Seven Grams of Lead (7 page)

“I’m drawing it to scale, dear,” Sokolova told her. “It’s about the same size as the flux compression generator; unscrew the antenna from the vircator and you can fit the whole system in the back of a car.”

The younger woman gasped. “In all the time I was at Princeton, we weren’t able to design—let alone assemble—a decent E-bomb that could even fit into this lab.”

“Miniaturization was critical for the weapon to be deployable,” said Sokolova. “Leonid reinvented the vircator as a tiny vacuum chamber. Within it, the high-current electrons pass through a polyester mesh anode, turning the other side into a virtual cathode, which causes oscillations that produce microwaves with peak power of one hundred milliwatts. A pulse of just one one-thousandth of a nanosecond and this system can take out everything within a fifty-mile radius.”

The range was news to Canning. The best news, he reflected, that he’d ever heard.

Sitting back at
his desk at the NYO—the FBI’s New York City field office—Warren “Corky” Lamont reflected that, on big cases like this, the office is like your oxygen source. The next witness, the next phone call, the next classified document a courier shows up with: Any one of these could be the key. So any length of time away from your desk is an eternity, even as little as hitting the head, because you have this nagging sense that the case is going to take that crucial turn and that the information you had when you stepped out will be obsolete by the time you get back. The mentality in the office, meanwhile, is
bunker.
Pizzas are ordered, ties are loosened, sleep is rare. And it’s not about pay or promotions. As the old saying goes, the FBI is a company of 10,000 agents all struggling to stay at the bottom. Just out of Quantico,
Lamont would tell friends that the buzz was comparable to the thrill of the hunt, but he came to realize that that trivialized it. What kind of hunt expended human capital, prevented the quarry from claiming additional victims, and concluded with justice done? And the best part of all came when the case was closed. He would go home at the end of that day, just like any other New Yorker piling into the subway, except—having kept the rest of them safe—he felt like a superhero.

He longed for just a drop of that feeling now. Seven days and twice as many pizzas into the Peretti case, the exhilaration had burned off. Lead after lead had led to dead ends. He spent yet another night hunched over his computer in the cube farm on 26 Federal Plaza’s twenty-third floor, eyes glued to his monitor. He scrolled through the Au Bon Pain’s security camera videos for maybe the hundredth time. The problem was that when positioning security cameras, fast-food managers were concerned with petty larceny, not homicide. As it happened, ten minutes prior to the Au Bon Pain shooting, one of the two cashiers whisked a dollar bill from her register drawer and into her blouse.

Lamont hoped to see the shooter arrive, Peretti and Thornton enter, or the crime itself. But all of that took place off camera. He slowed the video now in search of mere light fluctuations. What he wouldn’t give for a shadow he hadn’t already noticed.

His eye was drawn away from the computer by
the bank of fluorescents sputtering on. The cube farm transformed from a dawn-speckled gold to its true office-drab gray. At this time of day, the twenty-third floor could pass for the offices of any accounting firm or insurance agency. In a couple of hours, though, it would be more like the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, a microcosm of the city, packed with colorful characters such as his partner, Musseridge, who liked to share his opinions, often at the same time others were sharing theirs, making the place way, way more entertaining than the three field offices Lamont had rotated through during his rookie year. A cold, formal atmosphere was the norm.

He checked for e-mail, finding one from Musseridge, who had finally gone home late last night to have “a beer or six,” as he put it, in hope of getting some shut-eye. Lamont clicked open the message, sent at 3:41
A
.
M
.:

Lamont hadn’t seen a table ad or placard or anything of the kind listed on the FD-192, the crime scene unit’s evidence list. That form had long since
been FedExed to the lab at Quantico along with all pertinent items found at the Au Bon Pain. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that an exhausted investigator had bagged the ad and labeled it as something else fired up Lamont like five cans of Monster Energy. An error like that was a decent possibility, he thought. To complete an FD-192, you had to detail every item thoroughly, including an estimate of its dollar value, and you had to do it by hand, meaning the form wasn’t available digitally. As Musseridge always said, “Expect to see time travel before you see a paperless Bureau.”

