Inspector Dean sat alone in an incident room at the police precinct, spread out on the table were the bagged items of evidence recovered from the scene of last night's robbery. In truth, there wasn't a whole lot of physical evidence, the gymnastic thief had taken most of her equipment with her. The rope launcher, nylon rope and the pitons that had secured it were the only things she had left behind. Apart from that is the envelope addressed to him personally.
The lab boys had already been all over the climbing gear and had failed to find a single print. In their opinion, the whole launcher had been disassembled and cleaned with an oil that removed fingerprints, and then the thief wore gloves that night. The launcher was homemade, but closely resembled a military model used by special forces. 'To make this good a copy from scratch would take a qualified craftsman,' Dean realized. The rope was pretty standard and produced in high quantities, as were the pitons.
Dean held up and read the card in it's clear plastic baggie onc more.
"Dearest Inspector,
I'm so glad you could make it for my debut. Hope you don't get in too much trouble for failing to catch me. That is assuming I wasn't apprehended after leaving this note. If I am still at liberty, rest assured I'll be in touch again very soon.
."
The Inspector smiled to himself at the message. She certainly had bravado, this . He switched on the overhead projector and a large image of appeared on the screen. 'The tight catsuit showed off her body's genorous curves well,' he noted. He put up an image of Lady , leaving the reception at the hotel beside it. He slid one image across and stepped up to the screen to study the result closely. The two images meshed perfectly, if Lady wasn't , then it was her exact body double.
Dean zoomed in on a section and seperated the images. Now the screen showed the feet and lower legs of the two. The boots worn in both pictures were identical, as he had thought.
The Inspector had been warned off investigating Lady very firmly by the police commissioner himself. Both the Commissioner and the district attorney attested vehemantly that she had been at the reception all night and hadn't been out of their sight for more than a couple of minutes. Dean looked through his notes and found the timetable of the robbery he had constructed. From the moment he'd first seen on the roof of the hotel to the moment she had slipped back into the ventilation duct only four and a half minutes elapsed. He figured it was possible to to exit or enter the party and quick change in two minutes, maybe a little less. It would take split second precision, but it was possible Lady could have pulled off the robbery and only been absent from the reception for around eight minutes.
Dean was sure he'd got his woman. In the bustle of the party with distractions, the witnesses would never notice her absence, despite their sworn statements to the contrary. Now he just had to prove it, the body match and boots were extremely circumstantial, the district attorney himself had dismissed them at a glance.
The door opened and Lieutenant Adams entered. The African American detective had been up all night on this case too, fatigue showed in her face as she handed him a strong coffee. She looked at the screen and frowned.
"You still on about the boots Dean?" she asked. "What is this, some sort of fetish with you? Maybe I should wear some biker boots tomorrow and see if you ask me out to dinner."
Dean laughed as he tried to take a sip of coffee.
", she's our cat burgler, but the Commissioner and the DA say she's off limits for investigation," he told his partner. "If you help me poke around, you'll be putting yourself in the line of fire, so I'm not ordering it."
"You know I'd take a bullet for my partner," Adams replied with a shrug. "I'm a cop, that's part of the job. So where do we start?" |