A DEDUCTIVE BURRITO
"I hope you haven't already gotten lunch."
Alex scowled in the glow of her computer. "Good god, Kagan, how did you get up here?"
"I told them I was the burrito delivery guy, which, in the strictest sense of the term, I am."
"You'd think a lobby filled with cops would recognize the most notorious criminal in the city."
"Ahh," Harris juggled the burritos into one hand and pulled a red mesh cap from his back pocket. He pulled it low over his eyes. "Never underestimate the art of a good disguise, Detective."
"I'm sure Sherlock Holmes would be proud. Take that dumb thing off."
Harris chucked the hat aside and sat in the chair opposite Alex's desk. "Now, I realize I was very wrong in my previous deductions. The Minnesota Vikings. The mice in your closet. Let me have one more chance at deductive redemption."
Alex looked up from her typing. "And what's that?"
Harris placed one of the two burritos on the desk beside Alex's elbow. "Chicken burrito, white rice, green chili salsa, no sour cream or cheese, lettuce and double guac."
Alex stopped her typing. She slid the burrito near. "Everyone gets chicken."
"I don't. Veggie all the way."
"Veggie?"
"Free guacamole on a veggie burrito."
"Ahh," Alex nodded. "What about the rest? Green salsa over red? How did you know I don't do dairy on my Burrito Euphoria?"
Harris shrugged. "The art of deduction, Detective. You should try it sometime."
Alex pointed the burrito at Harris. "You asked the burrito barista."
"Please, Alex; I believe the preferred nomenclature is 'burritosmith.'"
"We're not talking about the guys who built the railroad, here." With a sly grin, Alex unwrapped the top of her burrito, took a small bite. "It's like I said before, the simplest answer is almost always the right one. I also said no food—no dinner, no lunch—until the case is over, Harris."
"Ah," Harris said, "but it is over. That's why I'm here."
"Is it now?"
Harris pulled the phone from his pocket, handed it across the desk to Alex. "It's all there. Look at the first photo. Proof of innocence, quod erat demonstrandum."
Alex, wiped guac from her lip and placed the burrito to her desk. First looking to Harris, she hunched over the phone in her hand.
"Wait. Did you go to Rainbow Lanes? Why would you go to Rainbow Lanes when Family Bowl is just…" She stopped short, mouth open, bits of chewed chicken and rice on her tongue. "What's this envelope?"
"It's the copy of Kavi's story that was sent to Sheila Talbot. Before the crime."
"Before?" Alex looked up from the phone, dread heavy on her face. "Arthur?"
Harris shook his head. "Listen, I know you're wary but I think—"
"Darn it, Harris, I told you to let me know if he did anything strange."
"I didn't know until after he'd already met with Sheila. Apparently he played back some of the sound recordings to her and she handed over this envelope in the picture."
"Where is the envelope now?"
Harris shrugged. "Dunno. Arthur has it."
"Harris—"
Harris scooted around the desk, zoomed in on the face of his phone. He leaned forward, catching a woozy whiff of Alex's perfume. "Just...forget about Arthur. Look at the fingerprints. They match."
"Of course they match," Alex said. "They're both your prints."
"No," Harris zoomed the screen, framing an envelope fingerprint beside a crime scene print. "See here? The prints lifted from the scene exactly match the ones on Sheila's envelope. Not just closely resemble, but exactly match. Isn't that unlikely? On Law & Order or whatever, they're always blown away by a few points of similarity."
Alex peered at the screen, brow furrowed. The curving lines of the glowing fingerprint followed the exact same human maze as the powdery, crime scene prints. Zero deviation. Even the ragged edges of the print aligned without difference. Alex fell back in her seat, Harris' phone in her dangling hand.
"You think they were planted." She shook her head, suddenly very heavy. She looked to the green walls and saw her own head mounted alongside the mounted elk and deer. The plaque below her confounded look read: "sucker."
"They were planted." Harris said.
"It could still be Arthur."
"It could," Harris nodded. "I mean, it still probably is. But you have to consider. Who has the resources to plant fingerprints at a crime scene?"
Alex shook her head. "Harris, believe me: Police Chief Hardcastle isn't behind this." With a cleansing exhale, Alex turned back to the phone in her hand, began swiping through the pictures. The parade of copy and pasted fingerprints needled her guts. "That you keep bringing him up doesn't make any sense."
Harris, sitting back in his seat and awash in the euphoria that gave his favorite burrito joint its name, didn't notice Alex swiping through his phone. He looked up to Alex, stuffed to bursting with guac and rice and sour cream, just in time to see her brow furrow. He lunged forward, hrmphing 'stop' through a closed mouth, just as she tapped play on the phone's video.
Alex's frown relaxed. Her eyes grew wide. Her lip trembled. Then, with an electric jolt, she threw her hands up in the air.
"Ahh! What the freak, Harris?"
The phone clattered to carpet. Harris swiped the device and pressed stop without looking at the screen. "We…," he swallowed. "We did some digging. I told you before, Miss Leslie is a convicted felon—"
"There's no record of any felony," Alex said. "Besides. Harris! That's a sex tape! Of. My. Boss!"
"I'm telling you, she's into something with Chief Hardcastle. They e-mailed each other about our arrest right before and right after the cops took us on Tuesday. They use code names in their messages. So we followed her and …"
"Shut up." Alex slumped forward, head in her hands. "Thank you for alerting me about the fingerprints, but you need to get out of my office and not come back until this is all over."
"So that’s like a solid maybe on our date?"
"Oh cheese and rice. What are you, twelve?" Alex pointed to the office door. "Get out already."
Harris, mind already adding the math of burritos and the Detective and classic NES games, was only too happy to oblige
Chapter Twenty-Three
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