With a little bit of luck, if the camera was operational, and the field of vision included the Channing house–or the area to the right or left–they might have something. Byrne felt his pulse quicken as he held open the door for Maria Caruso and stepped inside.
The shop was long and narrow, with five nail stations on the right. There were two customers; one getting a manicure, one a pedicure. Both customers were women were in their thirties. A six-year-old girl sat at a vacant station, fully engrossed in an iPad.
‘Welcome to Nail Island.’
The woman was coming out of the back room, carrying a plastic tray of various polishes. She was African American, in her late thirties, very slender. She wore a hot-pink smock with the store’s logo, white jeans, white sandals. All of her nails, top to bottom, were painted a soft yellow.
‘My name is Alvita Francis,’ she said. ‘How may I be of assistance?’ She had a slight Caribbean accent.
Maria produced her ID. ‘My name is Detective Caruso. This is Detective Byrne. I believe we spoke on the phone the other day?’
‘Yes, of course. About the SafeCam.’
‘Yes.’
Alvita reached out a hand to Maria, palm up. ‘May I?’
Maria extended her right hand. Her nails were short. She wore no polish.
‘You have very pretty nails,’ Alvita said.
‘Thank you.’
‘You must be getting your B12.’
‘Greek yogurt is my life.’
‘I can make them look better,’ Alvita said.
‘You can?’
‘Lord, yes. Beautiful nails are my life.’
Long nails were not just an inconvenience for a female police officer, they were a potential hazard. Although there was no departmental policy regarding long nails, it was frowned upon, and almost always ruled out before the fact. Anything that might hinder or prevent you from drawing your service weapon was a bad idea.
Alvita glanced at Byrne. ‘I’m not liking those nails at all.’
Byrne looked at his hands. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘You ever get a manicure?’ she asked.
‘It’s on my bucket list.’
She reached over to the counter, pulled out two cards, handed them to Byrne and Maria. ‘Ten percent discount to PPD.’ She pointed to the woman at the third of three stations. ‘Mika could take you now if you like.’
‘Maybe some other time,’ Byrne said. ‘But thanks.’ He pocketed the card, pointed to the area above the front door, where the exterior camera was located.
‘May I ask why you have a camera?’ he said.
Both sculpted eyebrows went up. ‘You from Philly?’
‘Born and bred,’ Byrne said.
‘And you still ask people that question?’
‘Fair enough,’ Byrne said.
‘On the phone you said that you record to a DVR,’ Maria said. ‘Did I get that right?’
‘You did.’
‘Is that activated by a motion sensor, or is it on all the time?’
‘It’s on all the time,’ Alvita said. ‘When we’re closed, that is. Sometimes I just turn it off to save the hard disk space during business hours.’ She pointed to the camera on the wall opposite the register. ‘That one’s on twenty-four-seven. I keep the cash drawer empty and open and lighted when we’re closed, but you never know. They’re not criminals because they’re smart.’
‘And you’re saying you had the camera on and were recording on the night I asked you about?’ Maria asked.
‘Yes, ma’am. I closed up around eight o’clock that night, set the alarm and put the cameras on. Went to Cape May for the weekend.’
‘May we take a look at the footage?’
‘By all means.’
Alvita led them to the rear of the shop. On the way, the little girl looked up from her iPad, waved at Byrne.
The back room was piled high with boxes, hair dryers, stools and carts, manicure tables, plastic chairs, shampoo bowls. Somewhere in all this was a cluttered desk with a 21-inch iMac.
‘Please excuse all this,’ Alvita said. ‘I’ve been meaning to sort this from the time Whappy killed Phillup.’
Byrne and Maria exchanged a glance. Byrne figured that she meant a very long time. He didn’t ask who Whappy and Phillup were.
‘I took the liberty of cueing up the recording to about an hour before the time you said you were interested in,’ Alvita said.
‘We appreciate it,’ Maria said. She pointed at the chair. ‘May I?’
