MOSAICS: A Thriller by E.E. Giorgi Page B

façade of Parker Center, a lonely cloud reflecting off its windows. A van from one of the L.A. news station was parked in front of one of our patrol cars.
    “They’re prowling again,” I commented.
    Satish nodded. Now that the Callahan case was back in the news, the news vultures had come back to the nest.
    The rattling of a jackhammer joined the honks of downtown traffic. Workers were replacing the old memorial monument with a forest of metal tubes—some sleek concept by the firm Northrop Grumman Space and Missions Systems. Together with the new headquarters about to open up, it was all part of the beautification of our over one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old agency. Our façade was being polished and refreshed, yet the bureaucratic loopholes kept tightening, the brass was aging, and our crime labs were still understaffed and overburdened.
    We walked past the fenced off area and inside the building. Under the skeptical brows of the watch officer s, two cameramen were wrestling their equipment through the metal detector. Satish and I snuck right behind them and took the elevator down to Property Division, where all evidence from cold and closed cases was stored until they could either be officially released or used for court proceedings.
    An officer checked our badges and scribbled our numbers on the visitor log. She looked neither black nor white, neither young nor old. Her inflection was from the valley, her stance from the city.
    We walked down a long corridor . The waiting room to Jail Division was located at the opposite end, and we could clearly hear the bickering of family members in line to visit their relatives. A man shouted he’d been waiting for more than an hour to see his son. An officer replied his son had been waiting in the joint for more than one year, so he could wait a few minutes longer.
    The evidence room was small and windowless. Four boxes sat on a round, metal table. They all bore the LAPD stamp and the additional labels, “Charlie Callahan, case ID XCV56, submitted by Det. C. Henkins.”
    “The evidence on the Callahan case, as you requested,” the officer said. “All his personal items are here. We contacted the family to see if they wanted it, but they replied we could burn it all.” She gave us a quick glance that meant, “Do you have any questions?” Relieved to see that we didn’t, she took off.
    Satish hooked his hands on his belt and took a deep breath. “Well—looks like we’ll be in here for a while.”
    I leaned across the table and pulled one of the boxes closer.
    “Look at the bright side,” I said. “Chances are, by the time we’re done, the news crews up on our floor will be long gone from Parker Center.”
    Satish flopped on the chair across from me, loosened the knot of his tie, and pulled out the field reports. “They’ll come back,” he said. “They always do.”
    We sorted through the victim’s clothing, field notes, pictures, crime sketches. In the inventory, we found Callahan’s apartment floor plans marked with all the places from where evidence had been taken.
    “What’s in the box that says ‘Digital’?”
    I craned my head and looked inside. “CDs. Couple of jump drives.”
    He reached for the box and looked for himself. “No laptop?”
    I shook my head. “Does the inventory say laptop somewhere?”
    Reading glasses precariously hanging from the tip of his nose, Satish flipped through the pages of the inventory. “Home desktop.”
    “Was it seized?” I asked.
    Satish frowned, flipped more pages, then dropped his chin and stared at the boxes on the table from above the rim of his reading glasses. “Well, it does say they looked at emails and personal documents, but I don’t see no computer here.”
    I sifted through the box of CDs, mentally count ing. There were about a dozen data CDs and a couple of jump drives. “Maybe it’s still at Electronics. Did they find anything interesting?”
    “Persona l emails to friends. Nothing out of the