Tales of River City

by Frank Zafiro

  Elias stepped forward first and examined the interior of the locker. He let out a long, loud sigh. Then he stepped aside for Finch.

  Finch looked inside the locker. At first sight, it appeared empty. Then his eyes lighted onto the upper shelf. A rolled baggie of marijuana the size of two thick cigars perched halfway to the rear of the locker.

  Finch groaned. “This is about some marijuana?”

  “Yeah,” Booth admitted. “I smoke it for the pain in my joints. I don’t sell it, man. I just use it, you know, medicinally.”

  “Why is it here?”

  “My P.O.,” Booth explained. “He visits my house and tosses the place. And he comes here sometimes, too, and searches my locker. So I use the spare locker to store my stuff. Before I go home at night, I take a little with me. Just enough to get through.”

  “Great,” muttered Elias.

  “Are you guys going to arrest me on this?” Booth asked. “Because if you do, my P.O. will probably violate me. I’ve got seven months left to go on my sentence.”

  “Close that,” Finch told him.

  Gratitude flooded Booth’s features. He shut the locker and snapped the lock into place. “Dude, thank you. Really. I mean it.”

  Finch ignored him and went to the sink, where he splashed some water on his face. Behind him, he heard Booth thanking Elias. Elias grunted.

  When Finch turned back around, Moore strode through the door. Adam trailed behind, carrying a notepad.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Adam asked. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “The acoustics are better in here,” Elias said.

  Adam smirked at him. “Whatever.”

  “What do you have, Adam?” Finch asked.

  Adam’s smirk melted into a proud grin. “Something interesting. I cross-checked all of the door contacts against the alarm disables.”

  “If the alarm is off, how did you—”

  “The current still runs through the contact on the door,” Adam explained, “even if the alarm is disabled. Breaking the contact just doesn’t set off the alarm, that’s all. It still registers in the system as a contact break.”

  “Meaning you can tell when a door was opened, even if the alarm was off,” Finch concluded.

  “Right.”

  “Why didn’t you check this earlier?” Elias asked.

  Adam scowled. “The software doesn’t display it. I had to go into the programming language and identify—oh, never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Elias opened his mouth to protest. Before he could, Finch asked, “What did you find?”

  Adam glanced down at the notepad. “The alarm was disabled at 0100 and forty seconds. Six minutes later, it was re-enabled with a sixty-second delay.”

  “We know that already,” Elias said.

  Adam held up a finger, silencing him. “The door was opened at 0100 and twenty-eight seconds.”

  Elias twirled his finger, signaling him to hurry up.

  Adam paused, seeming to savor the moment. Then, through a smile, he said, “The door wasn’t opened again until 0613.”

  Finch and Elias stood still, absorbing the information. In the silence, the sound of water dripping from the sink reverberated throughout the locker room.

  Finch cleared his throat. “I thought there was a disable before that.”

  “There was. The system was disabled at 0559.”

  “Which we figured was Leavitt. And then Moore a short time later.”

  “0613,” Adam said. “And there is a corresponding break in the door contacts for Moore’s arrival at 0613. But there isn’t one at 0559.”

  Finch and Elias exchanged a knowing glance.

  “Whoever it was that came in at 0100 never left,” Elias said.

  “Most likely Leavitt,” Finch said. He rubbed his chin. Then he asked, “So where’s the mummy?”

  Elias gave him a confused look.

  “If Leavitt never left,” Finch began.

  Realization flooded Elias’s face. “Then neither did the mummy. Of course.”

  “So where is the little bastard?”

  The five men stood in the locker room in silence once more. Finch closed his eyes. He envisioned everywhere he’d been inside the museum. He considered and rejected Leavitt’s office as a possibility. Too obvious. Dr. Ingram’s office, perhaps? Too dangerous. Maybe inside another exhibit, where it could sit until the fervor died down and then he could retrieve it?

  Finch tried to focus, but the dripping water faucet and the rattle of paper from Adam’s notepad distracted him. Michael Booth coughed. Elias unwrapped a piece of gum.