‘Please do,’ Alvita said.
Maria Caruso was part of the younger generation of detectives who had a deep understanding and interest in all things digital and high-tech. Byrne had come to it all on the slope of a nearly vertical learning curve.
‘I will leave you to your business,’ Alvita said. ‘Call me if you need anything.’
She pushed through the beads, and stepped back into the salon.
Maria sat at the desk, took the mouse in hand. She navigated to the period just preceding the medical examiner’s estimate of Edwin Channing’s time of death. She hit play. The screen revealed the area beneath the Nail Island entrance, along with the cars and sidewalks on the other side of the street. The Channing house was out of frame to the left.
On the upper right-hand side of the screen was visible the vacant lot to the right of the Channing house and, in the distance, a small portion of the next street over.
Cars passed. A few pedestrians crossed the frame. A man walking his dogs. No one seemed to be paying much attention to Edwin Channing’s residence.
At 11.25, a vehicle crossed the frame, right to left, on the far side of the street. It was a large late-model SUV, dark blue or black. As it moved out of frame, the vehicle came to a halt, the field illuminated by the brake lights. It appeared to have stopped just in front of the Channing house. Only a portion of the rear bumper was visible.
For the next two minutes it did not move. No one crossed the camera’s field of vision on foot.
At 11.28, the brake lights flared again, and then disappeared in darkness. The only lights now were the street lights.
At 11.30, a dark SUV rolled to a stop at the very top of the frame on the right, parking on the next street over, just on the other side of the vacant lot.
‘It looks like the same vehicle,’ Maria said.
‘Yes, it does,’ Byrne replied.
A minute later, the driver door opened and two ghostlike shadows moved from the SUV, across the vacant lot, in the direction of the Channing house. The time code said 11.32. The two detectives watched the recording wordlessly, as the occasional car passed in the foreground. Maria put the recording on double speed.
At 12.16, the two shadows returned. The SUV started, and the headlights cut through the gloom with an ethereal yellow glow.
‘Can we run that back?’ Byrne asked.
Maria grabbed the scrubber bar, moved it slightly left. A few seconds later, the two shadows again crossed the vacant lot, approached the car.
‘Stop it there for a second.’
Maria hit pause. Byrne knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking.
Were these the men they were looking for?
Were these two cold-blooded killers?
‘Could you ask Alvita if there is any way we can get a hard copy of this?’ Byrne asked.
‘Sure.’
While Maria walked into the salon, Byrne sat at the desk. He took out his phone, snapped a picture of the screen, looked at the photo. It was grainy, but not significantly worse than what was on the recording.
He rewound the recording. He paused it at the moment the SUV passed by the store. There was a good deal of motion blur, and the darkened windows prevented him seeing into the vehicle, but one thing was discernible. The left-rear fender was dented.
Maria stepped into the back room.
‘Alvita said there might be a way to do it, but her only printer is up front.’
‘That’s okay,�
� Byrne said. ‘With her permission, let’s get someone from the AV unit out here to make a copy of this footage, bracketing it by thirty minutes either side.’
‘You got it.’
While Maria Caruso headed back to the Roundhouse, Byrne spent the next hour canvassing the neighborhood with the blurry photograph of the old woman he’d gotten via email from Anne-Marie Beaudry. No one recognized her.
The night before, he had sent the photo by email to Perry Kershaw, who said not only did he not recognize the woman, but he now wasn’t sure he’d actually seen her. Byrne put the so-called lead in a mental compartment he used for coincidence, and moved on.
He spent the next few hours walking around the blocks that surrounded the Channing scene. Using Edwin Channing’s house as ground zero, he made ever-widening concentric circles, looking for exterior surveillance cameras.
Just because a homeowner or commercial establishment had surveillance cameras didn’t mean they were available or willing to sign up for the SafeCam project. Far from it. It was only common sense to realize that people had at least as much to hide as they were willing to share. Probably far more.
