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He picked right up.
“Jay, am I right that your folks have finished going through Chuck’s meat-processing plant?”
“We’ve pulled core samples from about two tons of chopped meat,” he said. “Talk about a needle in a haystack. We’re looking for pellets that can fit inside a cold capsule. Anyway, we’ve examined a lot of prime beef. We scoured the prep kitchens and grilled the workers. No red flags. No flags of any color.”
“Any suspects—at all?”
“Seems like only angels work at Chuck’s. I’m wide open to ideas, Sergeant.”
I updated Beskin on our big bag of zeros. I summarized the stakeout at Barney’s Wine and Liquor, including the hand-lettered threat left in the briefcase. I told him about my day at the product-development plant and the prospective buyout by Space Dogs that might now be off the table. And I said that my partner and I were about to dive into surveillance footage, again.
Beskin wished me luck, and we exchanged promises to keep each other in the ever-widening, thus-far fruitless loop.
I hung up and looked across our desks to my partner.
He said, “Let’s each take a disk
, press play, and see if something jumps out at us.”
I stared at the stacks of surveillance footage, thinking how much I’d love to have a single clean fingerprint or an eye witness or a drop of the bomber’s blood. That was the kind of forensic evidence cops had long relied on to point the way, to apply the screws, and nail a case shut.
On the other hand, watching a million hours of surveillance tape was probably the perfect antidote to my upcoming nervous breakdown as I thought about Yuki and Brady under the guns of paramilitary terrorists off the cold coast of Alaska.
“Lindsay?”
“I heard you,” I said to Conklin. “We’re looking for something to jump out at us. Preferably someone wearing a sign reading, ‘I’m the Bomber.’”
Conklin laughed. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
He brought us coffee from the break room and I unwrapped the BLTs. After our trash had been dumped in the round file, we each cued up a CD from our chosen stack.
My first had been recorded on the day before the original belly bomb explosions.
We were 100 percent sure that the two students who’d been killed by belly bombs a week ago had eaten “hamburger bombs to go” from the Hayes Valley Chuck’s.
Somewhere in my stack of disks, there had to be a killer.
CHAPTER 62
SECURITY SYSTEMS IN fast-food restaurants and parking lots rarely produce footage that’s HD, in focus, and Sundance Film Festival worthy. Chuck’s Prime’s Hayes Valley series was no exception.
I cued up the first disk, the footage that was shot inside Chuck’s on the day preceding the double belly bombs. The camera was set back and across from the cash register and trained on the cowpoke behind the counter. The camera angle also gave a partial view of the kitchen behind the counter, a sixty-degree-wedge view of the tables, and the front door.
I watched black-and-white images of people coming into the store for morning coffee, and then I hit fast-forward until I reached the three-hour mark, about the time Chuck’s began to fill for lunch.
I scrutinized the customers ordering, those picking up at the takeout line, and others who were dining in. Wait staff were doing their jobs and joking with customers. I didn’t see anything remarkable. It seemed to be a good day at Chuck’s Hayes Valley.
I studied the cooks and kitchen workers through the letter-box view of the kitchen and tried to imagine how one of them might plant mini-explosives in a hamburger patty.
It didn’t look all that hard to do.
Meanwhile, the mood inside our bullpen had changed from a high-functioning homicide squad into some kind of powerless mission control center agonizing over a derelict spacecraft. Throughout the afternoon, the day crew kept stopping by our desks to find out if Conklin and I had heard anything new about Brady. At day’s end, Cappy McNeil and his partner, Paul Chi, dragged chairs over and sat down. They had both worked with Brady, had friendships with Yuki, and were feeling frustrated and angry and helpless to the max.
Copy that.
Lacking any shred of good news, we batted around theories of how the hijacking might resolve with pirates dead and passengers safe. We put a hopeful face on it, but in fact none of us tossed confetti.
Before Chi and McNeil clocked out, Chi leaned over my desk and tapped a key that brightened my screen. Cappy gave me a pound cake he’d been intending to take home for dessert and kissed my cheek. A first.
