At his desk at LAPD headquarters, Detective Garrett Dobbs scrolled through the hundreds of photographs taken at Alyssa Tepper’s apartment earlier in the day. CSI had uploaded them to a secure cloud storage folder. Pictures of Tepper and Michael Kepler, or Michael Fitzgerald, or whatever; seemingly random photographs of her kitchen, living room, bedroom. Still shots of the video featuring her with Kepler. Near the end, he found what he was looking for. “There it is.”
Dobbs raised his phone and held it out to Wilkins.
Wilkins, sitting at the desk across from his with his own phone pressed to his ear, waved him off.
Dobbs looked back down at the screen and enlarged the image of the feather attached to a thin leather strap, some kind of necklace. On the flat-panel computer monitor on his desk, he had a picture of the bag of feathers found in Kepler’s truck. A tech had removed one of the feathers and photographed it alongside the bag and a ruler. The example feather was a little over four inches long, similar to the one on Tepper’s necklace. Dobbs was by no means an expert, so he called one. Mirella Sunde at the Griffith Park Bird Sanctuary dropped into lecture mode, and Dobbs scrambled to take notes on at least thirty-five sparrow species in North America. Fifteen of those were common throughout the country, half a dozen were common to the eastern United States, ten more were common to the central part of the country, and two particular species were common to western North America—the Baird’s sparrow and the golden-crowned sparrow. Dobbs finally got her to consent to identify the species if he had a feather brought to her by a uniformed officer.
Across from him, Wilkins scribbled on a notepad, then ended his call. “I’ve got something from Kepler’s credit card records. He rents a warehouse space off Alameda. Maybe ten minutes from here.”
Dobbs snatched his keys from the corner of his desk and stood. “I’m driving.”