In all, Byrne counted nine cameras within a four-block radius, cameras that were not signed up to SafeCam. He stopped at all the locations. Four were residences, with no answer at the door. One turned out to be a dummy camera. Three of the business cameras did not have any recording devices hooked up.
At two o’clock, he found one that did.
Four blocks east of Nail Island was a small convenience grocery called Sadik Food King. It was run by a Turkish couple named Joe and Fatma Sadik.
When Byrne walked in, he was greeted by a symphony of aromas, not the least of which was from a brass samovar of strong black coffee. He was also greeted by Joe Sadik. Sadik was in his late forties, a wiry, neat man with a firm handshake and a ready smile. He wore a cream-colored dress shirt and a cocoa bow tie.
Byrne explained what he was looking for, without giving any details on the circumstances. He also gave Joe Sadik the time frame.
Unlike the setup at Nail Island, the Sadiks–having been robbed many times–had invested in high-quality cameras, and subscribed to a cloud service that stored their surveillance recordings off site.
They met in an office in the back of the store.
‘Why did you decide on this service?’ Byrne asked.
Sadik became animated. He spoke with expressive eyes and hands. ‘Twice we get robbed, and they took not only the tape machine, but the cameras themselves.’ He pointed at the ceiling above the heavily fortified back door. There was a smoked glass dome there. ‘Now it’s a little harder to spot, and definitely harder to steal. And if they do steal the camera, they won’t get the video.’
At this, Joe’s wife Fatma, a petite woman dressed in a burgundy pantsuit, came into the room with an orange tray. On it was a pair of small cups of steaming black coffee.
‘Thank you,’ Byrne said. He sipped the coffee. It was strong and flavorful.
On the screen, the surveillance video lurched forward. Cars passed, people passed, the sun cast long shadows, then set altogether. As the image glowed beneath the street lamps, a familiar vehicle crossed the frame.
‘Wait,’ Byrne said. ‘Can we go back?’
Joe Sadik hit pause. He backed up the recording.
As the recording inched forward, cars passed in starts and fits. At the 9.55 mark, a black SUV entered from the left side of the frame, stopped at the corner. A black SUV with a dented left-rear fender. The license plate was not visible in the frame, but the badge was. It was a GMC Acadia. Byrne called it in.
When he’d completed the call, he turned back to Joe Sadik.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s let it play.’
Sadik hit play. On screen, the vehicle pulled up across the street, parked in front of the U-Cash-It store. A few seconds later, the driver and passenger got out. Without prompting, Joe Sadik hit pause.
Although the light level was low, and the vantage was a high angle and across four lanes, Byrne could see that the occupants of the SUV were white males, late twenties to mid-thirties. They both wore black leather jackets. The passenger had long hair, nearly to his shoulders. The driver, who sported wraparound sunglasses, had close-cropped hair. Both wore what looked to be fingerless black gloves.
‘Okay?’ Sadik asked.
‘Okay,’ Byrne said.
Sadik hit play.
Onscreen, the one with the longer hair held open the door of the U-Cash-It, and the driver walked in. The second man followed.
‘Is there any way to print this out?’
Sadik was on his feet in a flash. ‘We have this technology.’
The U-Cash-It store was a renovated and fortified brick row house, next to a phone and pager store. Renovated was prob ably the wrong word. The first floor was gutted, dry-walled and painted. That was it. There was a counter that spanned the width of the space, a U-Cash-It sign on the far wall–a garish red and yellow, with a fist holding bright green cash, and a lightning bolt forming the center of the U–but nothing else except for a small two-way mirror, and a pair of cameras in the far corners.
Byrne had never been in a more stark and uninviting commercial establishment.
Then again, if you found yourself needing to cash checks at these rates, you weren’t here to socialize.
If the interior was uninviting, the man standing behind the counter was even more so. In his late twenties, he stood maybe six-two, two-forty. Shaved head, a pair of iron loops in his right ear, two of the most intricate sleeve tattoos Byrne had ever seen. Not to mention a gaudy neck tattoo. Apparently his arms and neck were where his sense of color and composition lay, such as it was.
