She smiled and looked down at the box of donuts I held out to her, selecting one carefully.
'Y'all really know how to tempt a girl.'
'If that's all it takes, then I've been wasting a lot of money on jewelry and concert tickets,' I joked.
'What can I do for you, Detective?'
'I was wondering if we're getting anywhere on my contact lens.'
'I was just fixin' t'check with Brandon on that. Come on.
I followed her down a narrow corridor lined with tiny rooms that were the approximate size of walk-in closets. Each one contained a computer, a desk, and a geek. We entered a slightly larger room at the end of the hall dominated by a very skinny, young, black guy with a receding hairline. He wore no jewelry, not even a watch, but he had on a T-shirt that said 'Crime Unit' with an arrow pointing down to his shorts. We're really going to have to do something about the quality of humor in law enforcement. Cindy made the introduction.
'Brandon Washington, Detective Shane Scully. Shane has HM fifty-eight oh-five.'
'Grab a seat,' Brandon said. 'Lemme check my e-mails on that lens.' When he smiled I saw that his two front teeth were box-outlined in gold. Not my favorite look, but hey, guys do what they think will get them laid in this town. He turned on his computer, and brought up his e-mail.
'I've got a shitload of correspondence here. Hang on a second. Let me shoot through them.' As he started scrolling, he brought me up to date. 'I examined that contact when it first came in yesterday. It's a rigid gas- permeable lens.'
'Is that normal?' I asked.
'Gas perms with this kind of correction are pretty expensive and are used for special eye problems. I checked it under a microscope for a manufacturer's edge mark, but it wasn't made by any of the labs here in the U. S., so I sent it out to an eye clinic we use that buys from manufacturers in Europe to see if they can trace the country of origin. Ahhh, here we go.' He leaned forward and read the screen. 'Okay, the guy I sent it to says that he can tell from the way the lens was made, that it is from Europe, but they don't know where yet. It could take him a while to run it down because he says there are any number of countries with labs that might be able to do this kind of lens.'
'Why don't you start with Russia?' I said.
He leaned back from his computer, looked at me and frowned. 'Why Russia?'
'Hunch. Cops get hunches, it's how we solve cases.' 'Okay, I'll start with Russia.'
'You also might try all of the countries in the old Soviet Union,' I suggested. 'Georgia. The Ukraine.'
'Okay.' He picked up a sheet of paper from his out basket and handed to me. 'I scanned your lens last night,' he said. 'That's the condition it was correcting.'
I studied the sheet. Bell graphs and squiggly line drawings with a column of numbers.
'That prescription corrects an eye disease called Keratoconus, or KC. It only occurs in a fraction of one percent of the world population, so it's extremely rare. It usually occurs when a person's in their mid-twenties and can progress for ten to twenty years. The name refers to a condition in which the cornea grows into a cone shape and bulges forward. To correct KC, you need one of these rigid gas-permeable lenses.'
'This is good,' I said. 'Anything else?'
'Historically, degeneration of an eye with KC slows around age forty or fifty. According to this prescription, the dead man in the wash was significantly sight-impaired and probably past middle age. Without his contacts, it would have been impossible for him to even drive.'
'How expensive are these to get made?'
'My eye expert says hundreds of dollars. They have to be fitted several times to make them wearable.'
I sat for a minute holding the printout, thinking not many bums are walking around with expensive contact lenses. 'Since this is a rare eye condition, if we can find the lab in Europe that made the lens, we've got a damn good chance of finding out who he is.'
'Yep,' Brandon said. ''Bout the way the donut crumbles.' Then he took another Krispy Kreme.
Chapter 10
You have the transcripts from the cassettes we made at the first three murder scenes?' I asked Zack. 'They aren't in the murder book.'
He was wearing yesterday's clothes and was slumped in his wooden swivel chair across from me in our cubicle, scowling down at the reorganized murder book, thumbing through the pages. He must have gone to a doctor because his nose was now encased in a metal splint and heavily bandaged. He seemed sober, but then it was only 10 A. M.
'I put them in there. In the flap leaf,' he said, pointing at the binder. 'Somebody musta removed 'em.' Since I was the only other person with access to the book, the implication was that I had done it, forgetting for the moment, that he'd left the damn thing unattended in the Xerox room. But so what? I stand accused. Our troubled partnership wallowed on.
Then a look of momentary clarity spread across his discolored face and he snapped his fingers, tilted forward, and started rummaging around in his bottom desk drawer. After a minute, he sat up with an apologetic grin and handed me some Xeroxed pages.
Accused and exonerated. Swift justice.
'I threw 'em in there,' he explained. 'Was gonna put 'em in the book later. . forgot.' He shrugged as if to say, hey, I'm only human.
I took the blue LAPD murder book out of his hand and started to tape the Xeroxed transcripts for Woody, Van, and Cole onto a fresh page in each of their sections.
'You really wants take this dumb-ass, new theory of yours to Calloway?' Zack said, leaning back and looking down his nose, studying me across a pound of medical adhesive.
Since Cal had demanded a theory that tied all the unaligned facts together on Forrest's murder, I'd been trying to find one. I'd come up with a promising idea this morning. The more I'd thought about it, the more I liked it. I bounced my copycat theory off Zack as soon as I got in to see how it played. It had been met with stony silence. Now I ran down my new idea. After I finished, Zack glowered at me.
'The skipper's gonna say two things,' he complained. 'He's gonna call this a hunch and tell us that Homicide Special dicks operate on evidence, not hunches. Then he's gonna say, you ain't got nothin' but bullshit here. Which of course, is exactly what it is.'
'He'll listen to reason.'
'If you're five and a half feet tall and shave your head every morning, you don't need reason.' He leaned forward in the wood swivel. It squeaked loudly. 'So, after he hears your dumb-ass idea, he's gonna call us morons and broom us both off the fucking case. No way he's gonna let us separate out John Doe-Four 'cause it's not a copycat, and that's the only murder in this chain a hits that we got a halfway decent shot at. Besides, he's also getting his nuts roasted over a slow fire every other Tuesday morning in the COMSTAT meeting.' He was referring to the chief's bi-monthly meeting with all the division commanders to review computer crime statistics.
'We gotta tell him anyway,' I persisted. 'Because regardless of what you think, I believe I'm right.'
Then, as if he had been waiting outside, listening for his cue, Captain Calloway stuck his shaved head inside our cubicle.
'You guys asked for a meeting?'
'Yeah.'
'Let's do it.'
He turned and walked across the squad room toward his office.
'You tell him,' Zack said as I stood. 'I ain't up to being screamed at by Mighty Mouse this morning.' 'Fine,' I said. 'Just hold my back.'
'Only reason I still come in is so I can hold your back and watch you work.' Sarcasm.
On our way out, we collided in the doorway. I caught a gamey whiff of him.
'Since you've given up showering, how 'bout investing in some cologne?' I muttered.
'This is cologne. Eau de Werewolf. I send to Transylvania for this shit.'
