Method 15 33 (11 page)

12:01:
hands me plastic cup to collect more water while I use bathroom. Drink from faucet. I collect 7 oz. of water and return
.
leaves, locking door
.

12:02-12:20: Eat lunch: egg-and-bacon quiche, homemade bread, milk
.

12:20: Measure shadow, record vectors: 5’9”, 40” at waist, 182 lbs. Findings are consistent. Will continue measurements
.

12:20-12:45: Wait for
to return to take tray
.

12:45:
returns. Keys rattle…

And so on. His patterns were punctual, timely, predictable. His vectors consistent. A clone trooper. A hypnotized soldier. In fact, based upon my Navy Seal father’s militaristic ways, I queried whether my captor was ex-military. On Day 25, I confirmed almost as much. Odd, however, the discrepancy between his severe punctuality and his bedraggled physical appearance.

As you can tell from the above excerpt, I took repeated measurements. I wanted a bulletproof execution. But I soon determined that writing everything in longhand would be inefficient, so I switched to charts for metrics, calculations, and vector documentation and left new intel and acquisitions for longhand. So that my lab book was transformed to include mostly only charts.

Endless weeks into our investigation, Lola and I sat at a corner booth in the famed Lou Mitchell’s breakfast diner in Chicago’s West Loop. It was a late spring Wednesday, making the crowd a thick mixture of tourists in tracksuits and business persons in double-breasted power statements. My meal arrived on a hot porcelain plate: two over-medium eggs with a sheen of the butter they had fried in, white toast, home fries, and extra bacon. Lola had the same, plus a stack of flapjacks and a side of ham. Of course, there was a large pot of coffee between us. I fell into the groove of cranky waitresses and busy patrons, all of them with their Midwestern attitude and twang, as though this morning were a nightclub and the work day or tour bus was not imminent, but only a pit stop on the way to a chicken-fried steak lunch and after-work beers with chicken wings. Pulsing in this rhythm, I allowed myself an inward grin at the thought of enjoying an outdoor cocktail on Rush Street. But then my cell phone rang.

“Hello,” I said.

Lola lifted her nose, which seemed embedded in her steaming pile of pancakes. “Hmm,” she said with her expression, as though she had answered my phone too.

The voice on the other end of the line caused me to leave the table and take the call on the sidewalk. Lola kept eating, unexcited. When I returned, I caught her picking toast off my plate.

“Boyd called,” I said. I loved dropping bombs like this on her.

She threw my toast on her plate and grabbed a napkin, which she’d already stained with her extra maple syrup and drippings of egg yolk. While wiping the outer rim of her lips hard and picking shards of ham out of her teeth with her tongue, she jabbed her fist at me. “Son of a damn bitch, Liu. I knew that shit-stinking farmer knew more. Didn’t I say that? Didn’t I tell you that?”

She had not said this to me. She’d only complained of the smell of Boyd’s barn. Although, truth be told, I, too, thought Boyd knew more. I wish I could tell you I was surprised he called. But I’d been through this so many times before. People get nervous when they sit with the FBI in their kitchen. They worry about how they appear, how they sound, whether they are targets themselves. They think about past indiscretions of their own and wonder if my inquiry is a cover for some other investigation, closer to home. It is not until we are long gone a few days—sometimes months—when a buried memory or a subconscious observation surfaces. And then these benevolent witnesses resurrect my card or Lola’s and they call. Usually their revelations are meaningless, worthless, or things we’d already uncovered. “Her car, it was definitely green, I remember clear as day now, Mr. Liu,” they might say, to which I’d think,
Yup. A 1979, emerald, two-door Ford. We found it, with the bodies in the trunk, at the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee last week. Thanks for the call
.

So when I heard Boyd’s voice, I didn’t expect much. Boy, oh Boyd, was I wrong.

But before we get into Boyd’s ruby of an investigative gem, I should explain why Lola and I found ourselves at a diner in Chicago. As you’ll recall, we had the fortune of falling into some lucrative videotapes at a gas station outside of South Bend, Indiana. We knew the day to watch and generally the time period: afternoon of the day Boyd sold his van, which happened to be his brother’s birthday and the reason Boyd left the same day to go to “Lou-C-Ana” for an extended visit.

There were three tapes for this day: one at the pumps, one
above the cash register, and one over the bathrooms with exterior doors. We found our suspect, full face and frowning—but wide-smiling in one frame—on all three tapes.
Jackpot
. We tracked him as soon as we captured sight of the van at the pumps, where he stayed for two-and-a-half minutes, and followed him to the counter at the cash register, after losing him for about three minutes, during which time he acquired a pint of chocolate milk and a package of Ding-Dongs. At the register, he asked for a “pack of Marlboros,” which was easy to discern by way of his slow manner of speech and our trained eyes for lip-reading. Then he asked for “the key to the bathroom,” and our lovely gas station owner obliged. Another four minutes passed, he returned the key, and we caught him one last time back out at the pumps, checking the gas cap, entering the driver’s door, and driving away.

