“I’m not at liberty to say, but, if I were you, I wouldn’t light a match on that side of the street.”

“Gotcha,” Dave said. He poured Howard a cup of coffee and sat opposite him. “The quality of the tape isn’t all that good. Lots of vibration. You’re going to have to isolate a frame and use some high resolution.”

Howard studied him as he chewed his bagel. “Do we have a face?”

“Yup. Looked right up at you.”

He nodded. “It was worth it, then.”

Kate joined them. “It was worth a hole in my roof?”

Howard looked apologetic. “It was an accident.”

“Some accident. You could have killed me. And what about trying to break into my house?”

“We weren’t trying to break into your house. We were searching the roof. The house was supposed to be empty. I pulled the fence section back to see if there was any evidence of the recorder crashing through the hole, and some crazy old lady almost blew my brains out!”

Dave spread cream cheese on a bagel and refrained from commenting on the location of Howard’s brains. He looked up at Kate and caught her smiling and knew she’d had the same thought.

“Then she took a shot at my partner. She have a license for that bazooka?”

Dave refilled Howard’s cup. “Absolutely. You want another bagel?”

“Better not. My wife has me on a diet.”

“So last night you tried a look-around in the helicopter?”

“Yeah. We were in the neighborhood, doing support for a car chase, and thought we’d give it one last shot. Sometimes things show up with the spot that don’t show up in daylight. But we didn’t find anything. Where was it?”

“In my azalea,” Kate said. “I saw it from my second-story window.”

Howard pushed back from the table and picked up the cassette. “I’m surprised it wasn’t ruined by the rain. Do you still have the camera?”

Dave handed him a box filled with the camera pieces. “Playing basketball on Thursday?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Probably.”

Howard tucked the box under his arm and looked longingly at the remaining bagel. “I’ve got to go. I’m late for a briefing.”

Dave grinned. “Be a shame to waste that bagel, Howard.”

“You know what she gave me for breakfast? Half a grapefruit and a slice of whole wheat bread. And then she gave me my choice of margarine or jelly. She said it was too many calories if I had both.”

Dave clucked his tongue. “Cops need more than that. Suppose you got shot today because you were weak from food deprivation?”