She sat down at her desk, finished her grand jury script, then started on the other witnesses. The medical examiner, Dr. Soresh, would have to testify, and Vicki looked through her mound of mail for his report, which had come in last week. She found a thick brown envelope with the familiar seal and braced herself. Autopsy reports were always awful to read; she'd start with Jackson's and move on to Morty's only when she felt strong enough. All she had to do was get the basics from each: official cause of death, number and location of entrance and exit wounds, to sketch the case for the grand jury.

Vicki slid out the papers. POSTMORTEM REPORT: JACKSON, SHAYLA read the boldface line at the top. She scanned the first page, containing the grim details about Jackson: "Pregnant Black Female, Age 23; Height 5'4"; Weight, 145." After that, it stated Cause of Death-exsanguination and internal injury due to gunshot wounds-and Manner of Death-Homicide. Vicki made a note of the Manner of Death for her script and turned the page. EXTERNAL EXAMINATION read the top of the page, and the description of the external examination of the body began at the top: "The head is normocephalic. The scalp hair is black and is up to six inches in length. The irrides are brown and the sclerae showed petechiae…"

Vicki skipped ahead, then was sorry she had. The cold, typed detail of the chest wounds, in old-fashioned Courier font, were gruesome, and she skimmed them quickly to get to the facts she needed and finish this awful job. She skimmed down to abdomen, which described in medical detail the gunshot wounds to Jackson's abdomen and her uterus beneath, which were all the more horrifying because of the level of medical detail. Just when Vicki thought she couldn't take any more she noticed something in the detail:

The fetus, approximately eight months and one week in gestation, was a female of mixed race, apparently African American and Caucasian.

She blinked, surprised. Vicki had assumed Shayla Jackson's baby was Browning's, but the report meant that it couldn't have been. What did it mean, if anything? Could that have been why they broke up? She skimmed the rest of the report for another reference, but didn't find any.

Suddenly her phone rang and she jumped. "Allegretti," she said, hoping it was Dan.

"Vicki, it's Jane, in reception? There's a buncha boxes just got delivered for you from ATF, Special Agent Pizer. Label says the matter is Kalahut."

"My new case. I'll be right there." Vicki got up, almost relieved to leave the grisly postmortem report behind for a minute. She opened her door and checked Dan's office on the fly, but it was still empty. She went to the reception room, which was dominated by fifteen cardboard boxes with ATF stickers, stacked in the center. "You weren't kidding."

"They delivered a few boxes last night, too," Jane said from behind her bulletproof window. "They're in the file room."

"There's too many to put in my office. Do we have a spare conference room, at least for a few days? I got a meeting with Agent Pizer today." Vicki checked her watch. 11:05. "At noon."

"Hold on." Jane checked the conference room log. "C is free until Friday. It's the little one, with no windows."

"I'll take it. Where's the dolly?"

"In the closet."

"Thanks." Vicki retrieved the orange dolly, loaded the boxes, and wheeled them into the conference room, making three trips, then she headed to the file room for the remainder. The file room smelled vaguely of dust and was empty, large, and windowless. Four cardboard boxes with ATF stickers sat stacked on the counter. Vicki loaded two boxes on the dolly and was about to leave when she remembered the missing transcript from Shayla Jackson's grand jury testimony. It would only take a second to look for it.

She checked her watch: 11:15.

She'd have to get it done fast.

Vicki pushed the dolly aside and went around the counter to the case files, which were kept in cabinets arranged alphabetically by the defendant's last name. She stopped at the Be-Bu drawer, pulled it out, and went though the files for United States v. Bristow. No luck. Just in case the transcript had been misfiled, she pulled out Branigan, Brest, Bristol, and Bruster, and thumbed through them, but it wasn't there. She thought a minute. It wasn't that old a file, less than a year, and it would still be active. Maybe it was misfiled under Jackson, which would have been an easy mistake to make. She went to the Ja-Jo cabinet and found the Jackson files; there were at least fifty of them.

Argh. Vicki didn't have much time. She pulled out each Jackson file, one defendant at a time-Alvin, Adam, Boston, Calvin-and checked every one for Shayla Jackson's transcript. Still no luck. She closed the cabinet with a final click, but she couldn't stop thinking about that transcript. It would be Jackson's own words and the details of what she knew about Reheema. It had been convincing enough to get a grand jury to indict. Where the hell was it? Vicki thought back to her walk with Cavanaugh and tried to remember what he had said about the transcript:

"I admit it, I wasn't into filing. Maybe it got misfiled."

Vicki reasoned it out. If Cavanaugh hadn't filed the transcript in Reheema's case file before he left the office, then, after he left, it would float around and somebody would most likely send it to the file room. What would the file clerks do with it? It would be a transcript, clearly from a grand jury proceeding. They'd be too diligent, or too scared, to throw it away, so they'd stick it somewhere. Where? Vicki realized the answer as soon as she'd asked the question:

The To Be Filed bin! It was a paper version of a homeless shelter. All sorts of stray legal documents were stuck in To Be Filed; papers that nobody could throw away without guilt, or fear of termination. The file clerks were supposed to file the documents from the To Be Filed bin when they got free time, which was never. Vicki looked around for the To Be Filed bin and on top of the first panel of cabinets sat not one but three overflowing bins, all labeled TO BE FILED. Maybe they reproduce?

Vicki went up on tiptoe, slid the first bin off the top of the cabinet, then set it on the floor and sat down in front of it, crossing her legs. She started skimming the papers and setting them aside on the rug; she felt energized by the thought of finding the transcript and by Mocha Java, grande size. The first document was a proffer letter in United States v. Streat, the second was a trial transcript in United States v. Gola, the third was a motion to suppress in United States v. Washington, and so on. Each case caption listed a litany of aliases and nicknames: "Psycho Chris," "Ant," "Shakey," "Baby Al," and "Boxing Bob." The bin was truly a miscellany, documents thrown into a stack, with the only common thread being that nobody knew what else to do with them. Vicki kept reading and in time finished the first bin. No Jackson transcript.

She got up and traded the first bin for the second, then sat back down and got to work. More stray documents, the mundane and the fascinating, all heaped together. By the end of the second bin and still no Jackson transcript, Vicki was telling herself to keep going because the oldest stuff would logically be in the third bin and Cavanaugh had left the office some time ago. She got up, traded bins, then sat down and kept looking, setting the papers to the side as she read. She slowed as she neared the end of the third pile, like a reader making a good book last. But when she finished, there was no transcript.

Damn it to hell! Vicki sighed and checked her watch. 11:45. The ATF agent would be here in fifteen minutes, if the snow didn't slow her down. It had started this morning, and by the time Vicki had gotten into work, there'd been two inches' accumulation. She hurried to put the stacks of miscellaneous papers back in the bin, then stopped at one of the documents when something caught her eye. She picked it up. It was a standard plea agreement in a drug case, United States v. David "Kermit" Montgomery. But it wasn't the caption that caught her eye, it was the address of the defendant: 2356 Pergola Street, Apt. 2.