‘How you doing?’ the man asked, with little interest in the answer.
‘Never better.’
‘You a cop?’
Byrne took a moment. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘What do you think?’
Byrne needed a little bit of help from this man, so he decided to let the attitude roll, for now. He moved on, pulled his ID.
‘Homicide?’
‘That’s right,’ Byrne said.
‘I haven’t killed anybody.’
‘Didn’t say you had.’
The man continued to try and stare him down. From the look of the tattoos, the posturing, the permanent scowl, it was clear that this was not the man’s first encounter with a law enforcement officer. That also told Byrne that this was a family business. If this guy was a convicted felon, no one was going to hire him to handle their cash, except Mom and Dad.
Eventually the man glanced away, over Byrne’s shoulder, at some imaginary customer who hadn’t just walked in.
‘I didn’t get your name,’ Byrne said.
The man took a deep breath, flaring his nostrils.
‘Dennis.’
Byrne made an elaborate gesture of taking out his notepad, flipping a few pages, clicking his pen.
‘Just Dennis? Like Cher, or Madonna?’
Another flare. ‘LoConti.’
‘Great to meet you,’ Byrne said. He put down his notebook and pen. He leaned back a bit. Just two guys talking.
‘I see you’ve got two surveillance cameras at the back of the store.’
Dennis turned around and looked, as if he didn’t know they were there. He turned back.
‘What about them?’
‘Have they ever come in handy?’
‘Not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean, have you ever had a problem where you had to identify someone who had come into your establishment via these surveillance devices?’
Byrne knew that Dennis knew that if there had ever been a burglary or robbery reported at this address, the PPD would have all the details. He could lie, but there would be no point if he wanted to get this cop out of his store and his life.
‘A couple of times,’ he said.
‘Awesome,’ Byrne said. ‘Money well spent.’ He pointed to the entry
door. ‘I notice that you don’t have a camera outside.’
‘No.’
‘May I ask why?’
A slight smile came across Dennis’s face, quickly receded. ‘Because it never gets that far.’
As he said this, Byrne saw the man’s right hand move, almost imperceptibly, back towards his body, stopping just a few inches from the edge of the worn countertop. He wondered what kind of persuader the man had under the counter. Not his business at the moment. Maybe soon, but not right now.
‘Understood,’ he said. ‘This might explain why you’re not part of the city’s SafeCam project.’
‘The what?’
Byrne gave him a brief rundown. About ten words in, he saw the man glaze. ‘I can have some literature sent out if you like.’
‘Yeah. Okay. Sure.’
‘I’ll make a note. But let me get down to business. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’
The man’s face said: Finally.
‘I need to ask you about two of your customers.’
‘Which customers would they be?’
‘I don’t know their names,’ Byrne said. ‘That’s kind of why I’m here.’
Nothing. Byrne moved on. He picked up his notebook, flipped a page.
‘These two gentlemen paid you a visit the day before yesterday. At about 9.55 p.m.’
‘About 9.55?’ Dennis asked. ‘Sounds exact to me.’
‘Actually it was 9:55:31. Didn’t want to burden you with the extra details. Were you working that night?’
‘I was here.’
‘Then you might remember them.’
Dennis rubbed a hand over his chin. ‘We get a lot of people in here.’
Byrne slowly looked around the room. They were the only two people, and had been since he had walked in. U-Cash-It was not booming. When he looked back, he saw he’d made his point.
‘So, these two guys were white, thirties, kind of street-looking. One had longer hair, black leather jacket, fingerless gloves. They drive a black Acadia.’
Dennis pretended to think. ‘Not ringing a bell.’
Byrne nodded, held the look for a few moments. He again pointed to the front door. ‘I was just talking with the folks who run that small grocery on the corner.’
Shutter Man Page 12