The faint knock on the door pulled him out of his daydreams, and Mike found himself face to face with Charley, a faint smile spreading on the African-American lab tech's lips when he realized that he'd caught the Lieutenant off guard.
"Rough night, Mike?"
"Something like that, yeah…", he answered absent-mindedly and ran a hand across his face, trying to disguise the somber thoughts that were occupying his every thought that morning.
"What'd you do with Stephen? I tried calling him earlier, no wonder he didn't pick up."
"He's running a couple hours behind, trying to get caught up with everything he didn't get done yesterday when he came across our body.", Mike answered matter-of-factly and reached for his cold coffee, eyes trained on the lab tech, "What have you got for us that brought you all the way to the 4th floor, my friend?"
Insecurely shifting from one foot to the other, Charley glanced at the guest chairs, but then discarded the idea of sitting down altogether.
"I checked some more into that leather jacket, and the material is quite inexpensive. Definitely no top of the line clothing. It probably came from one of the cheaper clothing lines you can buy without wasting your whole paycheck on it."
Acknowledging the tidbit and filing it away in his mental databank, Mike nodded.
"Now, on the traces of feces we found on Sullenger's shoes, I heard back from my zoologist friends this morning and it's definitely a combination of sheep, goat and chickens, not pigeons. You see, the pigeon manure has a higher concentration of nitrogen than regular chicken manure. They were even able to discern that the manure came from adult chickens which were fed a regular grain diet, not baby chicks."
"Okay, okay, never mind all that…was there anything mixed in there that could help us figure out where the…manure came from? We're having a hard time backtracking Sullenger's steps when it comes to that."
With a disappointed shrug, Charley lowered the file folder in his hand, his warm brown eyes glancing at something in the carpeting of Mike's office.
"Beyond the fact that it's a couple days old, that's all we can give you right now. If there were any dirt samples in the thread, they were washed or walked off. The manure however is sticky, that's why we were able to find the residue."
Grunting at the roadblock they'd hit, Mike pursed his lips, unwilling to let his frustration out on the dedicated man standing in front of him.
Well aware that his mood hadn't improved by any stretch of the imagination, he mouthed a quiet thank you and watched Charlie leave his office to return to his confines downstairs.
Taking another sip of cold coffee to shake him out of the drowsiness from a sleepless night spent evaluating his life choices; Mike exhaled slowly, the bitterness of the coffee matching the anger in his soul.
After leaving him a homemade meal to re-heat in the oven, Jeanie had been fast asleep by the time he returned to the house late last night, depriving him of the hope to spend a few precious hours with his beloved daughter, before resuming his investigation.
Instead, he'd spent hours in his rocking chair, his mind drifting to Jeremy's wife and children, his friend's tarnished legacy, his firm belief to stand up for what was right, and the ridiculousness of the judicial system that caused his murderer to walk the streets as a free man again in a few short months.
He knew the law, he knew the restrictions and he was a firm believer in due process.
But enough was enough.