The case dicks took a shot with a CGI house. Marx pulled it before the CGI people finished. I'm trying to find out what he did with it.

No idea, man. Like I told you, my team worked on the book. Wasn't in the book, I don't know about it.

Who worked on Repko?

That was Bastilla and Munson. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Munson was on it.

Munson again.

Who's Munson?

One of the Homicide Special guys, up there with Bastilla. He and Marx go back. I think they used to work together.

Can you ask them what happened with the disk?

Uh-uh, man, no way. I'm not going there. They were the inner circle.

Just tell them you were wondering about it. No big deal.

Cole, you don't get this at all. Those people were the people who gave us our orders, and one of our orders was to mind our own business. I ask about this DVD, they'll wonder why. We weren't even allowed to ask about each other's work when we were working together.

I thought Marx gave the orders.

Our work went up to the senior supervising detectives, and they brought it to Marx. That's why we called them the inner circle. You had to go through them to get to Marx.

So each team only saw its own part of the case, but the guys up top put it together.

It was the only way to keep so much parallel work coordinated. Look at how much we accomplished in just a week.

Was Crimmens part of that crew?

Nah. He was an add-on like me. We had a ton of people in here, man. I heard it was thirty-two people, though I couldn't say. I never met most of them.

I kept thinking about the DVD. It was a piece of physical evidence. Like every other piece of evidence, it would have been numbered, documented, and preserved in a chain of custody. Even if it was only a useless piece of plastic, its location and uselessness would be a matter of written record.

Okay. Forget asking. How about you take a peek in their evidence file and tell me what it says?

No way. I can't.

Thirty seconds and you're gone. Just tell me what Marx did with it.

I physically cannot. They keep the files in an evidence room. It's locked. We could only sign out material specific to our assignment. Since I didn't work on Repko, I don't have access to that material. One of the commanders would have to sign off.

Don't you find that extreme, Lindo?

I find it anal and corporate, but nobody asked me. Use your head. If this disk mattered a damn, we would have seen the video on the six o'clock news.

It doesn't make sense they would pull it before the CGI house finished their work.

Maybe that's why they pulled it, Cole. How long did that place have it and still hadn't finished? Marx or whoever probably had the FBI do an overnighter. That's what I would have done.