The Front by Patricia Cornwell Page A

doesn’t even look at the display to see who it is.
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    . . .
    The state police forensic labs have a simple but basic protocol: Evidence you submit should be incontrovertibly associated with crime.
    What Win has in several brown paper bags isn’t incontrovertibly associated with anything except his own fears, his own sense of urgency. If Lamont is involved in something sinister and is implicating him, he intends to find out privately before he does anything about it. Imaginative guy that he is, it’s the why part of the equation that has him completely bewildered and unnerved. Why would someone break into Nana’s house and apparently steal nothing but his gym bag? Why would this person even know about Nana in the first place, or that Win stops by her house almost daily to check on her, or that he routinely leaves his gym bag because of her laundry magic, or that she routinely fails to lock her doors or set her alarm, making it simple to enter, grab, and run?
    Inside the lab building, an officer named Johnny mans the front desk, engrossed in whatever he’s looking at on his computer screen.
    â€œHow ya doing?” Win says.
    â€œYou seen this?” Pointing at the screen. “Friggin’ unbelievable.”
    He plays the YouTube clip of Lamont in the ladies’ room. It’s the first Win’s heard of it, and he analyzes it carefully. Green Escada suit, Gucci ostrich-skin pocketbook, and matching high-heel shoes, obviously filmed at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He recalls that minutes after her lecture, she sent him away to get her a latte, and for about an hour, she was out of his sight. Irrelevant, he reasons. It wouldn’t have been a big deal for someone to hide in the ladies’ room as long as the person had thought this whole thing out, and obviously, someone put a lot of thought into it. Preplanning. A recon to see when she was going into the ladies’ room, making sure it was empty before hiding in a stall. A woman. Or someone dressed like one. Could have been a man, if no one was looking.
    â€œWas a lousy thing to do,” Johnny is saying. “Someone did that to my wife, I’d kill ’em. Looks like you got a mess on your hands, though. Mick was in the director’s office not even an hour ago, about the . . . What’s her name? The murdered lady from the blind school that’s all over the news.”
    â€œJanie Brolin.”
    â€˜That’s the one.”
    â€œLamont probably sent Mick down here because she’s worried about any alleged evidence, although I can’t imagine anything relating to the case still exists. Regardless, she’d want to make sure none of the scientists talk to reporters,” Win says. “That’s what I think, anyway.”
    â€œSo don’t I.” A Massachusetts native’s weird way of saying So do I. “To give her credit? Wow.” Shakes his shaved head, watching Lamont on YouTube again. “She’s so cold, you forget she’s hot, you know what I’m saying? She’s got some set of . . .”
    â€œTracy around?” Win says.
    â€œLet me buzz her.” Can’t take his eyes off Lamont in the ladies’ room.
    Tracy’s in, and Win follows a long corridor, bypasses evidence intake, walks into Crime Scene Services, where she’s seated at her computer station, looking at two enlarged fingerprints on a split screen, arrows pointing to minutiae she’s visually comparing.
    â€œWe’re having a little argument,” she says, not looking up.
    Win sets down his paper bags.
    She points to the left side of the screen, then to the right. “Computer counts three ridges between these two points. I’m counting four. As usual, the computer isn’t seeing what I’m seeing. My fault, was in a hurry, didn’t clean it up first, took a shortcut and ran it through auto Encode. Anyway, what can I do for you? Because whenever