“Hey, Danyluk. How goes it?”
“Pretty good. Or at least it was until I catalogued the DVDs you guys brought in from the grow op.”
Mitchell turned to Sandovan and Ryerson, “It’s Danyluk in the ER.”
He returned to the call. “What DVDs we talking about?”
Mitchell could hear Danyluk flipping papers. “They were in the grow house where the guy got away by going out the back patio doors. Or should I say, where the guy went through the back patio doors.”
“Yeah. The place the dope thieves hit disguised as a SWAT team. There was a dead pit bull at the foot of the basement stairs. Okay, I remember now. I just figured the DVDs were pornos, to go with the girly mags.”
Danyluk read from a log sheet, “There were fifteen pornos, the rest were Hollywood films. But there was one other that you’re going to be interested in.”
“Don’t tell me, it’s a golf instructional to fix my slice.”
“Nope. It shows that kid getting eaten by the tiger at the zoo.”
“Oh shit. We’ll be right down.”
Mitchell, Sandovan and Ryerson clustered around the tiny monitor in Danyluk’s cramped office just outside the evidence lockup. Sure enough, the DVD showed Rammi Vargas being lowered into the tiger grotto and the ensuing carnage. It was perverse. The detectives had seen the aftereffects when they went to see Rammi in the hospital, but watching it happen was far more horrifying. They had to turn it off.
The room was silent for a full minute. Ryerson had his face in his hands. Sandovan and Mitchell were seething. Finally Danyluk broke the silence. “I thought it was some kind of Hollywood special effects thing when I first checked it. Then when I realized what it was, I puked in that garbage can over there,” he said.
“There’s gotta be some kind of way to figure out who shot this. And who did it,” Mitchell said through clenched teeth.
Sandovan stood up. “Thanks Danyluk. Hey listen, nobody else sees this or hears about it, okay? We know the kid’s mother. If this ever saw the light of day it’d kill her.”
“You got it,” Danyluk said, ejecting the DVD and putting it back in its case.
They apprised Captain Ramsey of the new evidence. To their surprise, he didn’t say anything except “Jesus.” Together they tried to figure out how to get more information out of the disc. They thought of tracing the purchase, but it was a generic DVD, available at thousands of retail locations around Salento. There hadn’t been any prints on the disc, and only some inconclusive partials on the case. They couldn’t hear any voices from behind the camera because the commotion drowned everything else out. Finally, in desperation, Mitchell had an idea.
“You know, the ad agency where Mya works has a production department. She says there’s a guy there, he’s an executive producer who knows everything about everything when it comes to video. We could ask him to have a look at the DVD. Maybe he can see something that we can’t.”
Ramsey considered it. He walked over to his window and stared out over the city. Finally his chin slumped to his chest. “Okay,” he said. “Just make sure you get him to sign an affidavit that swears he’ll maintain full confidentiality.”
Harvie Widdicomb sat in a windowless room, painted institutional pale green. The only other furnishings were two other aluminum chairs, a table, and a wheeled cart with a TV monitor and DVD player on it.
Widdicomb had worked in the production end of the advertising business for thirty years. He’d made the transition from working with 35 mm film to digital to high definition. He knew the ins and outs of computer-generated imagery, all manner of special effects, and the intricacies of lighting, color correction and editing.
Harvie had worked with some now-famous film directors who had cut their teeth on commercials. He’d survived actresses who threatened to walk off the set of a million dollar shoot because their Perrier wasn’t chilled. Temperamental creative teams who felt their ‘vision’ for a cereal commercial had been compromised. He had even talked the Salento PD out of pressing charges against a child actor who was doing an endorsement and picked that shoot day for his first drunk and disorderly incident. He thought he’d seen it all.
Now he was in a sickly colored room, watching a crazy bit of footage, and wishing he could be somewhere else.
After the introduction by Mya, Mitchell, and Sandovan had met with him and explained the bizarre predicament they were in. Widdicomb looked at them as if they were crazy, but then he agreed to view the DVD with them.
