She looked at everything, paying particular interest to the images of the corridor outside the chemistry lab. This was the fourth time she had scanned the tape looking for- she didn't know what she was looking for. It was a feeling. She had feelings like this from time to time. Sometimes she was right about them. The Loverton poisoning the first week she came to New York was one example. Most of the time the feeling didn't pan out, either because she couldn't find the forensic evidence or she was simply mislead by her instincts. This effort with the tapes looked as if it wasn't going to pan out.
Then the glitch. She saw it and knew even before she proved it to herself. Lindsay saved the screen and opened a word processing program. She typed in the sequence of the camera shots, the order in which the camera picked up the images. There were sixteen surveillance cameras randomly programed but carefully positioned in the Wallen School. Lindsay typed in data on all sixteen. She didn't have to check to be sure she was right, but she did check.
She went back to the morning tapes, pausing to wolf down spoonfuls of chili and wash them down with Diet Coke. No doubt about it. The corridor outside the chem lab was not in the tenth sequence. She went through the next sequences looking for the corridor in each one.
The corridor was missing in the eighteenth sequence.
It hadn't been a mystical feeling. She had seen and sensed that something was not right in the tapes. Now she had proved it.
Each sequence had a time in white letters on the first image. The tenth sequence read: 8:40 a.m. The eighteenth sequence read: 10:50 a.m.
The missing video of the corridor was from ten minutes before Alvin Havel's last class to a few minutes after the class ended.
She had questions to ask now. Who had access to the monitor security room? Who had the expertise to erase and manipulate the tape? What had been deleted and why?
Lindsay finished the chili, threw the empty carton in the nearby trash, took her Diet Coke and headed home where she planned to reward herself. She would dare to eat a peach.
Driving to Queens was a nightmare. Taking the subway would probably have been worse. Flack had listened to the police band reports. Just a few minutes earlier a train had been stopped on the way in from Queens when one of the passengers tried to attack the others with a knife. The passengers had subdued him, but the line was delayed for almost thirty minutes while police made their way to the scene.
Flack shook his head. This trip might lead to nothing, but what else did they have? He had an address for Dexter, the Umbrella Man. He had a full name, Dexter Hughes. Dexter lived in Queens with his sister, Larissa, an LPN and a gospel singer with a bit of a local reputation.
This had been told to him by Alvino Lopez, who owned the garage on 101st Street where Dexter got his umbrellas. Alvino did not know Dexter's address, but that had been no problem for Flack. The problem had been that no one had answered the phone at the unlisted number of Larissa Hughes, which meant a trip to Queens.
Roads were leading to Queens. Dexter. The boy who lost his toe. The knife that took it that Mac said was the murder weapon. No, alter that. It looked now, according to Mac, as if it was one of the murder weapons. Keith Yunkin seemed to have an arsenal of sharp and deadly knives.
Flack arrived at the small frame house a few minutes after ten. Just about that time Keith Yunkin was getting off the subway at the Thirty-fourth Street stop, four blocks from the hotel where Ellen Janecek was patiently checking her makeup for the fifth time in the past hour.
'You all right?' asked Stella.
'I'm all right,' said Hawkes. 'A few bruises. What have we got?'
'Dead people,' she said.
They were in the crime scene lab, papers neatly overlapping and laid out, an image on the monitor, a simplified room with four thick, black supports in each corner. Three shapes were placed inside the room. Two together in the middle, another at the far right. Two others were placed outside the room on the left.
'That's the cook on the right,' said Stella, moving the arrow to the figure.
Stella maneuvered the arrow on the screen with the mouse and said, 'The beams in each corner of the room went together. TNT.'
An animated spark flashed. Hawkes nodded.
'Beams buckled, ceiling collapsed,' she said.
With that the ceiling of the room on the screen fell and covered the shapes in the room.
She clicked again and the already bent and twisted support beams buckled and collapsed. The three figures were gone.
'FDNY arson investigator says the placement of the bombs was perfect, professional,' Stella said. 'But the kind of material used, the amount, suggested an amateur.'
'Someone wanted it to look like the work of an amateur, but they also wanted to be sure Doohan's and everyone in it went down,' said Hawkes. 'Why? Custus looks like a professional. Some of those scars on his chest and arms are twenty-five years old at least. Question is still there. Why pretend to be an amateur?'
'I don't know,' said Stella. 'I'm running DNA on everyone who died in Doohan's and on Custus. Maybe we've got a bomber besides Custus.'
'Two in one building at the same time,' said Hawkes. 'Quite a coincidence.'
'Don't believe in them,' Stella said.
She turned back to the computer screen and began typing.
'Okay, all three people in the bar look up.'
The stick figures on the screen moved their heads.
'Then Doohan and Custus come in.'
Two stick figures enter the image from the left. The first figure falls. The ground opens and swallows the second figure.
'Powder, explosive burns and residue on Custus,' said Hawkes. 'He shot Doohan, fell into that pit.'
'Doohan has powder burns on his hand too,' she said.
'Whose gun is it?' asked Hawkes.
'Street gun. Registered to a pawn shop owner in Dearborn, Michigan,' said Stella. 'Reported stolen five years ago.'
'Street gun,' said Hawkes.
'How do you see it?' Stella asked.
'More questions. If Custus planted those bombs, and it's pretty clear he did, what was he doing standing around outside the bar just before he detonated? He could have been killed.'
'And,' added Stella, 'what was he talking to Doohan about and why did Doohan run into the bombed-out bar? Did Custus shoot him? Did Doohan shoot himself? Why?'
They sat looking at the screen. Then Hawkes flipped through the lab reports.
'We can ask Custus,' he said.
'He'll tell you?'
'He thinks he's smart,' said Hawkes.
'Is he?'
'Yes, but maybe he can be fooled. We've got something on our side he doesn't have.'
'What's that?' asked Stella.
'Science.'