  Inspiration struck Finch like an unseen left hook. He opened his eyes and smiled. “You,” he said to Booth.

  Booth shifted nervously. “Me?”

  Finch nodded and pointed to the lockers. “Open those.”

  “Huh?”

  “The lockers. I want you to open them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Maybe. But start with the spare ones.”

  Elias broke into a smile. He nodded his head appreciatively. “Could be, Finchie.”

  Finch shrugged. “We’ll see. And since we’re dealing with a mummy, you might as well start with lucky number thirteen.”

  The relief was plain on Booth’s face as he fumbled with his master key. He unlocked locker thirteen. It was empty.

  “Open number fourteen.”

  Booth did so.

  Empty.

  “Next one.”

  Fifteen was likewise empty. So were the rest of the teens, twenty and twenty-one. When Booth swung open number twenty-two, he let out a gasp and took a step backward.

  Finch put a hand on Booth’s shoulder. He pushed slightly and the janitor stumbled to the side. Finch stepped forward and gazed into the locker.

  Inside, leaned casually against the locker wall, stood a two-foot mummy in a narrow, wooden coffin.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Elias said, peering over Finch’s shoulder.

  Finch felt the presence of the other men in the locker room as they crowded near him to see what stood inside the locker.

  “Thank God,” whispered Moore.

  “Thank Finch,” Elias said.

  Behind them the door swung open. All five men turned at once.

  A sandy-haired man in his early thirties stood in the doorway. His blue suit identified him before he even flashed his credentials to the assembled men.

  “Special Agent Maurice Payne, FBI,” he said in an anemic voice, swallowing his words. “I’m here to assist in the recovery of the antiquity that was stolen last—”

  He broke off, his eyes drifting to the open locker. Confusion filled his eyes.

  Finch glanced at Elias, who didn’t even try to conceal his grin.

  “I don’t understand,” Payne said. “My supervisor said that there was some sort of mummy stolen…”

  “There was,” Finch said. “A baby mummy.”

  “A bastard,” Elias added.

  Finch made a sweeping gesture toward the locker. “Special Agent Payne, meet Babafemi.”

  “It means ‘loved by his father,’” Elias said.

  Payne smiled hesitantly and gave the locker a small, uncertain wave. “Uh, so you’ve found it?”

  “Just in time, too, it looks like,” Elias said.

  Payne’s face pinched in confusion. “Wha—”

  “Agent Payne,” Finch asked. “Can you secure this scene for us? We have one more thing to take care of.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Thanks,” Finch said.

  “Nothing like local and federal authorities cooperating,” Elias said, clapping Payne on the shoulder as he walked past.

  “No one touches that mummy,” Finch directed, and left the locker room.

  Leavitt’s door was closed. Finch entered without knocking, Elias on his heels.

  Leavitt looked up from his paperwork, his pen frozen in place. He bore the same haughty expression he’d had earlier in th
e day. “Yes, detectives? Have you found the missing piece yet? Because if you haven’t, I—”

  “Actually, we have,” Finch said.

  A flicker of surprise flared in Leavitt’s eyes. “You did?”

  Finch nodded.

  Leavitt recovered, not missing a beat. “That’s good news. I must confess, I am a bit surprised.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet,” Elias said.

  Leavitt rose and offered his hand to Finch. “Well, then. Excellent work, detective. You’ll have to tell me the details.”

  Finch ignored the outstretched hand and didn’t reply.

  “We kinda thought you’d like to tell us the details,” Elias said.

  Leavitt’s lowered his hand, his gaze remaining on Finch while he answered Elias. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Oh, I think you are,” Elias said, leaning on the front of Leavitt’s desk. “I think you can pretty much tell us how the whole thing went down. Not that we need to know. Not from you, anyway.”

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend the ‘I don’t understand’ defense. Unless you can get some psychiatrist-for-sale to testify that you’re crazy, juries don’t tend to buy it.”

