Hidden Fire, Kobo (27 page)

"I'll be right back," she said.
"Keep an eye on them, okay?"

He grinned. "Part of my job."

She left the lab and went straight to the
office Randy shared with Kovak. The door was closed. She took a deep breath and
knocked.

"Come." Kovak's voice sounded from
inside. She opened the door. Kovak paced behind his desk, anchored by the cord
of the phone. "We'll talk tonight. I'll be home for dinner." A pause.
"Right. Soccer practice. Okay, should I grab a pizza?" Another pause.
He flashed her a tense smile and tilted his head toward the chair. "Spaghetti's
fine. I'll pick up Morgan and we'll see you at six-thirty." He hung up the
phone and ran his palm over his close-cropped hair. "Sorry to make you
wait."

"I'm the one who's imposing. Sorry
to interrupt."

He sank into his chair. Dark circles
under his eyes. Tension creases in his brow. "What can I do for you?"

She automatically reached for her purse
strap, then realized she'd left it in the lab. Forcing her hands to be still,
she met Kovak's curious gaze. "Did you talk to Randy today?" she
asked.

"No, not yet. I've been trying to track
down possible witnesses to your burglary. He's got his hands full with the
murder case."

She nodded. "I know. Have you found
anything?"

"Nothing that's panned out yet. Any
of these look familiar?"

He flipped a stack of grainy, distorted
photos across the desk. Each had a number on the back. "What are these?"
she asked as she browsed through them.

"Pictures from the ATM at the bank
near your shop. People we haven't identified. I'm going to take them to all the
other merchants in the vicinity and see if anyone recognizes them. If they
remember anything that can help."

She brightened. "That's good, right?"
She studied his weary expression. "You don't look like this is a good
thing."

He gave a short laugh. "People see
what they want to see. I predict half the merchants will swear that someone in
this stack was acting suspicious and was up to no good. Trouble is, no two
people will pick out the same picture."

She studied the pictures again and pulled
three out. "These were in my shop on Saturday."

He smiled. "Thank you."

"But I can't tell you who they were,
not unless I know what they bought."

"Ah, but I can get the ATM records."
He jotted something in his notebook. "I'll be in touch." He seemed
energized now. What was Randy always saying? Ninety-five percent of police work
was eliminating useless data. No wonder Kovak looked happy to have found
something that might be in the remaining five percent.

"Can I ask you something?" she
said.

"Of course. I'm sorry. You didn't
come in here to look at these pictures. I hadn't called you about them yet.
What was it you wanted?"

She blurted out the story about
discovering the coffee mugs, the repair job and Randy's insisting they be
photographed properly, everything they'd done. Well, except for the sex part. "I
was going to check the mugs, but I realized it might be better to do it with
someone official watching. For that chain of custody thing."

She watched his face, trying to see if he
thought she was being silly. He seemed earnest. "Okay," he said. "What
do you want me to do?"

"Watch, mostly. If you think we need
all those evidence pictures Mike Connor was telling me about, then he can take
them. But right now, I'm totally curious about the repair job."

"Let's do it." He pushed away
from the desk and was holding the door for her almost before she could stand.

Mike looked up from a microscope and
scratched the stubble on his jaw. "Need something?"

She stared at Kovak, waiting for him to
answer. She'd taken the step to push this into police business and it was up to
him now.

"Grab a video camera, would you?"
Kovak said to Mike. He turned his attention to her. "What do you want to
do?"

She picked up a mug and pointed to the
seam where the squat pedestal joined the mug. "This is the glue joint."

"It's not where they glued the base
to the cup?"

She shook her head. "That's not how
you make a piece like this and definitely not a Garrigue piece."

"You think it's a forgery?"

"No." She ran her fingers down
the glazed surface of the mug. "I could tell. His glazes, his patterns are
distinctive. Nobody else knows his formula."

"We could test it," Mike said. "Do
a chemical analysis."

"If you want," she said. "But
I don't have any Garrigues left to compare it to. However, I'd bet my
reputation that this is a genuine Garrigue."

"We can deal with that later,"
Kovak said. "Keep going."

"Okay," Sarah said. "To
make one of these, you'd throw the mug on a wheel and make the whole cup at
once, except for the handle, which you'd make separately and attach later.
There's no point to making the pedestals separate from the mug. It would be
tricky to get it to fit right for the firing."

"So, these broke and someone glued
them together," Kovak said.

"That's what Randy thought, too. But
I doubt it. Think about it. If you broke a piece of pottery, what are the odds
it would break evenly?" She gestured to the other mug. "Twice."

"She's right," Mike said.

I want to see the actual break." She
looked at both men. "I was going to chisel it apart at the glue line. Any
suggestions?"

"A vertical cross section would help
too," Mike said.

"You're right," Sarah said. "I
should have thought of that." But then, she hadn't been thinking last
night. "What kind of a blade do you use to get a clean cut?"

"Abrasive cutter," Mike said. "However,
we don't have one."

"What about Lester's Rock Shop? He'll
have a rock cutter," Kovak said.

"Should work," Mike said. "Let's
go."

Randy sat at his desk, contemplating the
notes he'd pinned to the walls of his cubicle. He'd spent the morning
interviewing people who'd called in about the identity of his body if their
description held the remotest possibility of being their victim. He looked at
the dwindling stack of pink message slips with mixed emotions. One the one
hand, he was almost finished and could check the item off his list. On the
other, he had few possible leads.

He rifled the last stack. The night
people. He'd abandoned that chore when Maggie had called last night. He sighed.
Tonight, then, on the one-in-ten-million chance someone actually knew something
useful.

