Takeover - Lisa Black [33]
“Duly noted.”
“I got nothing with the mag powder either. CPD called Conrad’s about the receipt, but it had been paid with cash by Robert Moyers, with the same address, the one he sold to the fashion designer. No one at Conrad’s remembers anything about one sale four years ago. And no one at Sirius will tell me anything about the satellite radio account either, so the cops are running that down.”
“Have you called about the meter on that envelope?”
“The what?”
“Where is it?”
Don moved to a counter and picked up the number ten envelope, now sooty from the mag powder used to process it. “It’s blank. Nothing but the forty-two-cent imprint.”
Theresa peered through the plastic at the inked red markings. “Postage meters are closely regulated. You have to lease them from a dealer authorized by the United States Postal Service. This is a Pitney Bowes; if we call them with this serial number, they should be able to give us the name of the company that metered this envelope.”
Jason listened attentively. “That easy, huh?”
“Not really—they’ll want faxes on letterhead and a few other forms of identification before they’ll release the information. I’ll take the envelope back with me and get some police VIP to call.”
Don thrust a printed form and a pen at Theresa. Chain-of-custody procedures had to be maintained, even under extenuating circumstances, up to and including Armageddon. “Sign here and it’s all yours. Now, follow me.”
She led them into one of the back rooms, pausing at the door.
“That looks—” Theresa stopped.
Don nodded. “Yep.”
“Like Leo. At a microscope.”
“Yep.”
“It’s like he’s working.”
“You betcha.”
“I can hear you, you know.” Her boss spoke without moving his lean face from the ocular lenses of an old polarized light microscope. “I can also hear the percentage of your cost-of-living increase dropping like a sow’s litter.”
Theresa approached with caution, as if a heavy tread could shatter the tableau. “What are you doing?”
“Pollen.”
“What?”
“Remember pollen? The powdery stuff that busy little bees carry from one plant to another, making most of our food supply possible? Identifying them with polarized light was a big deal in the fifties and sixties, tracking dastardly criminals back to the apple tree behind the crime scene.” He replaced a pair of glasses on his nose, long fingers flicking with excess energy. “It’s a dying art, sadly. No one does it anymore.”
“Yeah, like hair comparisons,” Theresa commiserated. “We have a reference collection for pollen?”
“In the basement. Way back in the corner, behind the piece of fence from that torso in the park and the skull-under-glass thing from those satanic wannabes. I’ve probably breathed in enough dust to give me pleurisy.” Indeed, the one-by-three-inch glass slides scattered around on the countertop appeared dusty, and the mounting media had yellowed. The corners on their hard vinyl case had abraded into powder.
“So what is it?”
“Pine.”
Her shoulders slumped. “That’s all?”
“Nothing exotic, sorry. It’s kind of odd to see so much of it, though.”
He skittered his chair back a few feet as Theresa bent her head to the eyepiece, viewing the pink-stained grains. They seemed to have three sections, a central orb with two kidney-shaped appendages. “Why is the amount odd?”
“It rains regularly here, even in summer. That knocks most of the pollen out of the air.”
“So they might be from some other area?”
“But I thought your guy lived here.”
“His car does. Or did. Where would we expect to find a lot of pine pollen?”
Leo began to fit the glass reference slides back into their kit. “I remembered how to use a polarizing microscope, Theresa. That doesn’t make me a botanist. But I’ll see if someone at the Museum of Natural History can help us.”
Leo, volunteering to make a phone call, hunt up a specialist? Tears pricked the backs of her eyelids. Don’t start, she warned herself. Don’t.
Jason’s remote radio chirped at the same time as Don’s Nextel.
Jason put it to his ear, then