  Leavitt broke away from Finch and stared at Elias. “Jury? Detective, I don’t know what you think you know, but—”

  “One chance,” Finch said.

  Leavitt looked back to him. “What?”

  Finch held up a finger. “You get one chance to tell your side of the story. One chance for the judge and jury to know why you did it. If you blow that chance, that’s your problem.”

  Leavitt started to speak, but Finch looked away and raised his hand to stop him.

  “Don’t answer yet,” Finch said. “You only get one chance, so hear me out. All right?”

  Leavitt swallowed. Finch saw the panic at the corner of his eyes, struggling to burst free. Leavitt kept it under control and nodded.

  “Good choice,” Elias said.

  “You may think you came up with the world’s best plan,” Finch said. “But you didn’t. We have the alarm codes. We have the contact breaks that tell us when the doors were opened and when they weren’t. We know you came down here at one in the morning, disabled the alarm, stole the mummy and hid it in a spare locker. Then you reset the alarm on a sixty second delay and headed to your office.”

  Leavitt said nothing. A bead of sweat appeared at his temple. It rolled down to his jaw.

  “I figure you did that because you didn’t know how long Eric would be asleep, right? That’s why he had to reach you on your cell phone when he realized that the mummy was missing.” Finch furrowed his brow. “I wonder what your contingency plan was if Eric had been awake? Kill him? Abort the plan for tonight and do it some other night? Did you check on him when you got down here? I think you did. Just a quick glance into the security room to see if he were snoozing. Which, of course, he was.”

  Leavitt swallowed and gave no reply.

  “After that, it was all cake. Let the security videotape get taped over, take the call from Eric and pretend to show up to get the investigation rolling. Then what? Wait until things blow over and sneak the mummy out in a gym bag or something?”

  Leavitt opened his mouth to speak, but Finch held up his hand. “I’m not done.”

  Leavitt closed his mouth.

  Finch smiled coldly. “You probably figured no one would search the place. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t find the mummy. And if they did, they couldn’t pin it on you, could they?”

  Leavitt finally spoke, his voice wavering. “No. And neither can you.”

  “Oh, we can,” chuckled Elias. “We can.”

  “He’s right,” Finch said. “We’ve got all the alarm evidence, plus you’ve got no alibi. And you’ve got motive.”

  “That doesn’t prove—”

  “Not to mention the other physical evidence,” Finch said.

  Leavitt blanched. “What other evidence?”

  “We can always process the mummy and that little wooden coffin he’s in for fingerprints. It would be really interesting if your prints showed up anywhere on there.”

  Leavitt smirked. “The Egyptian government would never allow it. You would destroy the artifact.”

  Finch cocked his head at Leavitt. “Oh, we have some very advanced methods of fingerprinting that are non-invasive. The Egyptians won’t have any problem with it.”

  Leavitt snorted.

  “But you probably wore gloves, right?” Finch said. “And so maybe that would be a strike out. But we don’t need your prints on the mummy. Not when we’ve got the videotape showing you stealing it.”

  A look of shock spread through Leavitt’s features. “I thought the tape—”

  “Was recorded over?”

  Leavitt nodded, swallowing hard.

  Finch shrugged. “Well, yes and no. Did you meet Adam, our techno-specialist? He can pull data off of a videotape even if it’s been recorded over six times. See, Mr. Leavitt, videotape works a lot like your computer hard drive. The entire tape isn’t used for the data signals. When you tape over something, just like when you delete something off of your hard drive, all you really delete for sure is the marker that tells the device where the information is stored. The information is still there until the actual storage space it’s in gets recorded over. That can take months on a hard drive. On a videotape, it takes six times, sometimes as many as eight.”

  Leavitt shook his head in mild protest.

  “All Adam has to do,” Finch continued, “is go in and pull out the data. Sure, we won’t have every single frame. But even half the frames will be enough to show you snatching the mummy. And that picture will convince a jury”—he snapped his fingers—“like that.”

