Spider - Michael Morley [98]
‘You know, Angelita,’ mused Manny, a five-carat sparkle in his eye, ‘if only I were twenty-five years younger and free and single, then you and I –’
‘Yeah,’ laughed Fernandez. ‘Then you and I’d be down the jail house’cos you’d be busted, on account that I’d still be under-age and you’d still be a wicked old man.’
They both laughed. Fernandez took one of the tiny biscuits and crunched off the icing. ‘You got anything for me, Mr L? Or do I have to come back again?’
Manny Lieberman sighed. He knew he was being ‘worked’ by the sassy agent, and he loved every minute of it. He put the document he had been examining into a file and demoted it to a desk drawer. He took out another file. Fernandez instantly recognized the carefully cut piece of cardboard with the black felt-tip writing as coming from the package containing Sarah Kearney’s head sent to the FBI. Manny also slid out a photocopy of the BRK note from Italy and placed this alongside the cardboard.
‘I know you officers have very short attention spans, so I’ll try to be as brief as possible about this.’ He folded his hands together. ‘The same man wrote the same writing with the same pen. Your Italian package and your American package were addressed by the same hand.’
Fernandez’s eyes widened as she took in the implications of his snappy summary. ‘You’re sure?’
Manny picked up some gold wire-rimmed glasses and popped them on. ‘Aah, so now you want the not-so-brief version?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Okay; then let’s start with the science first. As you know, I am a little old-fashioned in my ways and methods, but they haven’t let me down yet. I pin-scraped a tiny part of the ink from the writing on both samples that you gave me. I then subjected these scrapings to pyrolysis gas chromatography, which I have always favoured for analysis of paint and fibre samples. The final program produced in this process is virtually unique. Certainly reliable enough for me to say confident lyin any court that the samples matched.’
‘Fine,’ said Fernandez, getting her evidential bearings. ‘So that tells us that it was the same type of pen, maybe even the same pen, but it wouldn’t be evidence that the same guy used it?’
‘No, indeed it wouldn’t. And that presumably is the main reason why you came to me.’
‘Mr Lieberman, where else would I go – you’re the best.’
‘Flattery, my dear Agent Fernandez, will get you everything your heart desires.’ Manny slid a piece of tracing paper out of the file envelope and paper-clipped it on to the photocopy of the BRK letter recovered in Italy. ‘First I did top-of-the-letter analysis, and I’ve marked up this “trace” to show how the offender starts off his letters. Can you see?’
Fernandez had to stand behind him to get a proper look. The trace paper was covered with tiny marks. The first marks were made at the highest point of all the letters. ‘I’ve got it,’ she said.
‘Okay. Next I marked out where his second peaks are. So, for example, on the letter B, my first mark is at the top of the B, then my second mark is where the top half-circle of the B hits the middle of the vertical letter line. You got that too?’
Fernandez looked at the trace paper closely. ‘Yeah, Mr L, I’m still with you.’
Manny sat back. ‘By marking out all the peaks and troughs of his letters with those small dots that you saw, I was able to join up the dots and get a kind of graph. Let me show you.’ He returned to the trace paper and ran his finger along the pencil line, which looked to Fernandez very similar to the printout you might get from an ECG or a polygraph. ‘Then, I was able to take this trace from the BRK letter and place it over the writing on the label of the box sent to your office here in New York.’ Manny slid the trace over the cardboard sample and clipped it into position. ‘You’ll see now that although he wrote in capital letters, obviously to avoid handwriting detection, he has still given us enough