Then he walked back to the cruiser, holding the pan in front of him with both hands like a man carrying a tray of glasses, and opened the rear door and held it up so Lorenz could see it.
"This," he said. His voice had changed. It was quieter, and lower, and Lorenz could not tell yet what was in it. "This what you saw?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know what it is."
"It's a third pan," Lorenz said. "Third-size hotel pan, two and a half inch. Every kitchen in this city has a hundred of them. There's eight in my lowboy right now."
The cop looked down at the pan. On the bottom of it, near one corner, there was a small round sticker, faded and grease-stained and half peeled, about the size of a dime. Green. Lorenz saw it at the same moment Brodersen's thumb found it.
"What's that?" the cop said.
"Day dot."
"What?"
"A day dot. For food rotation. Every day of the week is a color, you put a dot on the container so you know what day it was made, what day to throw it out. Green is—" He stopped and thought. Different suppliers used different colors; Baird's used the National Checking ones. "Green is Thursday. Usually. Depends who your supplier is. But usually." He looked at the dot and then up at the cop. "Somebody took that out of a kitchen. Recently. Nobody leaves a dot on that long. You wash it off. Whoever did this works in a kitchen. Or they did."
Brodersen said nothing. In the silence the light bar ticked faintly as it cycled.