"Hey, Detweiler."

Randy glanced up at a weary-looking
Hannibal peering over the top of the cubicle. Rumpled shirt, loosened tie and a
stubble-covered jaw.

"Hannibal," Randy said, nodding
in acknowledgment.

"Got anything on our victim?"

"Eliminating leads is going well,"
he said. "At this rate, I'll be right where we started in a day or two.
Maybe sooner."

Hannibal guffawed. "I've never heard
'I've got zip' put quite like that. I like your positive attitude."

"It's about all I've got."

Hannibal stepped into the cubicle and
perused Randy's pinned-up notes. "How about our killer? ViCAP give you any
leads?"

Randy tapped the file folder where he'd
placed Kovak's faxes. "Too many, but I'm narrowing them down. I'm going to
share the information with Charlotte Russell. Maybe she can add something new.
So far, I've got possible connections to five murders."

Hannibal's eyes widened. "Around
here?"

Randy snorted. "Yeah, right. Make it
easy. The closest was in Kansas. One in DC, one in Florida, Chicago, some
one-horse town in Louisiana. I called the local law enforcement offices to
compare notes. I also added the pottery connection to see if that opens
anything new."

"Good work," Hannibal said. "You
get any lab results?"

Randy recapped what Dave had given him. "If
we have a suspect, we have exemplars for comparison, but nothing that gives us
much about who he is. I'm going to work on the vehicles reported at the scene next.
I've got the tire tracks. Maybe we'll get lucky and find something unique."

"Long shot."

"True." Randy pointed at
another file folder. "Missing persons reports are still our best bet. The
victim's blood has been sent to the National Missing Persons Database."

"Matching mitochondrial DNA to
family members. Longer shot."

"And it could take forever,"
Randy added.

Hannibal rubbed his eyes. "Yep. I
was hoping the bridgework would be a clincher, but nothing there either."

"We're at about a week from the
estimated time of death. Why no report that he's missing?"

Hannibal lowered a hip to Randy's desk. "How
far out have you gone?"

"I put out the request nationwide."

"Yeah, but that assumes there are
people who have time to compare what you sent to their records. How far have
you actually made personal contact?"

Randy detected a hint of skepticism in
Hannibal's tone. He looked through his notes. "Washington, Oregon, Idaho,
California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah—"

"Okay, okay. I get it. You've been
busy."

Damn right. He felt the burden of the
entire Pine Hills Police Department on his shoulders. He picked up a legal
tablet, flipped to a blank page and clicked his pen. "Back to our missing
person hypothesis. Why wouldn't there be a report?" He wrote "Report
filed, haven't found it" next to the numeral one. He wrote a two, then
looked at Hannibal. "He's supposed to be away?"

"Right," Hannibal said. "On
vacation, a business trip. Camping. Someplace where not checking in wouldn't
send up red flags. What else?"

Randy slid into brainstorm mode, feeling
more like part of a team. "No family? Homeless? Nobody to miss him?"

Hannibal nodded. "Another
possibility. Or maybe nobody gave a damn. Some people are just plain nasty."

"And sometimes I think we meet them
all."

"Too true." Hannibal gazed into
the distance. "Reminds me of a case in Florida. Took fifteen years to solve
that one."

Intrigued, Randy put down his pen. "Go
on."

"Wife killed her husband, shoved him
in the freezer for six months, then buried him under the garage. Her kids were
in on it. Guy was a scum and nobody reported him missing. Fifteen years later,
the kids killed the mother, but this time they got caught. Cops found out about
the missing father and dug him up."

Randy looked at the sea of notes pinned
to his walls. "I hope I don't have to spend fifteen years on this one. How'd
they break the case?"

"Apparently the mother told the kids
she was going to talk. They killed her, but someone did report the mother
missing. Detectives followed a money trail."

"Sounds like a real loving family,"
Randy said.

"Wonder what Christmas was like at
their place." Hannibal's cell phone rang. He pulled it from his belt,
checked the display and swore under his breath. "Gotta go. Keep it up."

Randy watched Hannibal trudge away, then
returned to his lists, letting his mind glide back into brainstorm mode. There
was a question he'd been meaning to look into, but it eluded him. He'd long
since learned that chasing after things that niggled at his brain merely sent
them deeper into hiding. He spent the next hours reviewing reports, making more
notes, adding notations to existing notes, pinning more bits to his wall,
moving them around and wondering when the missing piece would show up.

He returned from a fruitless trip to the
fax room as his desk phone rang. "Detweiler."

"Eldridge. My office. Now."

Eldridge's tone was far too reminiscent
of the chief's. Randy grabbed a couple of Tums to chew on the way.

* * * * *

Sarah followed Kovak and Mike Conner into
the lab. Mike snapped still pictures of the interior of the mugs, one neatly
sliced in two by Lester's cutter. Sarah asked if they could try to pry the base
from the mug on the second one, without sawing it. A few deft taps of a hammer
and chisel had popped it right off.

"All right, Sarah," Kovak said.
"Tell us what we're looking at."

"I can touch them, right?"
Kovak and Mike took charge and she hung in the background, letting them do
their thing, almost like she wasn't there. Lester had barely acknowledged her
presence, either. If there was a cop around, everything else faded away. Maybe
it was a cop gene.

"Help yourself," Kovak said,
apparently content to let her lead for the time being.

She picked up each piece, confused at
what she saw. "It doesn't make sense," she said.

"What doesn't make sense?" Mike
asked.