyone sending anonymous, threatening, and possibly lethal letters would have the sense to wear gloves when they did.
When she had photographed everything of interest and scanned the entire page and envelope, she put the iodine equipment away and got out another old plastic box. This held a supply of small, disposable paintbrushes and a collection of tiny glass vials whose contents came in two varieties—weak indented writing and strong indented writing, depending on how deeply the furrows had been made into her piece of paper. She chose weak.
A natural inhibition to permanently alter evidence made her hesitate. “Catus amat piscem sed non vult tingere plantas,” she said aloud, with no idea if she pronounced it correctly. The cat would love to eat fish but hates to get her feet wet. She shook the vial, inserted the tiny brush, and painted the upper corner of the paper with dilute ammonium thiosulfate. As far as she knew, it would not react with the iodine, and if it did, that might be a good thing, rendering the fading iodine print into a more permanent color. She might discover a new technique for stabilizing iodine prints. Or she might make the colors run together and the indented writing harder to see.
As it was, the iodine did not interfere and some shapes formed in a darker brown shade against the now light brown paper. Letters appeared: ne Sat 10.
Interesting, Maggie thought. But not at all useful—at least not to her. She would have to ask David Carlyle if the notations meant anything to him, because if they did, perhaps the letter had come from some coworker who didn’t like him very much. Or one who was not above accepting money from Vepo to work on their behalf. And Jack and Riley would have to ask, since questioning witnesses was not her job.
The envelope yielded no other writing. It did have some prints, which she had photographed.
She put the indented writing kit away, left the paper and envelope in the hood to dry, and prepared for her trip to Columbus. She had one stop to make first.
* * *
“I should be used to people yelling at me,” Lori Russo said. They had taken refuge where the crumbling brick wall blocked some of the noise of the workers. She perched on the waist-high edge of the fallen metal staircase without regard for her khaki trench coat. “But somehow I never am.”
Riley, unusually intense, said, “If he attempts any sort of retribution, you let us know immediately.”
Jack thought, not that we’ll likely be able to do anything about it. Politicians knew to keep their visible business one inch inside the legal fence, with people to take care of the invisible business.
The reporter said, “I can’t stand to see this huge pile of taxpayer cash about to be pushed off a cliff and no one seems to care. These tax credits and grants and outright payoffs to bring jobs to town hardly ever work out. I get that since the economy crashed, cities have been grasping for jobs and acting like another Great Depression is right around the corner, even though the unemployment rate is back down to normal. Yes, it’s always good to be prepared, but not good to be so desperate that you debit the future just to—well, just to get yourself elected.”
“You think StartUp Central is a pipe dream?” Riley asked.
“I think it’s a flat-out con, and Senator Cragin was our last chance to stop it. She could have gotten the committee to hold off the money until all questions are answered. The committee is so eager to make their mark that due diligence has been tossed out the window. I don’t mean to be ageist, but who hands control of twelve million dollars to a kid with no verifiable track record? Maybe Scofield actually believes he can do what he says he can, but I sure don’t. And I’m sure Green knows better.”
“You think part of that twelve million is going to come back to Green?”
“I have no doubt. And whatever he gets as a direct kickback is only part of it. A project this size isn’t one contract, it’s a series of contracts, and Green will have a finger in all of them. The wall panels are coming from a company called Wiley that’s owned, on paper, by the father of the guy who hired an ex-assistant of Green’s as a salesman. The ex-assistant kicks part of his increased salary back to Green, and lo and behold Wiley gets to sell wall panels to the StartUp project. I know that because his sister told me. The guy who will put in all the wiring owns a company that turned Green’s backyard into a resort—and I know that because I crashed a party there once—another reason he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t invite people who can’t keep their mouths shut.”
Thinking like a cop again, Riley asked, “Can you prove any of this? Or is it simply business as usual?”
“That’s the question. The currency of politics has always been jobs. Lincoln traded jobs for votes to get the thirteenth amendment passed. I’m sure several bags of rice changed hands to build the Great Wall. No politician ever had enough money to buy votes indefinitely, but give a man a job, and without spending a penny, he is indebted to you forever. Give a man a contract and the same applies, plus he pays you.”
Jack said, “And becomes a co-conspirator, should things turn sour.”
“It’s got to catch up with him eventually,” Riley said, more hopeful than positive.
Lori said, “But by the time it does, he’ll be a senator in DC and this will all be ancient history.”
“If he wins.”
“That may be a given now that Diane Cragin’s dead. Maybe not. It’s a numbers game now. It probably won’t matter that the new candidate will be someone the voters never heard of until today, or what he’s done or hasn’t done. All that will matter is that he’s Republican. There is no crossing party lines at the voting booth anymore . . . and that’s my fault as much as anyone’s.”
“Your fault?” Riley asked.
