by Ray Green
‘I’ll try not to get in your way too much,’ said Juanita.
Introductions over, Goldsmith turned his attention back to Juanita. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘Julia was using these three filing cabinets.’ He slapped his hand on top of each in turn. ‘You’ll need to box up everything inside them, and everything from inside her desk drawers; you’ll find some suitable boxes in that room over there.’ He pointed at an open door at the side of the office. ‘They’ll also need her laptop and any flash drives, discs and so on which she may have been using.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You OK with all that?’
‘Sure – that’s fine.’
‘Anyway, if you need anything else, I’m sure Emily or Scott will be able to help you.’
Emily nodded; Scott just grunted.
Goldsmith patted her on the arm, letting his hand linger rather longer than was necessary, before turning and heading back to his own desk.
So far, so good; but how the hell am I going to copy any documents or computer files with these two sitting right alongside me?
Chapter 17
Mark Bowman was back at his desk, supposedly recovered from his fictitious stomach bug.
Sergeant O’Reilly was his usual sympathetic self. ‘You’re back, I see. How’s progress on the Patterson case?’
‘Yeah, I’m OK now, thanks,’ retorted Mark. ‘Must have been something I’d eaten.’
O’Reilly ignored the sarcastic reply. ‘And the Patterson case?’ he persisted.
‘Well,’ began Mark, taking a deep breath as he prepared to deliver another pack of lies to his superior, ‘I think we’re onto something with the link to the jacket I told you about.’
‘Yeah?’ grunted O’Reilly. ‘What you got?’
‘Turns out the stolen jacket turned up in a dumpster two days after the Patterson burglary; the owner has confirmed it’s his. I’ve seen the jacket for myself and I’m almost certain it’s the same one that guy who got caught on CCTV at the Patterson spread was wearing.’
Mark was really sweating now. It would be the easiest thing in the world for O’Reilly to check out his story; Mark just had to hope he wouldn’t have any reason to do so.
‘So why’d this guy dump the jacket after going to the trouble of stealing it?’
‘My guess,’ said Mark, ‘is that he realised he’d been caught on camera and figured that hanging on to the jacket might make it easier to track him down.’
‘Hmm,’ said O’Reilly, stroking his chin, ‘could be, I guess. Anyhow, we gotta nail this guy and find the stolen stuff – especially that Jaguar. Apparently, Patterson’s going completely apeshit about that: seems he cares more about that damned car than his wife getting whacked over the head.’
‘I’m on it Sarge – I’ll work with the guys investigating the other burglary over at Staten Island. I’m also going to put out the word with a couple of my informants. Trust me - we’ll get these guys.’
‘You’d better,’ growled O’Reilly, ‘the chief’s right on my ass over this.’
Yeah, and you’re right on mine, thought Mark. ‘Sure thing Sarge,’ he said.
As O’Reilly lumbered away from his desk, Mark exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief. His heart was racing and his shirt drenched in perspiration.
Alexis, sitting at her desk nearby, had obviously overheard much of the conversation. She shook her head, slowly, before standing up and coming over.
‘Mark, you gotta be careful,’ she whispered. ‘If you’re bullshitting him, he’s gonna find out eventually.’
‘I guess,’ acknowledged Mark, ‘but I’ve got to keep him off my back until I can find Julia’s killer.’
‘Oh, Mark, you have to leave it to Don: he’s the detective in charge of Julia’s case. You’ll be in all sorts of shit if O’Reilly finds out you’ve been working on it too.’
‘I know, but …’
‘Let it go, Mark.’
He hung his head for a few seconds, before raising his gaze to meet hers. ‘I guess you’re right.’
‘I am,’ she insisted. ‘Now get on that Patterson case, before O’Reilly skins you alive.’
He gave a weak smile; she patted his arm and returned to her desk.
But Mark couldn’t just let it go. Don Lister had been in the force for almost thirty years, and he was due to retire in a few months’ time. He’d never exactly been the sharpest tool in the box, and it was no surprise to Mark that he’d never progressed beyond the rank of detective. He had very little confidence that, with retirement beckoning, Don would solve Julia’s murder and bring her killer to justice. But then, he had to admit that he wasn’t getting anywhere himself, either.
He clicked the mouse alongside his computer and brought up, once again, the CCTV clip which he had been studying before O’Reilly had interrupted him. For the seventh or eighth time, he watched the young woman come rushing out of the front door of the Edward Mason Pathology Laboratory, clutching a sheaf of papers. As she broke into a run, her long, dark hair streaming behind her, he hit ‘pause’. Frustratingly, he couldn’t get a clear view of her face, but there could be no doubt that this was the woman who had attempted to copy the autopsy report. How much she had succeeded in copying was difficult to determine, but from the page at which the original report had been left open on the photocopier, he guessed about half.
He hit ‘play’ and slowed the playback down to one quarter speed, watching as the woman sprinted, in slow motion, towards the corner of the next street, wheeling around to the right while barely breaking stride. Still he could not see her face clearly or glean any clue as to her identity. At least they had the passport photo, but it was small, and of poor resolution. When blown up to a larger size it was blurry and pixelated.