Twenty minutes later, Lamont returned to his cube with a copy of the FD-192, obtained from the rotor clerk, the secretary who maintained pending case files in a giant circular cabinet.

Lamont read the itemized list like it was a potboiler, before reaching an unhappy ending: The closest thing to an advertisement from the restaurant was a paper napkin.

On an off chance, he paid another visit to the rotor clerk, netting an FD-1004, the record of chain of custody for additional evidence requiring special handling.

It told the same story as the first form.

“Shinola,” Lamont said to himself.

As he slumped in his desk chair, his gaze wandered to a printout of a photo, pinned to the side of his cube, from his going-away party in Cleveland.
They’d taken him to a dingy pub off Market Avenue whose name he couldn’t remember. It was the first and last time he and his colleagues had gone out after work—two pitchers of beer split between nine guys. He could just make out a dog-eared card on the grimy table, advertising the
BRAT OF THE DAY
.

Maybe the crime scene team had simply ignored a trampled placard lying on Au Bon Pain’s floor, he thought. What if, once the restaurant reopened, someone just picked the thing up and stuck it back on a table?

He shot up in his chair, hammering his name and password onto his keyboard, then filling in the text boxes at the top of his screen and keying in a request for the Emergency Response Team’s Au Bon Pain crime scene photos. A slug of Monster and a check of his in-box later, he saw that his security clearance had been verified by the Bureau’s antiquated system. After a minute of churning, the monitor displayed a photo of a table with a tented advertisement for Au Bon Pain’s new cheddar and corn chowder. Three more clicks showed almost identical ads on the three nearest tables. Thirteen more clicks revealed the same ad at each of the restaurant’s twenty-six tables.

Except for one, the two-top closest to the men’s room.

As if on cue came a raspy voice, grumbling that a large coffee used to be just fifty fucking cents. Peering over the workstation wall, Lamont spotted Musseridge
shuffling from the elevator bank, balancing his usual cup of coffee—big enough to douse a fire.

Lamont bounded over, meeting Musseridge outside his office.

“Good morning,” Lamont said.

“You’re like my family,” replied his official mentor.

“Thanks?”

“I get home and before I can take off my coat, they start in clamoring for me to fix this or pay for that.” Musseridge elbowed his way into the office.

Lamont remained in the doorway, undaunted, while Musseridge took an excessive amount of time setting things down and carefully hanging up his overcoat. It was probably the first time in his life that Musseridge had put a coat someplace other than in a heap. Finally he said, “Okay, Corky, for the love of fucking Christ, tell me we got something.”

“Tented ads were on all twenty-six tables—except the one nearest to the shooter.”

“The ad got knocked onto the floor.”

“It’s not on the FD-192.”

“Then it was so worthless, they left it on the floor.”

“Suppose they didn’t check it.”

“They did.”

“How do you know?”

“They expose every last square inch of the crime scene to blue light checking for blood spatter.”

“I was thinking that the edges on the table placards aren’t that much thicker than a hair, so maybe
the Emergency Response Team missed the blood,” Lamont said.

“If the murder had taken place on a farm, I would bet on the ERT one-ninety-two-ing a needle in a haystack. And then they’d bag the whole fucking pile of hay.” Musseridge slurped his coffee. He drank audibly only when he had an audience. “So what, you want to go there today?”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you why not. Even if we find the magic flying placard, bringing it to a courtroom would be pointless. A piece of evidence that was left sitting for a week in a fast-food place is a defense attorney’s wet dream.”

“Still, if we find some DNA, we could narrow the list of suspects from three billion to one.”

Musseridge switched on his computer and waited for it to come to life.

“And lunch is on me,” Lamont added.

“I’ll take that, but no way we’re eating at Au Bon Pain.”

“What’s wrong with Au Bon Pain?”

“Nothing. But I thought you wanted to go there
today.
”

“We need an EC for that?”