“Okay, that’s quite enough for now,” he said.
Sandovan turned the player off.
Mitchell sat down across the table from him. “Mr. Widdicomb, we can’t thank you enough for doing this. It’s a life-changing bit of video, I know. I guess we’re asking if you can see anything we might have missed that would give you some idea of who did this?”
Harvie got up and walked around the room. He paused and leaned against one wall. “This is going to sound strange, in light of the subject matter, but it is very good quality footage. I mean, for a middle-of-the-night, sneak in and sneak out sort of guerrilla thing, it is quite crisp. There’s not much technique involved, except for the camera push down as the poor kid gets lowered. That was smooth. So you’re not dealing with some moron and his camera phone. I’d say it’s a really good HD camera with an experienced operator behind the lens.”
He paced some more. “Can I get a water or something?”
Sandovan left the room and returned two minutes later with a bottled water. Widdicomb took a lengthy drink. “Run it for me one more time.”
Mitchell ran it again. This time Harvie only viewed half as much before asking him to turn it off. “Okay, this might be something. I was at the National Association of Digital Content Producers’ conference in Vegas three months ago. For a long time now, the makers of digital cameras have been trying to come up with something that kicks thirty-five millimeter cameras into the archives.”
Sandovan and Mitchell looked at him with blank faces. “I don’t understand,” Mitchell said.
Widdicomb took another swig of his water. “The aesthetic standard for motion pictures has always been thirty-five millimeter film. If you have a favorite movie, I can almost guarantee it was shot on thirty-five. But film is temperamental. You need great lighting. Proper lensing. The film stock itself is also expensive. You’ve heard of Stanley Kubrick?”
“The director, right?” Sandovan said.
“Exactly. Obsessive perfectionists like Kubrick would often shoot seventy takes of a scene. Shooting that much film is expensive. You also have to process it and transfer it. In contrast, when you shoot digitally you can see what you got fairly quickly. And it’s all stored on a hard drive. Nobody cares how many gigs of storage you use. It’s cheap. The biggest knock against digital cameras is that they’ve never been able to approach the aesthetic quality of film.”
“Where you going with this?” Mitchell prompted him.
“Bear with me. Around 2007 the same guy who invented Oakley sunglasses created a digital cinema camera that really made the industry take notice. Directors like Steven Soderbergh started to make good movies with it. It rekindled the race to kick film in the can—no pun intended. Other companies, like Panavision and Arriflex began to sink serious dough into developing killer digital cameras. At the conference I was at in Vegas, a Swiss company gathered a VIP audience together and secretly showed a prototype digital camera that is a real game changer. It’s called the Zeus. By almost every measure, it kicks ass. I’d say ninety percent of the people who saw what it could do couldn’t tell it from thirty-five millimeter film.”
Sandovan was restless. “I don’t mean any disrespect Mr. Widdicomb, but what’s this got to do with anything?”
“Start the footage one last time. Actually, just start it and then freeze the frame.”
Mitchell did as he asked. The image was of startling clarity.
Widdicomb walked toward the screen. He pointed at the upper le
ft hand corner of the frame. “Check this out.”
Sandovan and Mitchell looked. “I don’t see anything,” Sandovan said.
“Look closer,” Widdicomb said.
They could barely make it out, but superimposed within the footage, was the name Zeus.
“Okay, so it’s one of those cameras. What do we do?” Sandovan asked.
“Like I said,” Widdicomb replied, “it’s a prototype. The company is allowing fifty videographers to use the camera for six months, as a way of proving it in the field. I can guarantee you that this is the only Zeus camera in Salento. You find out who has it. He’s most likely the guy who shot this.”
Sandovan and Mitchell were suddenly jacked with adrenaline. They got the Swiss camera company’s name from Widdicomb, then thanked him profusely, politely reminded him of his confidentiality affidavit, and let him head home.
“Fucking bingo,” Sandovan said.
