“The typewriter is a potential lead, isn’t it?” asked Morgan, pointing to the note. “Can’t we track him using that?”
“Well,” said Shepard, “this much is true: there’s a thousand little moving parts, and the wear and tear will cause each typewriter to leave a specific signature—usually in the form of slightly, distinctively misaligned letters.” Shepard seemed more engaged, and his frame seemed to sag slightly less, as he explained—Morgan could tell he enjoyed going through this sort of explanation. “So it would be possible to match a piece of text to a particular typewriter.” He bent down at a computer and typed something into it. “But here’s the problem.”
Shepard brought up on the big screen a photo of a big, clunky machine with a dull grey plastic casing. “Analysis shows that this is the machine that the note was written on. The Underwood Touch-Master 5. An office favorite in the early sixties. You can find at least a couple dozen for sale on the Internet at any given moment. Then there are antique shops, garage sales.... There’s no telling how many of those are still out there, and it very well may be that there’s absolutely no record of this particular typewriter after it was originally manufactured and sold. Bottom line, there’s no way of identifying and finding out where it is. It’s hopeless to try to track it.”
“I see,” said Morgan. “But we still have the surveillance tapes of Stuart’s first meeting with this guy, right? What do we have on that?”
“That’s a little more promising,” said Shepard. He went back to typing and moving things around at his terminal. “I pulled whatever footage I could get of the area during the time when Stuart made the exchange, from traffic and security cameras.” He brought up a video window on the big screen that showed a view about five feet above eye level of a paved plaza with a number of regularly spaced slender trees, a thin, heavily trodden sprinkle of snow on the ground, with a sparse but steady flow of pedestrians walking left to right and a few sitting on evenly spread stone benches. “That’s Zuccotti Park, and you can see our guy there a little to the right of center.” The picture showed Stuart sitting nervously on one of the stone benches in a fancy tan overcoat with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a large cup of coffee sitting on the stone next to him, his hand resting on a black suitcase as he looked furtively in every direction. The angle was a little above eye level, and the picture was crisp and clear enough to just make out the label on Stuart’s coffee.
“We’ve got another angle on the scene,” said Shepard, and brought up another window playing video of the same scene simultaneously, but this one from much higher up, two stories at least, and from the side rather than the front. Morgan saw by comparing walking figures in both images that they were perfectly synchronized.
“There’s our guy,” said Shepard, pointing out a man wearing, just as Stuart had described, a grey hoodie jacket and blue jeans, old white sneakers on his feet. His face was well-obscured by sunglasses and a baseball cap. He faced away from both cameras as he walked. He sat down next to Stuart.
“Watch his face,” Shepard said.
Morgan did—or rather, tried. The hat alone would have obscured it almost completely given the angles of both cameras. In addition to that, however, he managed to keep his head down, and somehow, at no point was Morgan able to catch a glimpse of anything more than his chin.
“The bastard knows where the cameras are,” he said. “He’s hiding from us.”
“Right,” said Shepard. “He keeps it up, too. Not one good frame. Look,” he said, pointing. “Here is where he passes the note.”
“How about face-recognition software?” Morgan asked
In the video, Len Stuart got up nervously and walked away, leaving the suitcase behind.
“Never even registers as a face at all,” said Shepard. “I ran it three times, just to be sure. See, this is when he gets up.” Shepard pointed at the videos with two fingers on his right hand. Perfectly synchronized, the figure in both videos got up, grabbed the handle of the suitcase, and wheeled it away.
“I managed to follow him through various video feeds along a couple of blocks.” Shepard brought up a new window with video from a different camera that showed the man as he turned a corner. He navigated around pedestrians, walking quickly. His pace was brisk, though not quite athletic. In fact, his step was graceless, almost mechanical.
“And this is where we lose him.”
The man walked into a deli, pulling the suitcase in behind him.