“I…I don’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t recommend the ‘I don’t understand’ defense. Unless you can get some psychiatrist-for-sale to testify that you’re crazy, juries don’t tend to buy it.”
Leavitt broke away from Finch and stared at Elias. “Jury? Detective, I don’t know what you think you know, but-”
“One chance,” Finch said.
Leavitt looked back to him. “What?”
Finch held up a finger. “You get one chance to tell your side of the story. One chance for the judge and jury to know why you did it. If you blow that chance, that’s your problem.”
Leavitt started to speak, but Finch looked away and raised his hand to stop him.
“Don’t answer yet,” Finch said. “You only get one chance, so hear me out. All right?”
Leavitt swallowed. Finch saw the panic at the corner of his eyes, struggling to burst free. Leavitt kept it under control and nodded.
“Good choice,” Elias said.
“You may think you came up with the world’s best plan,” Finch said. “But you didn’t. We have the alarm codes. We have the contact breaks that tell us when the doors were opened and when they weren’t. We know you came down here at one in the morning, disabled the alarm, stole the mummy and hid it in a spare locker. Then you reset the alarm on a sixty second delay and headed to your office.”
Leavitt said nothing. A bead of sweat appeared at his temple. It rolled down to his jaw.
“I figure you did that because you didn’t know how long Eric would be asleep, right? That’s why he had to reach you on your cell phone when he realized that the mummy was missing.” Finch furrowed his brow. “I wonder what your contingency plan was if Eric had been awake? Kill him? Abort the plan for tonight and do it some other night? Did you check on him when you got down here? I think you did. Just a quick glance into the security room to see if he were snoozing. Which, of course, he was.”
Leavitt swallowed and gave no reply.
“After that, it was all cake. Let the security videotape get taped over, take the call from Eric and pretend to show up to get the investigation rolling. Then what? Wait until things blow over and sneak the mummy out in a gym bag or something?”
Leavitt opened his mouth to speak, but Finch held up his hand. “I’m not done.”
Leavitt closed his mouth.
Finch smiled coldly. “You probably figured no one would search the place. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t find the mummy. And if they did, they couldn’t pin it on you, could they?”
Leavitt finally spoke, his voice wavering. “No. And neither can you.”
“Oh, we can,” chuckled Elias. “We can.”
“He’s right,” Finch said. “We’ve got all the alarm evidence, plus you’ve got no alibi. And you’ve got motive.”
“That doesn’t prove-”
“Not to mention the other physical evidence,” Finch said.
Leavitt blanched. “What other evidence?”
“We can always process the mummy and that little wooden coffin he’s in for fingerprints. It would be really interesting if your prints showed up anywhere on there.”
Leavitt smirked. “The Egyptian government would never allow it. You would destroy the artifact.”
Finch cocked his head at Leavitt. “Oh, we have some very advanced methods of fingerprinting that are non-invasive. The Egyptians won’t have any problem with it.”
Leavitt snorted.
“But you probably wore gloves, right?” Finch said. “And so maybe that would be a strike out. But we don’t need your prints on the mummy. Not when we’ve got the videotape showing you stealing it.”
A look of shock spread through Leavitt’s features. “I thought the tape-”
“Was recorded over?”
Leavitt nodded, swallowing hard.
Finch shrugged. “Well, yes and no. Did you meet Adam, our techno-specialist? He can pull data off of a videotape even if it’s been recorded over six times. See, Mr. Leavitt, videotape works a lot like your computer hard drive. The entire tape isn’t used for the data signals. When you tape over something, just like when you delete something off of your hard drive, all you really delete for sure is the marker that tells the device where the information is stored. The information is still there until the actual storage space it’s in gets recorded over. That can take months on a hard drive. On a videotape, it takes six times, sometimes as many as eight.”
Leavitt shook his head in mild protest.
“All Adam has to do,” Finch continued, “is go in and pull out the data. Sure, we won’t have every single frame. But even half the frames will be enough to show you snatching the mummy. And that picture will convince a jury”-he snapped his fingers-“like that.”
Leavitt’s breath had quickened. He swallowed again.
“All that’s left,” Finch said, “all that will make a jury understand, is knowing why you did this. And I’m giving you one chance to tell us that.” He held up his finger again. “One.”
Edward Leavitt began to cry.
Finch guided Leavitt’s head past the doorjamb and into the back seat of the patrol car. He closed the door and gave the roof a tap. The officer pulled away, heading to jail. Finch turned and walked back to his car.
Lieutenant Crawford stood talking with Elias. An unlit cigar hung from his mouth. “He was gonna lose his job, you’re saying?”
Elias nodded. “The museum was losing money. And on the personal front, he was already having trouble paying the taxes on the house he lived in, so he was getting desperate.”
Crawford frowned. “So sell the house.”
“He couldn’t,” Finch broke in. “His uncle left it to him with the proviso that if he didn’t live in it or if he died, it went to the museum.”
Crawford grunted. “And the mummy was in a spare locker the whole time?”
Finch nodded.
Crawford motioned toward Special Agent Payne, who was a dozen yards away, talking to a news reporter on camera. “And that FBI guy who’s taking credit over there didn’t find it?”
“No. He showed up just as we found it.”
“How’d you figure out it was in there?”
“Lucky guess,” Elias said.
“Probably not far off. Elias said you got the guy to confess with some techno mumbo-jumbo about videotapes and computer hard drives.”
Finch nodded.
“Any of that true?”
“It’s true about hard drives. Not videotapes.”
Crawford grunted and glanced at his watch. “I gotta go tell the chief what happened so that he can tell the mayor so the mayor can tell everyone else who cares.”
Finch and Elias said nothing.
Crawford removed the unlit cigar. He spit a small piece of tobacco onto the asphalt while he regarded the stogie. “Anyway, nice work, you two.”
“Thanks,” Finch said.
“Yeah, El-Tee. Thanks.”
Crawford contemplated the cigar. “At least you didn’t get beat up by any women on this one,” he said. He thrust the cigar back into his mouth and ambled off toward his car.
“Ouch,” Elias deadpanned. “That’s really no way to talk to world-famous mummy hunters.”
Finch shrugged. “That’s Crawford.”
“Well,” Elias said, “if he thinks I’m mentioning his name during the Discovery Channel interviews, he’s crazy.”