47
Sunday morning. The early edition landed on the front porch of Warren Shelburne’s Cape Cod style home and skidded to a halt on the welcome mat. The kids were sleeping in, as was Mrs. Shelburne, who felt she had earned a few extra Zs by organizing a very successful fundraising dinner for a children’s charity the night before.
Mr. Shelburne laced up his custom-fitted $285 trainers and strapped on his hydration belt. His MP3 player was fastened to his right arm, and he’d created a special two-hour playlist for his final weeks of training. He locked the door behind him and walked down the front steps to the sidewalk. He paused at the end of his walkway to look around. Not surprising, he thought. Just me up and at ‘em at this hour. All the other slackers in the neighborhood were taking it easy. He flicked his music on and started his route.
It took a mile to get into a good groove. He was starting to get a decent sheen of perspiration, but it would be another mile before he’d take the first hit of the specially-formulated water that would replenish his body over the course of the next two hours.
He turned onto a pathway leading to a wooded section of the route. The Rolling Stones were just starting “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” when his legs suddenly stopped working and he pitched forward into some junipers. Two sets of gloved hands grabbed him by the elbows, and a black hood was pulled over his head. Before he knew it he was in the back of a truck, which slowly pulled away from the curb.
Twenty minutes elapsed. For a business executive who had been hit with a stun gun and whose senses were no doubt screaming for some kind of coherent input, Hector thought the man was being reasonably calm. Perhaps the Colonel had underestimated him and they would need to take more drastic measures.
They arrived at a destination and drove the van around the back. Shelburne felt his legs slowly returning as the men hoisted him without effort, but he still couldn’t support himself. They took him through a doorway and inside. The place smelled of oil and stale pine air fresheners. When he was forced into a chair and the hood was removed, he saw why. It was a deserted gas station.
He couldn’t see any distinguishing features of the four men in the room with him. They were dressed in black, with partial balaclavas over their faces and sunglasses obscuring their eyes. One sat on a chair in front of him. Another stood behind him, holding his shoulders until he regained his motor abilities sufficiently to support his body. The other two were watching out the front windows of the station.
Only the man in front of him spoke. Slight accent. Calm. But obviously with an agenda.
“Mr. Shelburne, I apologize for the theatrics. You have some intelligence that I require. If you answer the questions I have for you, we will return you to your run and no one will know anything about this episode. Especially your boss, Mr. Otis Gaverill.”
At the mention of Otis’s name, Shelburne’s gut clenched. Shit! He always knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he might suffer some recriminations for his financial sleight-of-hand. But he’d anticipated it would be at the hands of the IRS, not people like this.
As a financial whiz, Warren Shelburne was detail oriented. In the thirty seconds that his hood had been off he had noticed he was in the clutches of serious men. The two lookouts were armed. The man in front of him had some sort of combat knife strapped to his calf. While Shelburne thought of himself as physically fit, he could tell by the grip of the hands on his shoulders and the carriage of the men in front of him that any one of them could snap his neck without breaking a sweat.
Warren was not a hero.
“What is it you think I can tell you?”
Even though the balaclava obscured his mouth, Warren could discern a smile on the seated man’s face. “We know that Verdant Florists and Greenhouses launders money for an even larger illicit drug-growing operation. We know that this operation yields large amounts of cash. We know that you have skillfully kept this money out of the government’s sight. What we do not know is where all the cash is channeled.”
Warren’s eyes got wide. His pulse increased to a point that it normally only reached on mile fifteen of his run. He weighed his options.
The Colonel, sensing the hesitation, gave him a prod. “Mr. Shelburne, listen to me. You have…” he looked at his watch, “approximately ninety minutes until you are due to return home. Nobody needs to know you told us this information. The physical stress you are under will be disguised by the effects of your run. If you don’t tell us what you know, we will kill you and find someone else who knows. I see no reason why your children should grow up without you. Tell me where the cash is processed.”
Warren’s brain was going far faster than his legs ever had. There was certain death here, whereas Otis might not ever find out he had talked. These men were giving him a chance. Having processed all the data, he made a decision.
He talked.