Once again, he flipped to the recording from the next camera, around the corner; once again, there was no sign of the running woman. He had already determined that there was a blind spot spanning the first thirty yards of that street before that camera’s field of vision kicked in. His quarry had managed to disappear somewhere within that blind spot; she must have either dived into a building within that first thirty yards, or into a waiting car. Mark had already checked the area and there were only three businesses with a door directly onto the street in that zone, and all three had numerical keypads to afford entry. Unless this woman knew the code of one of them – unlikely, in Mark’s view – then she had to have gotten away in a car. He assumed that, as she was in such a hurry, she would have set off immediately in the car: he estimated that there was a window of perhaps forty seconds during which time the car would have entered the camera’s field of vision.
He scrolled through the recording in slow motion, paying careful attention to the time stamp. There were four possible vehicles in which the suspect could have escaped: a black Ford Edge SUV, a silver Toyota Camry sedan, a dark blue GMC Sierra Pickup, and a white Ford Transit Connect van. Frustratingly, the location of the camera did not afford a view of the licence plates, but it was possible to get a view of the front passenger seat of each vehicle. Mark figured it unlikely that the woman would be driving; leaving her car on a yellow for any length of time in New York’s busy streets would have been just asking for it to be towed away. No, she most likely had an accomplice waiting for her.
Only two of the cars had a front seat passenger: The Camry and the Sierra. Both were women, but only the Camry’s occupant had long, dark hair. So now he knew, with near certainty, that the suspect had escaped in a silver Toyota Camry. Without the licence number, it didn’t exactly narrow the field too much: there were probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such vehicles in the New York City area. But it was a start, however small; if he could get some other clues to put together with this snippet of information then maybe, just maybe, he could get on her trail.
Chapter 18
‘Guess I’ll get started right away,’ said Juanita, addressing her remark to the young girl, Emily, rather than Scott, who seemed altogether less friendly.
‘Sure,’ she said
, smiling. ‘Anything we can help you with, just ask.’
‘Thanks. First off, I guess I’ll go and get some of those boxes.’
The room Goldsmith had indicated was about fifteen feet square and, judging by the tired décor and copious amount of clutter, was evidently treated as a sort of general dumping ground. The wall to the left was lined with several teetering stacks of box files and yellowing piles of papers. At the back of the room, below the single small window, were the boxes to which Goldsmith had referred: dozens of them. But the most important thing of all was located to the right of the door: a photocopier. Perhaps, if this room was not visited by other employees too frequently, she might be able to snatch enough privacy to copy some of the papers.
She had made sure her cell phone was fully charged this time, having well and truly learned her lesson from her stupid mistake at the path lab, but given the substantial volume of material she might need to copy now, the automatic document feeder of the photocopier would be far quicker than photographing individual pages. Even so, with the contents of three large filing cabinets, and Julia’s desk, to deal with, she would still need to be very selective about what she chose to copy. There was also the consideration of just how she would smuggle out the copied documents if she attempted to copy too much.
She grabbed two of the boxes and headed back to Julia’s desk.
‘I’ll make a start then,’ she said to Emily, who smiled and nodded in return.
There were several piles of papers on the desk. Juanita guessed that these were more likely to relate to what Julia had been working on recently than the huge amount of material in the filing cabinets, so she decided she’d concentrate her efforts on those. However, she was acutely conscious of the frequent furtive sidelong glances from Scott, seated alongside; he was bound to notice if she was examining these papers in any detail. She decided to start with the filing cabinets; hopefully, by the time she started sifting through the papers on the desk, he’d have lost interest in what she was doing.
***
An hour had passed, and Scott never did lose interest: he seemed to be paying more attention to what Juanita was doing than to his own work. Every time she stopped to take a look at some of the papers that she removed from the filing cabinets, his head swivelled towards her. Even when she had her back turned, she could feel his eyes boring into it. This was hopeless; she’d already more or less given up on gleaning much useful from the material in the filing cabinets, but when it came to sorting through the – hopefully more significant – papers on the desk, she’d have to get them away from under Scott’s watchful gaze.
She had an idea.
‘Uh, Emily,’ – the young girl turned towards her – ‘I’m kind of tripping over myself with all these boxes under my feet, and I’ve still got one more filing cabinet to unload. D’you think it’d be OK if I moved them over to the room where I got the empty boxes from and put everything together there for the police to collect tomorrow?’
‘Oh, sure … no-one cares about that room. There’s stuff in there dating back to the dark ages,’ she laughed.
All the time Juanita had been engaged in boxing up the papers, she had also been keeping an eye on the door to the room. Given that it contained the only photocopier in the office, it was not surprising that quite a few people were in and out of the room all the time. The intervals were, of course, quite random: sometimes no-one would enter or leave for around fifteen minutes; other times there would be an almost constant stream of people entering and leaving. Still, it was her best hope; at least she could sift through some of the papers away from Scott’s prying gaze. Furthermore, most people in the office appeared to be super-busy – unlike the slothful Scott. She hoped no-one would be too interested in why a temp was doing some photocopying.
‘Thanks,’ said Juanita, bending down to try to lift one of the boxes; it was way too heavy.
