Manhattan
Nicole’s intercom crackled. “NYPD on their way up, ma’am.”
The Saudi letter repelled her as if it had its own malevolent aura. She paced near the door until someone knocked and she saw Wojciechowski through the peephole. A middle-aged Indian with a camera around his neck and carrying an oversized metal briefcase followed the detective in.
“Detective Pranav somethin’ or other,” Wojciechowski said. “Dr. Nicole Berman, daughter of the vic. Get your explanation outta the way so you can get to work.”
The techie delicately laid his case down and presented Nicole his card, which identified him as Detective Third Grade Pranav Chakrabarti, a forensic technician with the NYPD Crime Scene Unit. “We are known as CSUs,” he said formally, “not CSIs, as Detective Wojciechowski insists on referring to us. And, as you can see, I learned to pronounce his difficult name, despite his unwillingness to pronounce mine.”
Nicole read it perfectly, and he beamed.
“Well, ’scuse me for not havin’ a doctorate,” Wojciechowski said. “Can we get to this now, Pranav?”
The CSU set up on the table a small tripod for his camera as well as a formation of LCD lights. He quizzed Nicole about how much she had handled the letter and envelope.
“I’m going to photograph them, dust them for prints, and then bag and take them to the lab for more sophisticated testing. Detective Wojciechowski tells me he’s trying to see your mail carrier this evening. Fortunately you and your father—and any US postal worker—have your prints in databases to which we have access. We need to determine which post offices this came through to eliminate their personnel and then see if we can lift any other prints.”
Chakrabarti went quiet as he worked, and Nicole pulled Wojciechowski aside. “Does this take the focus off my father and me?”
“Sure could be a game changer, assumin’ one of you didn’t send it yourself.”
Nicole puffed. “You just won’t be convinced, will you?”
“Lemme ask you this. What if we found your dad’s fingerprints on that letter?”
She shook her head. “I can’t even invent a response.”
“Welcome to my world, Doc. This is the kinda stuff I have to consider every day.”
“You’re working too hard.” Secretly, Nicole was glad he did. The threat had so rattled her she didn’t even want to talk about it. “Do you usually work weekends?”
“I wouldn’t know what a weekend was,” Wojciechowski said. “You think crime takes days off?”
“You love it, is that it?”
That seemed to stop him. “Love it? Well, I sure don’t do this for the cash.”
“Why then?”
“I’m good at it.”
“I can tell,” Nicole said. “But that doesn’t answer why.”
“You really wanna know? Truth is, I’m a justice freak. And much as people want you to believe that all the idealism is drummed out of a cop by the time he’s been on the job a coupla years, there’s still a lot of us in this for the right reasons.”
“What made you that way?”
Wojciechowski chuckled. “Now who won’t get off the case? You’d make a good cop.”
“You’re evading the question, George.” In truth, Nicole was desperate to talk about anything but her own trauma.
“Oh, good one,” he said. “I told you when we met that you could call me George, but you don’t until you wanna get personal.”
“Guilty. So why?”