by Mark Hall
THREE
I gave the bag back to Jeff and ran after Chris. He had run to the end of the hallway and right through the exit door and up the stairs to the second floor before I finally got to him. The way he took off made me draw my gun out of instinct or habit or scared to death. This end of the building was the least burned; many of the rooms on this side were fairly intact. He was looking through the glass in the door leading into the second floor hallway and put a hand up to stop me when he heard me coming. He turned to look at me and saw my gun.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What are YOU doing, running off like that” I asked.
Jeff got to us. “Have any of your men been upstairs?” Chris asked.
“No, didn’t see any need in it – there’s nothing up here. What is going on?”
Chris pointed through the class and I leaned in to look.
“Somebody is hunting” I said. There was another chair in the corner of the end of the hallway facing the doorway like the chair downstairs at the elevator. Tied or strapped to the back of the chair was another trail camera.
Chris walked on through the door and to the chair and camera. He undid the straps on the camera and held it up by those as if he knew we would dust the camera and not the strap. There have been several times that he has known a process or what to do or not do at a crime scene and it always makes me wonder what his past life might have been. I was almost sure he had been around crime scene detection or something area like that. He had too much intuition about what people might do in certain situations. I took the trail camera and undid the back of the device where I knew the SD card was.
“These things work on motion detection. As soon as there’s motion in front of the eye here, it takes a picture and puts it on this chip. If it is dark enough, it will even flash”.
I held up the SD card and flipped the camera back over to view the front.
“Bushnell HD camera, too. Over a hundred bucks and this one doesn’t use flash but instead uses night vision. This SD card will hold 32 gigs of pictures on it I think. The good news is that it will fit most cameras including the ones the techs are using downstairs”.
Jeff turned to Chris. “Now I see what Turnbow got so excited about down in Perry. How did you know this was here?”
“I expected it to be there. The other end of the building made it completely impossible to get to the second floor. The elevators don’t work and the only way to that floor was up those stairs and through that door. If someone is going to go to the expense of buying a camera, then running the risk of coming into this building, then putting that camera downstairs to catch someone moving down the hallway, then it wouldn’t be a large step to think they’d have a second camera looking into the second floor hallway. That first camera would catch anyone coming down the main hallway but if they came in through the broken window at the end then up these stairs, this one would get them. A second camera tells us that Dean had a strong idea someone would come into the hotel but didn’t know when or where specifically. This also tells us how Mr. Dean got his bump on the head”.
By now we had walked back to the downstairs hallway and the original crime scene.
Jeff turned to Chris, “how’s do you know from the camera that it was his and then how he got assaulted?” he asked.
“The only way for a man of his height to strap or unstrap or get the card out of one of these cameras is for him to get on one knee”. Chris pointed to a slight indention in the old carpet right in front of the back of the chair. Chris guided me down to one knee and my right knee went right into the indention. He then stood behind me and took a swing in the same motion that would have knocked out most people.
Chris continued, “But that wasn’t the end of it. This Mr. Dean is pretty tough and did not go down with a one punch knockout. He got to his feet somehow and wound up in the hallway over there a good fifteen feet from here”.
“There’s more proof of that!” Jeff exclaimed. “What I was going to tell you before Frito brought up the camera was that Dean had a note in his hand when we found him. A note that doesn’t make complete sense but he must have grabbed at the other guy while they were wrestling around and came away with it”.
“What did it say?” I asked.
Jeff looked at his notes. “I am sure I don’t understand all of it. It said ‘23 piscina’ and below that was edificios gemelos”.
Chris looked like he had seen a ghost. “Piscina? Are you absolutely sure it said piscina?”
“Yes, the Spanish word for swimming pool. Piscina. Below that was the Spanish words for ‘twin buildings’.
“And you guys checked out the pool area?” Chris asked.
“Still are. What we found was one of the wall tiles at the bottom where it meets the floor was knocked out. The pool room is attached but on the outside of the main structure of the hotel and those walls were standard studs and sheetrock, not concrete”.
“I bet it was the 23rd tile from the door, wasn’t it?” Chris asked while walking us into the pool room. The room still had a chemical smell even though the two feet of pool water was dark green and nasty looking.
“Sure was” Jeff grinned. “That much we know”.