All of these images were sent to Virginia for serious dissection, along with the lifted fingerprints from Boyd’s bathroom. At the end of the analysis, here’s what we wound up with: a man in his early 40s, brown hair, tightly cut in the fashion of Caesar, small, round rat eyes, pupils so brown they appeared black, thin lips, almost no lips, and a fat nose with extra large nostrils. His lower eyelids sagged, revealing the inner flesh of his eye sockets. The medical experts said this might be a sign of lupus. The profilers and anthropologists pegged him as Sicilian, but American-bred. Smoker, obviously, and overweight, which showed only in his rounded belly and not anywhere else. He had no priors and no military record, so the fingerprints revealed nothing. We measured him at 5’9” and between 180-185 pounds.

Our man was wearing a Lou Mitchell’s t-shirt. The analysts discovered that the color and style could have only been printed in the last year or two. I might not have been excited over the t-shirt if all I had to go on was the t-shirt; I’d probably have assumed he was just another tourist. But when he opened his wallet at the register, he made the mistake of laying it flat on the counter, and those sharp-eyed video-jockeys
back at headquarters zeroed in on the one frame that said it all: 126:05:001 showed the very top of a frayed check on which several letters were visible above the inseam: L       CHELL’S. Despite zooming in so far we could pinpoint individual molecules in the wallet’s leather, we couldn’t find the man’s name, what with the apparent absence of a license and credit cards, so we began to call our rat-eyed suspect, Ding-Dong.

We seized upon the visible letters on Ding-Dong’s check. The human behaviorists theorized that Ding-Dong’s body shape, gait, burn-marked fingers, and habit of wiping his hands on his pants at the pump, meant he was a short-order cook. Everyone surmised he’d been one at Lou Mitchell’s, given the t-shirt and by filling in the obscured letters on the check in his wallet to form the only possible solution. The medical experts also diagnosed him with a mild form of emphysema, just by video alone.

Lola and I hightailed to Chicago in search of anyone who might identify our short-breathed, short-order cook.

We were waiting at Lou Mitchell’s on a man named Stan, the head chef, to finish the breakfast rush. We promised the new manager we wouldn’t make any inquiries of the waitresses during their shifts and while they were out on the floor. So we sat and ordered the aforementioned breakfast. The manager had explained after we showed him a picture of Ding-Dong, “I started here last year and I don’t remember this guy. Your best bet is to talk to Stan. If someone worked here, Stan’d know.”

Our waitress, a hard-knuckle woman in her later 50s, came to collect our empty plates. Standing sideways to us with her face tilted to the side and down, and with a tone of familiar boredom, she said, “The big man is ready for ya’. Go through the counta’. Left at the ‘frig. Can’t miss him.”

Lola and I did as directed. As soon as we turned left at the “frig”, we saw him, a literal wall of man, standing before an eight-foot-long
griddle. He was so wide, they had married two aprons together so as to stretch across his midsection.

“Stan?” I said.

Nothing.

“Stan?” I repeated.

“I heard you the first time, lawman. Come over here. Sit on these boxes of oil.”

I sat where directed. Lola, on the other hand, took her usual position as faithful sentry behind me.

From the side, Stan’s head was the size and shape of a medicine ball: big and round. He had a well-maintained pork-chop beard and a mane of wild curls, which were slicked to mid-skull. The remaining locks broke out from the grease suppression into a clown’s wig behind. Stan turned to face me. I have never seen a nose so big in my life. If giants ever existed on this planet, Stan was surely a descendent.

“What you want to ask me, lawman?” A splatter of batter plopped from his spatula to the floor, which I followed; he did not.

“Wondering if you know this man?” I held out the picture of our suspect.

Stan glazed the picture with his brown cow eyes, snorted, swiveled back to his grill, flipped three pancakes in quick succession, and grunted.

“Guess that means you know him,” I said.

“Man’s a first-class idiot. He ain’t been here in about two years. I kicked him out on his third day. Comes to me, says he worked a truck stop diner outside a’ Detroit for five years. Says he’s been short-order, sous chef, pastry chef, head chef, you name it. Lost everything on account a’ some fight with the owner, he says. Says he’s all down on his luck, wants to start over, can’t he be something in my kitchen. So I give him the bacon station. First day, I knew right away, this man ain’t never been in no kitchen. Burnt every strip he was supposed to fry up. Next day, I give him dishes. Screws that up too. Sending plates out with eggs and shit still stuck on ‘em. I figured I better give him the Ol’ Stan Lecture
on Perfection and give him one more day. So I did. But, well dammit, he fucks up the third day too. And, well, shit, here it is, lawman, we Lou Damn Friggin’ Mitchell’s. We don’t put up with no bullshit. We got the best damn friggin’ breakfast in the city. Mayor Daley loves us. Zagat says God makes our omelets. Calls us ‘world-class’.” Stan turned his attention to Lola, “You know,” he said, pointing his spatula at her, “Yeah, you know, lawwoman, I saw you Hoover my pancakes.”