PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL, the reason the secretary didn’t open it. There is no return address. No stamp or postage-meter tape.
Herman has just arrived in the outer office. I can hear him chatting with Jennifer, the paralegal. The rest of the staff is off. It’s a holiday. All the government offices, including the courts, are closed. Jennifer should be home as well, but by now she is attached to Arnsberg’s case in the way a magnet attaches to metal.
“Where did this come from?” I look at Harry, who is still paging through one of the catalogs.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jennifer, you out there?” says Harry. “Come in here for a second.”
A second later she slips her head around the corner of the door.
“Any idea where this came from?” I hold up the envelope.
She looks at it, then comes in and takes a closer look.
“How you guys feeling?” Herman comes in and leans up against the book cabinet inside my office.
“I could use a few more hours’ sleep, but other than that, a signed declaration showing proof of service for a subpoena on Arthur Ginnis and everything is chipper,” says Harry.
“Oh, that,” says Jennifer. “It was under the door when I got to work Thursday morning.”
Whatever is inside, I’m guessing a business envelope containing more than one page, based on the heft and the fact that it’s sliding around, too small for the larger manila outer envelope.
I can feel it in my bones. Tuchio is laying something on us at the last minute. I’ve been expecting it for days, the midnight motion. I talk with Harry as I slit the top of the manila envelope with my letter opener. I peer inside for the business envelope, looking for the district attorney’s printed address in the corner.
My fingers are halfway into the manila opening when I see what’s inside. Instantly I stop what I’m doing and withdraw my hand.
Harry reads my face and looks at the envelope as if maybe there’s a snake inside. “What’s the matter?”
Carefully I lay the envelope back down on the desk.
Harry and Herman are both looking at me, like maybe they should run.
“Do we still have those tweezers, the big forceps we use on the printer?”
“I think so. What is it?”
“Just get them, and a towel, something clean.”
In seconds Harry is back. He hands me the forceps, large tweezers about seven inches long. Harry bought these a few years ago in a hardware store. We use them for plucking small pieces of torn paper from the printer when it jams. I check them to make sure there is no ink or toner powder on the metal. He hands me a small, square cotton dust cloth from the cleaning closet, where the janitor keeps a supply in a bag.
“You’re sure it’s clean?”
“Got it out of the bag,” says Harry.
With the cloth I gently hold the manila envelope to the top of the desk and slip the forceps inside. I snag the folded pages and slide them from the envelope. With the folded letter now exposed on my desk, you can see it clearly: a fine, rust-colored filigree, oblong ringlets of blood where kinetic energy had stretched them as they collided with the paper and later dried.
This delicate, lacelike pattern is interrupted by four bloody dots, spaced in a slight arc in the middle of the folded page. I lift the pages with the forceps and check the other side: a single rust-colored dot near the bottom edge, where the killer’s thumb gripped the envelope on this side as he used the blood-soaked gloves to snatch it from the leather portfolio. The existence of this thumb mark on the letter explains the slight smear of blood at the lower boundary of the rectangle on the portfolio, made when the killer grabbed the letter.
“See if you can find something for that.” Using the cloth, I slide the envelope across the surface of my desk toward Harry. “Maybe a legal-size folder. Or something bigger.”
Jennifer’s fingerprints and my own are already on it, along with how many others, we don’t know.
I lay the folded pages, four of them from what I can see, on the blotter in the center of the desk.
The side of the paper facing up is covered by countless tiny, hollow, oblong ringlets in rust where it was spattered by Scarborough’s blood as it lay on top of the portfolio by the television in his hotel room.
Harry gets two more cloth dust towels and hands the rest of the bag to Herman in case we need more. Instead of a legal-size folder, which would be too small to encase and protect the entire manila envelope, Harry has an empty transfer box with the lid already off. Using two of the cloth towels, he picks up the manila envelope by the edges, carefully compressing the two edges between his hands to lift it, and when he does, an item I had missed inside slides out and falls onto my desk.
It is a tiny Ziploc bag, maybe two by three inches in size. I don’t touch it, but I look closely as it lies on the surface of my desk. Inside are what appear to be several short strands of blond hair.
“All of you saw it,” I say. “Where it came from?”
There are nodding heads all around, Herman, Harry, and Jennifer.
Twenty minutes later I’m on the phone. Judge Quinn is calling from his house. We have had to go through the bailiff’s office at the courthouse, staffed by only a skeleton crew on a holiday, to have them call Quinn at home and have him call me at my office, an emergency.
Before I can say a word: “Mr. Madriani, if you’re looking for more time, the answer is no.”
When I tell him what has happened, there is a moment of stone silence from the other end of the line. “Have you told Mr. Tuchio about this?”
“I don’t know how to get ahold of him on a holiday,” I say.
“Leave that to me,” he says. “He’ll have to have somebody from his office or forensics pick it up.”
“Good.”
“Stay there until they come. Be in chambers before court tomorrow morning. Let’s make it seven A.M.,” he says. “In the meantime don’t touch the damn thing. Leave it for forensics.”
We hang up. There’s little sense in telling him, since I already have touched it, at least with the tweezers.
Before I talked to Quinn on the phone, I dispatched Herman to call our forensics expert, to track him down at home so that he can be here when Tuchio’s people show up to take the letter and the hairs back to the police crime lab. I don’t want the letter or the little bag of hairs going anywhere unless our own expert is glued to them.
Then I spend ten minutes with Harry hovering over the desk as I pry open the folded pages using the forceps and the rag. It is ordinary twenty-pound copy paper, the kind you can buy in any OfficeMax. As soon as I got it open, I knew. Whoever made it used a color copier. The elegant hand-scripted letters bore the tobacco-colored hue of the original ink. The script had obviously been reduced in size, though it was still quite readable. The four pages are stapled at the top left-hand corner. It is identical to the image I recall from the video over the restaurant table, the letter laid open as Scarborough and Ginnis talked.
On the copy you could see the outline of the outside edges of the original, larger page on which the script was written, freehand with no lines. I tried to remember. On a trip to Williamsburg with Sarah several years ago, hearing a name for the page size commonly used in Jefferson’s day-a quarto or a folio, something like that. I wondered if this was it.
I had Harry clean the glass surface on the copy machine, no chemicals just a damp cloth and elbow grease. Then he dried it thoroughly.
We both checked to make sure there were no fibers from the cloth left behind on the glass that might stick to a page and send the crime lab on a wild-goose chase. Then I took the pages.
Harry and I agreed that we could not remove the staple. The holes and the missing staple are something forensics would pick up on immediately. Also, if the dinner video of Scarborough and Ginnis comes into evidence, the missing staple becomes a problem in terms of comparison. And we wouldn’t dare try to replace it. You could never get it precisely in the same place, not so that a forensics expert wouldn’t know, and there is no doubt evidence of blood on the original staple.
Consequently we were left to ham-hand the copying process. With Harry helping me, four ham hands being better than two, I held each scripted page down on the screen of the copier as Harry supported the other pages, trying not to bend or tear them from the stapled corner. Each page was copied with the copier cover up and out of the way. Doing this, holding the pages between pieces of cotton cloth took more than five minutes. Harry was sweating so profusely that he was afraid he might drip on one of the pages.
