Unlucky 13(47)

I interrupted, grunting my thanks, and said “Sorry for yelling. I love you.” Then, churning with furious thoughts about cheapskate cruise ship lines, I went back to work.





CHAPTER 61


WHEN I GOT back to our desks, Conklin had assembled an array of surveillance DVDs from the six Chuck’s Prime restaurants in San Francisco. He’d separated the disks into six stacks, one stack for each restaurant. Each stack was six inches high.

He said, “These were shot with cameras inside and out. There isn’t one complete two-week set, but this is everything that could be retrieved, including one from Hayes Valley starting the day before the Jeep bombs.”

I said, “The FBI has seen all of these?”

“Yup.”

“And they found nothing?”

“There are about a hundred million hours here. The Feebs are human. They could’ve missed something,” Conklin said. “We could save the day.”

“I admire your optimism.”

“Yeah?”

He grinned at me. Let’s just say that Ashton Kutcher has nothing on Conklin.

I grabbed my phone and put in a call to FBI special agent Jay Beskin in his Golden Gate Avenue office.

He picked right up.

“Jay, am I right that your folks have finished going through Chuck’s meat-processing plant?”

“We’ve pulled core samples from about two tons of chopped meat,” he said. “Talk about a needle in a haystack. We’re looking for pellets that can fit inside a cold capsule. Anyway, we’ve examined a lot of prime beef. We scoured the prep kitchens and grilled the workers. No red flags. No flags of any color.”

“Any suspects—at all?”

“Seems like only angels work at Chuck’s. I’m wide open to ideas, Sergeant.”

I updated Beskin on our big bag of zeros. I summarized the stakeout at Barney’s Wine and Liquor, including the hand-lettered threat left in the briefcase. I told him about my day at the product-development plant and the prospective buyout by Space Dogs that might now be off the table. And I said that my partner and I were about to dive into surveillance footage, again.

Beskin wished me luck, and we exchanged promises to keep each other in the ever-widening, thus-far fruitless loop.

I hung up and looked across our desks to my partner.

He said, “Let’s each take a disk, press play, and see if something jumps out at us.”

I stared at the stacks of surveillance footage, thinking how much I’d love to have a single clean fingerprint or an eye witness or a drop of the bomber’s blood. That was the kind of forensic evidence cops had long relied on to point the way, to apply the screws, and nail a case shut.

On the other hand, watching a million hours of surveillance tape was probably the perfect antidote to my upcoming nervous breakdown as I thought about Yuki and Brady under the guns of paramilitary terrorists off the cold coast of Alaska.

“Lindsay?”

“I heard you,” I said to Conklin. “We’re looking for something to jump out at us. Preferably someone wearing a sign reading, ‘I’m the Bomber.’”

Conklin laughed. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

He brought us coffee from the break room and I unwrapped the BLTs. After our trash had been dumped in the round file, we each cued up a CD from our chosen stack.

My first had been recorded on the day before the original belly bomb explosions.

We were 100 percent sure that the two students who’d been killed by belly bombs a week ago had eaten “hamburger bombs to go” from the Hayes Valley Chuck’s.

Somewhere in my stack of disks, there had to be a killer.





CHAPTER 62


SECURITY SYSTEMS IN fast-food restaurants and parking lots rarely produce footage that’s HD, in focus, and Sundance Film Festival worthy. Chuck’s Prime’s Hayes Valley series was no exception.

I cued up the first disk, the footage that was shot inside Chuck’s on the day preceding the double belly bombs. The camera was set back and across from the cash register and trained on the cowpoke behind the counter. The camera angle also gave a partial view of the kitchen behind the counter, a sixty-degree-wedge view of the tables, and the front door.

I watched black-and-white images of people coming into the store for morning coffee, and then I hit fast-forward until I reached the three-hour mark, about the time Chuck’s began to fill for lunch.

I scrutinized the customers ordering, those picking up at the takeout line, and others who were dining in. Wait staff were doing their jobs and joking with customers. I didn’t see anything remarkable. It seemed to be a good day at Chuck’s Hayes Valley.

I studied the cooks and kitchen workers through the letter-box view of the kitchen and tried to imagine how one of them might plant mini-explosives in a hamburger patty.