“The collective me—the news media. We in print media at least modify it a little bit with actual stories and information about events other than politics, but the twenty-four-hour channels—the talk shows that pretend to be news shows—have discovered the key to job security. Sorry, I’m being obscure.” She spoke with her hands, long fingers dancing through the air to sketch her thoughts. “Two things have changed this country. One, the political parties have gerrymandered all the districts so that each has a majority of one party or the other. Once a candidate gets past the primary, they don’t need to do much else. If the district is largely Republican and they’re a Republican, they’re going to get elected. If it’s largely Democrat and they’re the Democratic candidate, they’re going to get elected. It doesn’t matter what a candidate does, what they’ve done, what they’re planning to do. Both parties have trained the populace to think only in terms of party. Any political advertising or platforms or sound bites you see don’t say a word about ‘Candidate A believes in charter school vouchers and hopes to get funding for a new dam to generate green power in the valley.’ They say, ‘Candidate A is the candidate for party A and we can’t let any more B representatives get into Congress. ’ They behave as if that’s all the voters need to know, until the voters come to believe that is all they need to know. That’s certainly all they’re told—and who has the time to do their own research while they’re earning a living and taking the kids to soccer practice and maintaining the house?”
Riley listened, his attention due to either his interest in politics or his interest in beautiful women. Jack listened, wondering if this could get them any closer to who killed Diane Cragin. Maybe so. If the political world had become so either/or, why wouldn’t murdering your opponent be the simplest, easiest, even cheapest way to victory? But according to Lori Russo, changing the candidate wouldn’t change the numbers. So had someone killed Diane Cragin for nothing? Or for a different reason altogether?
“The second thing is me, us, the media. I’m not trying to absolve myself, but obviously it’s mostly the twenty-four-hour channels, who have discovered the same thing: the economic beauty of a built-in customer base. They can chat away for hours and hours, not about what has actually happened but about what might have happened and what they think might happen and their opinion of what happened or what they think should happen. Why? Because it’s easy and it’s cheap. You don’t have to do any investigation or any real news-gathering. All you have to do is pick one party or the other and you have the same defined, built-in customer base that the parties do. Of course your goal is ratings, not votes, but either way its job security. So for their own reasons, the media in this country have jumped on the bandwagon with both feet.” She tucked a lock of yellow hair behind one ear, then gave them a sheepish look. “And that, gentlemen, is what’s wrong with this country. According to Lori Russo.”
Perhaps Riley’s thoughts had been more on target than his partner suspected, because he said, “So who do you think killed Diane Cragin?”
“I’d love it to be Joey Green,” she admitted. “But I have nothing to back that up. All I can do is bust his chops over StartUp Central. If he did kill the senator and my pestering distracts him, maybe he’ll screw up and reveal something to you two. And it will distract him from my real story.”
“What’s that?” Riley asked.
“Sorry. I can’t comment on an open investigation,” she said with a devilish grin. “I’m trying not to turn into another Roberta Baskin.”
“What does that mean?”
“Roberta Baskin did a great expose on Nike sweat shops in Vietnam, got a lot of attention, but CBS pulled the story when Nike sponsored the Japan Olympics—aired on CBS. I don’t want to give Green any heads-up. Influence can travel by a number of different avenues. Suffice it to say that StartUp Central and all the money swirling in its orbit is only the tip of a very large iceberg.”
Then she stood up and brushed off the back of her coat, holding it out and twisting to see if the fallen staircase had stained the back of it. Jack looked too, but not at her coat.
The metal staircase had had metal steps, with risers made of rectangular metal grates, two to each step. Apparently they had simply rested inside the step’s frame and then slipped out when the structure collapsed. Several rested on the ground. They looked quite similar to the object found on Diane Cragin’s doorstep. He leaned past her and picked one up.
Riley stared. Then he said, “I’ll get a bag.”
“What?” Lori Russo asked. “What is that?”
“Long story.”
For a reporter, she knew when not to press. Or when to change direction. “Hey, guess what? My editor approved the New Mexico travel. I’m going to Phoenix.”
If I have any acting skills, Jack thought, now is the time to use them. But it seemed impossible to make his face calm when his stomach had clenched into one iron knot. “Great. When do you leave?”
“This weekend. Is there anything you can think of that I should ask when I talk to the Phoenix PD? Any lingo that would make them take me seriously?”
He pretended to think about this as they emerged from the ruins. The wind cut through his blazer, and the sun had begun to sink toward the West Side Market on the other side of the river. He still carried the grate, and in the distance Riley rooted around in the trunk of their car. Jack wanted to cut the conversation off, but if she kept talking until Riley returned, she might get his partner’s attention. So far Riley had been okay with considering the vigilante murders to be unsolvable ancient history. Should he drag his feet and get her onto another topic before his partner returned? Or cut his losses and tell her they had to get this grate to Maggie for comparison as quickly as possible?
Managing people proved so much easier when he planned to kill them in the same sitting. Then he could say anything he wanted.
“No. You know all about the murders here—ask if they had anything similar. Especially similar to the caliber of the gun and the locations of the bodies.” At least these last two would broaden the number of murders under consideration instead of narrow it, and with luck she’d get someone with little patience or time or inclination to help. Someone who might send her on her way without encouragement, or worse, a tour of the facility.
His safest bet was if she didn’t go at all.
She picked her way through the weeds and thanked him.
Riley approached and held out a paper grocery bag, into which Jack dropped the metal grate.
“Are you guys going to tell me what that thing is?” the reporter asked.
In unison, they told her, “No.”