Diego’s digital recorder captured every word. Then they told Shelburne to relax. He would get his bearings and know exactly where he was the moment he went outside. It wasn’t so far from his home that he couldn’t get home in the appropriate time frame.
Then it was just a matter of keeping his mouth shut, the Colonel said. “Because if you talk, your boss will see to it that heads will roll. And judging from his reputation, that will not be a figure of speech.”
As the van sped away from the gas station Hector watched out the back window. “No sign of him. He didn’t try to get our license plate or a vehicle description. He is probably just getting his legs back.”
He rejoined the others at the front of the van. Luis turned to the Colonel. “Do you think Mr. Shelburne will do as you say, Commandante?”
“Yes, Luis. Unlike Terence, who felt like he had to seek revenge, I believe Mr. Shelburne will go back to his life and pretend nothing ever happened. He may be unprincipled, but I could tell he is intelligent. Now, let us plan our assault on Otis Gaverill’s cash counting operation. Our ship is almost ready to leave the port of Salento, and I cannot stall the captain more than a few days if we need a delay.”
48
After checking out the Swiss camera company on the Internet, Mitchell and Sandovan went to Captain Ramsey with the new information they’d gotten from Harvie Widdicomb. Ramsey closed the door. “So this guy says that there’s only one fucking camera like this in Salento, and it’s being used by some dumb fuckers who are doing their own sadistic version of ‘Wild Kingdom’? What the fuck is the matter with these people?”
“Well said Cap,” Mitchell said.
Sandovan looked at the notes he’d made in the interview with Widdicomb. “The guy says that the majority of the cameras would’ve gone to LA but a few probably went to Bollywood. He’d also wager that a select few top documentary film makers might’ve been given the chance to take one for a spin.”
“Damn. So did you call the camera company and find out who in Salento might have one?”
Mitchell glanced at Sandovan. “We did. Talked to a guy named Emil Lautens. He’s their head of R&D. But he wouldn’t give us the time of day. He said the camera was still under w
raps, and they wouldn’t discuss who had one and who didn’t.”
Ramsey looked at his watch. “Switzerland’s what, six hours ahead of us? This guy should be just about ready to head out for a beer. The Swiss probably call it ‘Müeller Time.’ Gimme his number.”
Sandovan tore the page from his notepad and gave it to Ramsey. The captain punched the numbers on his phone like he was stabbing a suspect in the sternum. After talking with the receptionist, he was put through to Emil Lautens.
Ramsey put his feet up on his desk. Mitchell and Sandovan braced themselves for the shit storm. “Herr Lautens, my name is Captain Miles Ramsey. I’m with the police in the city of Salento in the United States. Yes, I know you’ve already talked to one of my men. Oh, he mentioned you were less than cooperative. Proper channels? Hmm. Well, here’s the deal. I don’t give a flying fuck about proper channels, embassy parties, or trade delegations. We’re investigating an attempted murder, and when dipshits like you get in the way my first impulse is to hop a quick flight to Zurich and kick your neutral Swiss ass into gear. But I don’t have the time or the frequent fucking flyer miles. So here’s what you’re going to do. I’m about to pass the phone to one of my detectives. You tell him who has one of your fucking cameras here in our city. If you don’t, I know a chief inspector at Interpol who works out of Geneva. His name is Anders Acklin, but his nickname is The Badger. I’m going to send The Badger to have a talk with you. He might decide you’re obstructing justice and toss you in a holding cell with some biker who wants to play ‘hide the Toblerone.’ Or he might decide to audit your fucking tax returns for the past decade. You just never know with The Badger.”
There was a pause.
Ramsey took his feet off his desk. “Well that’s mighty nice of you. Here’s Detective Sandovan.”
Ramsey passed the phone to Sandovan, then put his feet back up on the desk. Mitchell looked at him, unable to conceal his admiration. “So Cap, how is it you happen to know a chief inspector at Interpol?”
Captain Ramsey gave Mitchell a pained expression. “I don’t know anyone at fucking Interpol.”
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