Free Hack by Kieran Crowley

got through the traffic very quickly, which is what lights and sirens are for. After viewing Aubrey’s food-fest film, Izzy said something in a foreign language that sounded like German.
    “
Es vaskst by mir in teller
,” he groaned.
    Izzy confiscated the original hard drive—along with the entire machine, which Emiliano did not like. Phil softened the blow by giving him a receipt, and explained that there were so many different video surveillance and software systems that grabbing the entire works was the only way to guarantee they could play and copy the evidence.
    “So, let me get this straight,” Izzy said to me. “You’ll let me take credit for screwing up my own homicide case and making myself look like an asshole. Gee, thanks, amigo.”
    “I just get to put it in the paper first. Would you rather I took credit in the paper and didn’t tell you?” I asked.
    “Okay. I admit that would be much worse,” Izzy agreed. “Thanks. The pooch may be screwed here but maybe I can un-screw it. But Forsythe could still have killed Leonardi before he left. This just tightens up his alibi timeframe. It could still work.”
    “And he still ate Neil Parmesan,” Phil pointed out.
    “True,” I said. “And he smacked him around. But I think maybe he didn’t kill Neil. I don’t think he had time to do all that cooking, for one thing.”
    “Then who did?” Izzy demanded.
    We all looked at each other for a while, clueless.
    “Maybe whoever fed him Neil,” I suggested.
    “You’d make a great defense lawyer,” Izzy said. “Nobody has proved anyone fed Leonardi to Forsythe without his knowledge.”
    “But now
we’ll
have to eliminate that possibility,” Phil sighed. “Izzy, he’s right. And he did the right thing.”
    “Okay,” Izzy said. “Sorry, Shepherd. Thanks, man.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    They had investigating to do and I had another exclusive to write. I turned to leave, then paused.
    “Izzy, what did you say, when you saw the footage? Sounded like German.”
    “Old Yiddish expression.
Es vaskst by mir in teller
,” Izzy repeated. “In English it would be ‘It’s growing on my plate.’ It means the more you eat, the more there is. Like this damn case.”

17.
    I went back to the
Mail
and gave them one of the DVDs so they could take stills for the morning paper and run the whole video on the paper’s website. I kept the second DVD for myself. For a change, Aubrey’s lawyer refused to comment. I wrote up my story about how Aubrey had lied about where he was because he did not want the world to know a haute cuisine critic had pigged-out on fast food. I did my best to write in the short, punchy
New York Mail
style, by imagining I was writing a Hallmark greeting card about murder. I made it clear that Aubrey had eaten human flesh and might still be the killer but the McDonald’s footage made it possible he was innocent of the murder. Apparently, at a newspaper, when you completed a big story, they didn’t congratulate or thank you. Your reward was they just stopped yelling at you to finish.
    I grabbed a Dr. Pepper and a bag of pretzels from a vending machine in the lunchroom. It was after nine. I yawned. I tossed my empty soda can and plastic bag and headed home. I was too tired to walk or bicycle, so I decided to take another cab. I told the woman cabbie my memorized address in TriBeCa on Broome Street. She grunted, flipped the meter flag and sped off, punching my address into a GPS navigation unit.
    “What does TriBeCa stand for?” I asked her.
    “What?” she asked.
    I repeated the question.
    “You live there and you don’t know?”
    “So you don’t know either?”
    We both laughed.
    The cab stopped in front of the wrong building, the first of three identical brick buildings on the right. My apartment was in the last one. Not wanting to lose my new friend by pointing out her mistake, I paid her and walked the fifty yards to my building. The outer door was unlocked. The inner door was