Two Graves by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

nothing. Constance knew nothing. No one answered the phone at the Dakota apartment, and Pendergast’s cell phone was apparently still dead.
    D’Agosta shook his head. No point in worrying—Pendergast often disappeared without notice.
    Time to go. D’Agosta gathered up his file and laptop, rose from his desk, and left the office, heading for the conference room. Over thirty officers had been assigned to the case, which put it in the middling range of importance. The highest-profile cases might have more than double that number. But it was still a lot of damn people, many of whom would have something to say. So much for his afternoon. Still, such meetings had to happen: Everyone had to know what everyone else knew. And it was a fact of life that, no matter how much you cajoled or threatened, you just couldn’t make a cop sit down and read a report. It had to be a meeting.
    He arrived at a few minutes past one and was glad to see everyone was already there. The room was restless, with a palpable sense of anticipation. As the rustling died away, D’Agosta heard an ominous growl in his gut. He strode up to the podium that stood on the stage beside a projection screen. They were flanked by wheeled whiteboards. As his eyes swept the room, he noticed Captain Singleton, the chief of detectives. He was sitting in the front row, next to the assistant chief for Manhattan and several other top brass.
    His stomach lurched again. Laying his file on the podium, he waited a moment for silence, and then spoke the words he’d been rehearsing.
    “As most of you know, I’m Lieutenant D’Agosta, squad commander.” He gave the group the briefest rundown on the homicide, then consulted the list of names he’d drawn up. “Kugelmeyer, Latents.”
    Kugelmeyer strode to the podium, buttoning his hideous brown Walmart suit as he did so. D’Agosta placed a finger on his watch, gave it a subtle tap. He had threatened everyone with serious harm, even death, if they went over five minutes.
    “We got an excellent series of latents from the corpse and the room,” Kugelmeyer said quickly. “Fulls and partials, right and left, and palms. We ran them through all the databases. Negative. The perp, it seems, has never been printed.”
    That was it. Kugelmeyer sat down.
    D’Agosta glanced around the room again. “Forman, hair and fiber?”
    Another quick report. This was followed by a dozen others—blood spatter, footwear, microscopics, victimology—each following the other with military precision, much to D’Agosta’s satisfaction. He tried to avoid glancing at Singleton, despite being eager to gauge the man’s reaction.
    One thing D’Agosta had learned about meetings like this was to create a little bit of drama by saving the best for last, knowing this would keep everyone awake and paying attention. And in this case, the best was Warsaw, the video geek from the forensic investigation division who specialized in analyzing security videos. While he was officially a detective, Warsaw looked more like a scruffy teenager,with his slept-on hair and pimples. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a suit, even a bad one, but rather skinny black jeans and T-shirts with heavy-metal logos. He got away with it because he was so good.
    He was also a bit of a show-off. He came bounding up to the podium with a remote in hand; the lights dimmed.
    “Hello, everyone,” Warsaw began. “Welcome to the perp show gag reel.”
    That got a laugh.
    “The Marlborough Grand has the latest in digital security, and we got beautiful, and I mean
beautiful
, footage. We got the perp from the front, back, side, above, below—HD all the way. Here are the highlights, edited down to, ah, five minutes. Your folders have a selection of still shots taken from the footage, which is as we speak being shared with various other luxury hotels and—very soon—with the
Times, Post
, and
Daily News
.”
    The movie began, and it was just as good as Warsaw promised. The excerpts