  Leavitt’s breath had quickened. He swallowed again.

  “All that’s left,” Finch said, “all that will make a jury understand, is knowing why you did this. And I’m giving you one chance to tell us that.” He held up his finger again. “One.”

  Edward Leavitt began to cry.

  Finch guided Leavitt’s head past the doorjamb and into the back seat of the patrol car. He closed the door and gave the roof a tap. The officer pulled away, heading to jail. Finch turned and walked back to his car.

  Lieutenant Crawford stood talking with Elias. An unlit cigar hung from his mouth. “He was gonna lose his job, you’re saying?”

  Elias nodded. “The museum was losing money. And on the personal front, he was already having trouble paying the taxes on the house he lived in, so he was getting desperate.”

  Crawford frowned. “So sell the house.”

  “He couldn’t,” Finch broke in. “His uncle left it to him with the proviso that if he didn’t live in it or if he died, it went to the museum.”

  Crawford grunted. “And the mummy was in a spare locker the whole time?”

  Finch nodded.

  Crawford motioned toward Special Agent Payne, who was a dozen yards away, talking to a news reporter on camera. “And that FBI guy who’s taking credit over there didn’t find it?”

  “No. He showed up just as we found it.”

  “How’d you figure out it was in there?”

  “Lucky guess,” Elias said.

  “Probably not far off. Elias said you got the guy to confess with some techno mumbo-jumbo about videotapes and computer hard drives.”

  Finch nodded.

  “Any of that true?”

  “It’s true about hard drives. Not videotapes.”

  Crawford grunted and glanced at his watch. “I gotta go tell the chief what happened so that he can tell the mayor so the mayor can tell everyone else who cares.”

  Finch and Elias said nothing.

  Crawford removed the unlit cigar. He spit a small piece of tobacco onto the asphalt while he regarded the stogie. “Anyway, nice work, you two.”

  “Thanks,” Finch said.

  “Yeah, El-Tee. Thanks.”

  Crawford contemplated the
cigar. “At least you didn’t get beat up by any women on this one,” he said. He thrust the cigar back into his mouth and ambled off toward his car.

  “Ouch,” Elias deadpanned. “That’s really no way to talk to world-famous mummy hunters.”

  Finch shrugged. “That’s Crawford.”

  “Well,” Elias said, “if he thinks I’m mentioning his name during the Discovery Channel interviews, he’s crazy.”

  The Worst Door

  Since I came on the job, it’s the first door ever that I didn’t want to go through.

  We stood lined up on the left side of the door, guns out and pointed to the ground, our ballistic vests hurriedly strapped over the top of our business-casual attire. Two uniform cops brought up the rear for the purposes of backup and presence. A third stood on the right side of the door, holding a steel door ram. I stared at the white words—“knock, knock”—scrawled on the side.

  “You ready, Finchie?” Elias asked me, his voice low. He kept his .357 tucked in tight to his chest and pointed downward like they’d taught us at the Close Quarters Battle seminar last fall.

  I nodded my head yes, but the truth was that I was anything but ready. Sure, my body was prepared to take the door and the analytical part of my brain was prepared tactically, just like the hundred or so times I’d done this before. Only this time, my heart raced like a trip-hammer and I wasn’t sure if it was about to break or explode.

  “You sure?” Elias asked, his voice now almost a whisper. “Because you can hold the perimeter if you want. You don’t have to go in.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  Elias didn’t sigh out loud, but I could see that response in his eyes. He didn’t argue any more, though. “I’ll take point, then.”

  I nodded my thanks. I knew he was doing it so that if anyone had to do any shooting, it would likely be him. That thought brought home the reality of the situation and shunted my physical readiness and tactical mindset for a moment.

  I really am standing outside this door, I thought. Goddamn it.

  There was a long silence while the other men stood still, tense with anticipation, like runners right before the start of the race. Elias was watching me. I took a shallow breath and blew the air out.

  “I’m ready,” I told him. “Let’s do this.”