“What are we doing, Mike? I thought the DT wanted us to wait to be questioned?”
“Change of plans, Doyle,” I said as I knocked on the super’s door.
“Oh, that poor girl,” said Meg Hambrecht as she answered, in jeans and a sweatshirt now. “I remember the day she moved in, how concerned she was about her movers hogging the elevator. Not wanting to inconvenience everybody. She seemed so together. Now something like this. It’s just—”
“Thanks, Ms. Hambrecht,” I said, interrupting, “but I noticed you have a security camera by the buzzer. We’d like to look at the footage.”
She shook her head rapidly.
“I’m sorry, but they’re installing a new system, and the building management fired the contractor in the middle of it. The whole thing has been out for a while now, three, four weeks. There is no footage.”
“Thanks for your time,” I said. “The other detectives are finishing up upstairs. They’ll probably be contacting you in a bit.”
“Mike, c’mon. What’s up?” said Doyle as we left the building.
“I’ll tell you what’s up, Doyle,” I said. “I worked homicide for five years. It’s more politically expedient for the department that her death be seen as a suicide. That’s why we have to investigate this on our own.”
“What about protocol?”
“Protocol and politics and especially Chief Starkie be damned, Doyle. Naomi was part of our team. She was one of us. If we don’t catch the people that did this to her, no one will.”
CHAPTER 31
WE RUSHED BACK TO the Harlem office, and for the next half hour, Doyle and I tossed Naomi’s cubicle, looking for any notes she might have started on the cannibalism case.
It wasn’t looking too good. There weren’t any notebooks. The only paper in the place was a ream of copy paper for her printer. Everything we needed to know seemed to be on her password-protected computer.
“Hey, you know, Lopez knows computers,” Doyle said as we stood there staring at the Toshiba’s screen. “He, like, went to school and stuff before he got called for the cops. You didn’t hear it from me, but he even fixes them on the side.”
“You tell me this now?” I said. “Go get him.”
Lopez arrived along with Noah Robertson and Brooklyn Kale, who we’d informed on the way over. The gang looked pretty torn up about Naomi.
“We need you to do all you can, Arturo,” I said. “For Naomi.”
Lopez sat down in front of the computer and took a deep breath and began clicking away. After a second, he snapped a finger.
“Hey, we know Naomi had a Yahoo e-mail account through AT&T. The phone company will have her password on file. Somebody call them so we can at least look at her e-mails.”
Noah Robertson was doing just that when Lopez cried out.
“Forget it. I got it! Open sesame. I’m in!”
“Arty, my man,” Doyle said, giving Lopez an enthusiastic high five.
“What was it?” I said.
“Chast was a Red Sox fan,” Lopez said, rapidly clicking more keys and the mouse. “Used to drive me nuts. I mean, go join the Boston cops, why don’tcha? I remembered making fun of her at a softball game for wearing a Dustin Pedroia jersey, asking her if it was his actual jersey since the guy is such a shrimp. So I tried DUSTIN plus her birthday and wham-o. Easy beans.”
Lopez brought up a Word file entitled Current Case.
“Here it is, I think,” he said. “Looks like a cut-and-pasted note from her iPhone. She probably e-mailed it to herself. It looks like notes from an interview dated yesterday.”
Lopez read a little bit more and looked up at me.
“Mike, it looks like she’d already spoken to the complainant yesterday. Hudson Du Maurier the Third.”
Doyle looked at me from the other side of Lopez.