“What do you think?”

Lamont recited another Musseridge maxim: “You can’t fart at the Bureau without first filling out a request form.”

Musseridge nodded. “You’re finally learning.”

• • •

Returning to his cube, Lamont clicked the EC—electronic communication—macro in the keyboard’s top row. The monitor gradually filled with a document template changed little since its WordPerfect inception in the early 1990s. He entered his name, his office location, and the eleven-character case ID, three times apiece. Before beginning his communication, he provided the requisite synopsis of it.

Finally he began the communication itself, referring to himself as THE WRITER per one of many Bureau directives whose purpose was lost to time.

He paused to go online in order to collect the physical address of the Au Bon Pain as well as its telephone number.

By noon, he’d sent the completed EC to the division’s supervisor, who, along with the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, had responded. The “mission” was a go. Just as soon as Lamont printed a hard copy of the EC, obtained the required signatures, photocopied the document three times, and, of course, filed the original.

At two fifteen, he and Musseridge stood in the parking garage. In Manhattan, the FBI needed to subcontract a valet service because, as Musseridge put it, “Finding a public parking spot around here takes longer than solving a case.” Since the valets operated government vehicles, they had to undergo extensive vetting. Unlike in other parking garages, tipping wasn’t permitted here, so turnover was high. New and inexperienced valets were the norm.

Following a wait of eight minutes—not bad—Musseridge hung a left out of the dark garage and into an explosion of daylight, making his way across Centre Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Below the bridge, tugs and barges turned the East River into swirls of browns and grays, the view blurred by exhaust from stop-and-go traffic. Musseridge smiled, a rare occurrence. Lamont knew that after twenty-something years of driving the sort of American-made cars that ID’d you as a Fed sooner than your shield (Caprices and Crown Vics were known internally as G-cars), Musseridge savored the dealer-fresh white Cadillac Escalade SUV, part of his cover in an ongoing mob sting up at a Connecticut casino. Sitting in its leather sports seat was the only time he didn’t complain about his back. Lamont attributed this to the thrill of the perk.

After another twenty minutes—possibly a record for the thirteen miles of I-278 and the Verrazano Bridge—Musseridge brought Uncle Sam’s Caddy to
a halt in the St. George Ferry Terminal parking lot on Staten Island. Before Lamont could set foot on the asphalt, he had to radio the NYO dispatcher with a street address, in case he and Musseridge were to require backup.

Entering the Au Bon Pain, it took Lamont a beat to get his bearings. He could have sketched its layout from memory. But the video hadn’t encompassed much beyond the counter, and the photos had been stills. Now the place was full of the clamor and motion of the patrons and employees.

Because the store manager was cute or because there was free pastry in the offing, Musseridge assigned himself the task of apprising her of the FBI’s presence and official operational objective, then obtaining her signed acknowledgment at the bottom of an FD-597, a form that yielded two carbon copies—using actual carbon paper.

Lamont found the table in question unoccupied, and replete with a tented advertisement for the restaurant’s new cheddar and corn chowder. Sliding into one of the two chairs, he drew from his pocket a flashlight that to all appearances was a pen. He discreetly snapped a translucent orange disk the size of a dime over its bulb tip, then clicked on the 470-nanometer blue light, which would make bloodstains appear to darken, enhancing fourfold the contrast between the blood and the stained object. He aimed the beam at the triangular placard’s three edges, and … nothing.
No surprise. The placards were replaced due to wear or, his hope now, shuffled between tabletops during cleanup.

He intended to scan every placard in the restaurant, but first he needed to come up with an explanation devoid of phrases like “blood spatter.” While searching for the right words, he spun the placard before him. The photograph of the chowder made Lamont hollow with hunger; he’d eaten nothing since a cold slice yesterday afternoon. He would order something, he thought, until his blue beam ran across the placard’s other side. Nothing on the left. But black spots on the right. Black spots that disappeared when he flicked off the blue light, meaning they were bloodstains.