‘Oh, don’t try to do that,’ said Emily, rising from her chair. ‘There’s a sack truck in the room over there. Come with me … I’ll show you.’
The two of them went over to the photocopier room, returning a minute or two later with the truck. Emily tried in vain to lift the first box onto the truck.
‘Scott,’ she chided, ‘are you gonna help here, or not?’
The big man exhaled noisily as he levered himself to his feet. ‘Shoulda thought about that before loading up them boxes so full,’ he muttered.
‘Thanks a bunch for the advice,’ she replied, a sharp edge to her voice. ‘So, you gonna make her unpack the boxes, or you gonna help?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he grunted as he bent down and heaved the first box onto the sack truck. He stood back, evidently not expecting to actually wheel the truck over to the photocopier room.
‘Thanks,’ said Juanita, trying not to let the sarcasm show in her voice, ‘I guess I can manage this bit on my own.’ She placed a foot on the base of the truck and heaved backwards, tipping it until it felt balanced, before setting off with it.
‘You’re such a shmuck, Scott,’ she heard the young girl hiss at him from behind her.
Juanita didn’t know what else Emily might have said to him in the minute or two she was away, but it must have had some effect because he then offered to move the rest of the boxes himself, though he barely uttered a word while doing so.
When he had finished, in spite of his somewhat surly demeanour, Juanita treated him to her most winning smile, touching him lightly on the arm. ‘Thanks so much Scott … it’s good to have a strong man around to help.’
His expression softened; there was even a hint of a smile. ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ he murmured, before turning back to sit at his desk.
Emily and Juanita exchanged a knowing glance. Men, Emily mouthed silently, before returning to her work.
OK, so far so good. What next? thought Juanita. For once, Scott seemed now to be actually paying attention to his own work. This could be a good time to attempt to copy the contents of the laptop onto the hard drive. She opened the lid of the laptop and pressed the power button. After a few seconds the screen lit up with a stunning view of snow-covered mountains, infused with a golden glow by the setting sun. In the centre was Julia Turner’s name and photograph: the contrast between this beautiful, vivacious-looking girl and the shockingly mutilated face she had seen in the autopsy report elicited from Juanita an involuntary gasp. But it was what lay below Julia’s name that made her heart skip a beat: a white box containing the single word, ‘Password’.
Shit!
Chapter 19
Juanita’s heart began to race as she tried to figure out what to do. She had been counting on the computer to provide the best evidence of what Julia had been working on – it would be impossible, in the time she had available, to sift through the entire contents of those boxes of files. There were, of course still those piles of papers out on the desk, but it was the computer which was most likely to hold the key.
She sat for a few minutes, going through the motions of reorganising the piles of papers while she tried to compose herself and come up with some plan. Should she risk actually stealing the laptop? Even if she did, how would she and James get past the password barrier, no matter how much time they had? Furthermore, once the police realised the machine had been stolen, they would know, straightaway, that she was probably the one responsible and it was more than likely that they’d eventually make the link with the copying of the autopsy report. Then she’d really be in their crosshairs. This was all getting far too dangerous: maybe she should just abandon this mission completely and try to convince James to do likewise.
Her introspective pondering was interrupted by a loud creaking noise as Scott levered his considerable bulk from his protesting swivel chair. ‘Gotta use the men’s room,’ he informed her, somewhat unnecessarily.
With most of her options now closed off, Juanita decided she’d use the few minutes while Scott was away to see if Emily knew anything. ‘Nearly done,’ she said, as a means of opening the conversation. Sh
e tried to keep her voice as calm and casual as possible.
Emily managed a small smile, but there was something about her demeanour that made it clear she wasn’t in a smiling mood. It didn’t take long for her to reveal why.
‘I still can’t believe that Julia’s gone. I was so used to her sitting right there, alongside me. Seeing all her work reduced to a just a few boxes of papers like that … it kind of brings it all back. It’s all just so …’ her voice tailed off as she fought back the tears which threatened to burst forth.
Juanita placed a comforting arm around her shoulders. ‘Yes, it’s a terrible, terrible thing.’
The moment passed, and the tears never came, but once again, fear showed in the young girl’s eyes as she visibly shuddered. ‘I know … it’s absolutely awful.’
‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’ said Juanita.
‘I don’t know,’ said Emily, ‘but everyone’s really scared that there could be a serial killer out there with a grudge against the newspaper.’
‘Seems unlikely to me,’ said Juanita. ‘It could just be a random attack … or maybe she’d upset someone with an investigation she was working on.’
‘Maybe,’ conceded Emily, ‘but … oh, I don’t know.’
This was the moment: Juanita needed to sound as casual as possible. ‘What was she working on, anyway?’
‘Oh, she was doing a feature on companies employing illegal immigrants as cheap labour. She was homing in on the building industry … apparently, in New York alone, they use thousands of illegals, mostly from Mexico.’
Ironic, thought Juanita, that Emily was telling her this when she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico herself. But there was no time to dwell on this; she needed to get to the point as quickly as possible, before Scott returned. Although Emily seemed completely credulous that her questions were born merely out of curiosity, she doubted that Scott would be as accommodating.