Strangled - Brian McGrory [9]
Martin said, “We’ll have to turn that over to the cops, even though it doesn’t show anything. But let’s make a duplicate and keep a copy for ourselves.”
Edgar nodded and shut down the DVD player. He said, “We could dust that driver’s license for prints.”
I asked, “You know how to fingerprint something?”
“No idea. I’d send it out.”
Smartly, Martin interjected, “Even if we got any prints off it, which is doubtful, we have no database to run them through. It’d be meaningless to us.”
I sat back in my chair as those two got up to leave the conference room. I said, “So I call the cops with the news of the license. I offer them the tape. They’ll want to talk to Scully. They’ll probably want an original copy of the note. And we get nothing. Peter, right now, I don’t even think we have a story.”
I swear to God, Martin’s nose twitched like the little news rodent he can be, though I’m not sure if it was out of nerves or because he had the scent of something very big. He said, “It’s only ten o’clock in the morning. This cycle’s just begun.”
And with that, prescient as ever, he walked out the door.
My first official call on the case, if there is such a thing that a reporter can make, was to the lieutenant in the homicide bureau of the Boston Police Department, an FOJ (friend of Jack) by the name of Leo Goldsmith.
Leo is just old-school enough that he doesn’t have the current-day mentality nurtured in precinct houses and at daily roll calls that reporters are the real bad guys and that the only time you should ever talk to them is to mislead them.
Back in the old days, from what I’ve been told, cops and reporters used to be comrades in arms. Newspaper photographers and police reporters who cruised the city with a dashboard filled with scanners and a car roof groaning under the weight of antennas would often beat cops to crime scenes. They’d see the same things, crack the same jokes, and at the end of their shifts tell the same stories about the same cases over a pint of beer in some bucket-of-blood bar.
But somewhere along the line, there was a gargantuan split. I think it might be Woodward and Bernstein’s fault. After they brought down a president and, more important, had their work glorified by Hollywood, newsrooms suddenly drew a better-educated brand of reporters who hailed from wealthier backgrounds. They didn’t carry names like Tommy and Billy anymore, but Jonathan and Eric. They took lunch at fancy joints downtown, which I personally don’t have a problem with. But suddenly, the two sides weren’t even speaking the same language, or if they were, they certainly didn’t speak them with the same words. Suspicion eventually, perhaps inevitably, turned to animosity. Now cops and reporters, often seeking similar truths for the same greater cause, are from two different planets.
Because of this, I take no small amount of pride in my ability to relate to my friends in blue, an ability that I’ve used to my significant advantage over my entire career.
“I’ve got something for you, and I’m hoping you’ve got something for me.”
That’s how I opened the bargaining session with Lieutenant Leo Goldsmith. He may not have realized it, though probably he did, but a set of negotiations were about to take place, and he represented one side of it.
“What I’ve got is about one minute,” he replied. “We’re getting called out on another case.”
All right, this wasn’t going exactly as planned. The thing about reporting is that few things ever do. The one phone number you need will always be the unlisted one. The crucial official that you need to supply the last key fact in a story is invariably going to be away on vacation, probably in a Third World country, often on a river cruise without any use of a phone. The file you need in federal court is inevitably the one that’s inexplicably missing.
“Jill Dawson,” I said.
Before I could continue, he interjected. “I’ve got nothing on that one for you. Absolutely nothing. And take that at face value. I’m not being told anything about the case, and best as I can tell, the decisions on that one are being