“Yeah. Lab.”
“This is Special Agent Aaron Uzi—”
“Can you speak up a little?”
“I’ve got some latents,” Uzi shouted. His voice echoed in the empty glass-enclosed booth. “I need them run through the system. Yesterday.”
There was a loud groan on the other end of the phone. “Uzi, you’re not really doing this to me, are you? Please tell me this is a dream.”
“Tim? What the hell are you doing here?”
“They got me out of that god-awful hospital and wanted to transfer me to another god-awful hospital. Hate those places. Then they said something about a safehouse but I didn’t want any part of that. So I had them bring me here. There’s a cot in the back room. If I’m not safe here—”
“Jesus, Tim. Okay, listen. I’m serious about these latents. It’s super important.”
“You know what, Uzi? I’ve never said no to you before, but there’s a first time for everything, right?”
“Tim—”
“No, I’m putting my foot down here. I just got my freakin’ butt blown off. Have some compassion.”
“These prints could be from the person who planted the bomb in your house.”
There was a pause, then Meadows said, “Bring ’em right up. Let’s get this bastard.”
Uzi stepped into the break room and found Meadows reclining on the cot, eyes closed and his right shoulder scrunched against the wall.
Uzi nudged him in the side. “Sleeping on the job, eh?”
Meadows opened a lazy eye and groaned. “This is a nightmare, right?”
“We just talked on the phone, you told me to come up.” The dazed look on the tech’s face told Uzi to continue doling out clues. “The latents, the bomber…”
Meadows groaned again, then licked his lips. “Damn medication. Puts me out. Yeah, okay, fine, the bomber. I remember.” He tried to push himself off the soft cot, but couldn’t get much purchase. “Well, you gonna watch me struggle or you gonna help me up?”
Uzi grabbed Meadows’s left arm and pulled him off the cot. “You should be in a hospital.”
Meadows steadied himself against the wall with his right hand. “And when did you get your medical degree? Or are your FBI creds just a cover?”
Uzi pulled the Ziplocs from his pocket. “I don’t think ‘Doctor Uzi’ would work. Might scare away the patients. Although I once saw a dentist named Payne.” Before Meadows could comment, Uzi held up the bags. “I couldn’t dust them, but I huffed on the mirror and saw a print.”
Meadows slowly made his way into the adjacent lab. “You did what?”
“Huffed. You know, blew on it with— Just dust the damn sample.”
Meadows sat down heavily on a stool and pulled a small kit from a drawer. His movements were clumsy because of the injury to his hands, but Uzi noted the doctor had removed the bandage wraps. Only casts remained, affording him some dexterity with his fingertips. Meadows dipped a wide brush into black powder, then tried to twirl it over the mirror. “Oops.”
“Oops?”
He blew away some of the powder. “You try doing precise work with these things on your hands.” He tilted his head to assess his work. “Don’t worry, if there’s something here, I’ll find it.”
Uzi yawned hard, then shook his head. “Sure hope so.” He took the DVDs and, handling them carefully, slipped them into the drive of a nearby PC. He opened Windows Explorer and browsed them. There were two encrypted files from six months ago.
“When you’re done with the latents, you’ve got a couple of files to crack.”
“Oh, goody. You really don’t want me sleeping tonight, do you?”
Uzi dragged the files onto the PC’s hard drive, then brought the discs back to Meadows and grabbed a stool of his own. The tech looked at Uzi and seemed to appraise him for the first time.
“You look about as good as I did after the blast.”
Uzi looked at his reflection in the glass cabinet above the slate work surface. Numerous abrasions covered his face and neck, and a dollop of dried blood was plastered just above his left eye. “Let’s put it this way: you weren’t their only target.”
Meadows glanced sidewards at Uzi. “No shit?”
Uzi nodded at Leila’s mirror. “Anything?”
“Looks like one on the front and another on the back.”
“Okay. Run them through the system, dust the discs, and see what they show. I’ve also got some DNA. And no, I really don’t want you sleeping tonight.” He rose from the stool. “I’m gonna use the bathroom, clean up and try to make myself look a little less scary.”
When Uzi returned to the lab, Meadows was asleep in a chair beside a computer monitor where digitized fingerprint images rolled by at astounding speed. Uzi walked down the hall to a vending machine and bought a Coke and a granola bar, both of which he downed in record time.
He joined Meadows, set another bar in front of the computer, then gently woke the technician. “Tim, time to eat. We’ve got green eggs and ham. Tim…”
Meadows opened his eyes to half mast, groaned, and then sat up. “I dreamt I was eating breakfast. Eggs and—”
“No dream.” Uzi nodded at the granola bar. “At least your hearing’s coming back.”
“What?”
“Anything on the latents?”
Meadows looked at the screen, rubbed his eyes with a shirt sleeve, and struck a few keys. “This ain’t easy with freakin’ casts on.” Finally, he leaned back. “Nope. No hits.”
Uzi stood and leaned over the desk to look at the monitor. “How can that be?”
“Guess this person wasn’t in the database.”
“She’s gotta be. Where’d you run it?”
“Everywhere. Even Interpol.”
“Call up Batula Hakim.”
“Hakim, that name rings a bell,” Meadows said as he pecked awkwardly at the keyboard. He hit Enter and seconds later, the fingerprint for Batula Hakim appeared on-screen.
“Compare it to the ones you just lifted.”
Meadows created a split screen, and the two prints popped up beside one another.
“Any matching points at all?”
Meadows studied the screen, then shook his head. “Not even close. See these whorls here? They’re— Well, look for yourself. It doesn’t take a computer to call this a nonmatch.”
Uzi fell back onto his stool. Aksel was wrong. He put me through all this for nothing.
“Sorry. You thought we had something, didn’t you?”
Uzi rose, nodded absentmindedly, and then turned away.
A beep sounded, and Meadows rotated his body to check the monitor. “But we do have a match on one of the latents from the DVDs.”
“Yeah?” Uzi asked impassively. “Whose?”
“None other than our own Marshall Shepard.”
“Shep?” Uzi spun around and looked at the screen. “What would his prints be doing on those discs?” Uzi began pacing. On the fifth pass, he mumbled, “I just don’t get it.”
Uzi looked over and noticed Meadows sleeping again, his head nestled in the fold of his elbow. Uzi guided his friend back to the cot and gently set him down. He then grabbed a backpack and made his way through the many rooms of the lab, helping himself to various supplies and equipment.
He had the sense that his answers did not reside in a database. For the next few hours, he’d have to figure this out on his own.
Uzi signed out an unmarked Crown Victoria BuCar — Bureau Car — from the FBI motor pool and grabbed a cell phone from the communications center. If he had wanted to replace his Glock, he would have had to do so at the Academy’s armory — and complete paperwork about his prior handgun, which was now evidence in Adams’s murder. But he hadn’t taken the time — and there certainly was no chance to do that now.