“What do you want to do now?”
“We call the geeks, that’s what we do.” MacNeice reached inside his jacket and took out his cellphone.
“Put this back, boss?” Aziz had closed the album and was leaning against the credenza.
“No, not just yet. I’d like to take some shots of the boyfriend in the mirror and start asking questions.”
“I’ll go through the rest of the drawers to check if there’s anything else.”
“I think we’ve found the Rosetta Stone, but yes, keep looking.”
He walked over to the credenza, opened the album again and smoothed it flat, then shot several close-ups of the boyfriend in the mirror before putting his camera down to call Forensics. Aziz heard him say, “No, we’re not going to wait. There’s a uniformed officer downstairs—Scales. Check in with him. Aziz and I will be in the security room reviewing the digital files from several cameras. Yes, digital, but only a week’s worth.…”
MacNeice hung up, remembered to turn his camera off and tuck it back in his pocket, then looked down again at the photograph.
“Do you think he could have done that to her?” Aziz was putting the sweaters back on the shelf.
MacNeice said, “I don’t think so. That young man is an artist, and it’s not that artists don’t occasionally kill their lovers … but I couldn’t see him doing it that way.” He moved aside some of the sweaters and put the album back where he’d found it, then removed his latex gloves.
Riding down in the elevator, Aziz said, “Do we tell the father about this?”
“Not just yet.” MacNeice stared up at the floor numbers as the elevator descended.
“Why would a woman with such talent pose like that?”
“Love.” MacNeice was still looking at the numbers and she couldn’t tell whether he was being serious.
“I don’t buy that. Well, not completely.”
“A mixture then, of love and lust and trust, and maybe a sense of knowing …”
“Knowing what, exactly?”
“That she wouldn’t always look like that, that maybe this was her last shot at rebellion, her first time choosing another persona, and another person to love other than her father.” MacNeice glanced over at her as the doors opened.
As they walked across the lobby to the security room, he said, “So, no desktop or laptop in the apartment—just that silver unit next to the desk and dozens of CDs.”
“But there was a jack beside the desk.”
“So who’s got her computer? And why?”
FOURTEEN
—
VERTESI HAD FOUND A DIFFERENT WAY to spend his day off, which he rationalized by also qualifying it as police work. It’s a funny thing about screened porches, especially the ones that surround old cottages. You can’t see a damn thing till you’re standing there rapping on the door like a travelling salesman.
“Hi, can I help you?” An older woman in a summer dress opened the door, and Vertesi had to step down to let it swing past. Beyond her the inner door to the cottage was wide open, and to the left he could see an older man asleep on a wicker triple-seater, a newspaper on his lap. There was a glass on the floor next to a pair of sandals.
“Yes, I hope you can. My name is Detective Inspector Michael Vertesi and I’m investigating a crime that was committed around the point from your cottage. I’d like to ask you some questions. Is this a good time?” He glanced towards the sleeper, who hadn’t moved.
“Oh, yes, I think so. We’ve heard about it, of course—a real tragedy.” She was nodding her head from side to side, the way some people do when what they’re saying calls for up and down.
“It is. Very tragic. May I come in?” He already had control of the door and was beginning to step up.
“Oh, certainly, but you know, Detective—”
“Vertesi. It’s Italian.” He showed her his badge and smiled—charmingly, he hoped.
“Vertesi. Yes, well, I was going to say that we—well, not I, but my husband”—she glanced over to the wicker sofa—“we told a young man named … Palmer, I think it was … everything we—well, my husband, that is—knew.” Again it was a misdirection of sorts, since she was already leading him into the cottage.
“This is more of a follow-up, Mrs.…”
“Ingram, Louise Ingram. But please call me Lou; everyone out here does … but not when we’re back in the city—do you find that strange? I always have.”
The room was huge, with a wooden staircase to the left that led to a balcony surrounding the open space on three sides. At one end, a stone fireplace he could have stood in was full of wild flowers in several pots and tin cans.
“This is a beautiful place, Lou, really beautiful.” He realized he was twirling around slowly the way kids do watching the stars at night, and stopped. The light from the lake danced like diamonds through the windows, and offshore he could see roughly where Book’s Boat had taken him. There were people down on the dock. He turned back to Mrs. Ingram. “Shall we sit here?” He motioned to an old leather couch with a cat curled up sleeping on a flat pillow near the arm.
“Oh no. It’s a pretty day in June; we should sit on the porch lakeside. Would you like a lemonade, or perhaps a beer?”
“A lemonade would be great. Can I help?”
“Don’t be silly, Detective Vertesi. We make gallons of lemonade up here every day, and by noon it’s all gone.” She smiled and swung easily towards the kitchen door on the far side of the fireplace.
After half an hour on the lakeside porch, Vertesi had asked Mrs. Ingram all the questions he could think of, and no one had come up from the dock. He closed his notebook and was about to stand up when at last a young woman came running up from the lake. Slapping the screen door open, she said, “Oh, hi. Sorry—be back in a minute,” and rushed past them into the cottage. A few minutes later, as Vertesi was standing, notebook in hand, looking out at the lake, she was back. “Sorry, I had to pee,” she announced.
“Oh, God, Rachel,” Mrs. Ingram said. “Detective Vertesi, this is my youngest, Rachel Ingram.” She left the porch to go inside.
“Sweet, isn’t she? I’m twenty-five and I can still embarrass my mom.”
“Not just your mom.” Vertesi held out his hand but pulled it back just before hers touched his. “Did you wash your hands, Rachel?”
He could hear her mother laugh, and after a moment’s hesitation, Rachel did too.
“I see,” she said. “A comic cop. Well, I guess you’re here about the murder.” She was wearing a turquoise bikini very much like the yellow one he’d seen her in the day before. Perhaps she bought them by the dozen.
“I am. Do you know the people who own the cottage?” He’d already learned that no one knew Dr. Michael Hadley.
“Ah, actually no. But I do know Book’s boat, and I think I waved to you yesterday sitting in the back of it. Am I right, Detective?” She was smiling at him.
“Well, yeah.”
“Look, everyone up here waves! I was doing what cottagers do—we wave to passing boats.” She stifled a laugh and looked out at the lake. “Did you think it was something else?”
“I’m Italian.” He was feeling awkward, but enjoying it.
“Right, like I’m supposed to know what that means.”
“It means, Miss—Rachel—that I saw a beautiful girl—sorry, woman—and I thought to myself, God, I’d love to meet that woman. And yeah, I hoped that you could see me sitting there in Book’s boat, all uncomfortable because I’m not from around here, and that you saw me looking back at you. I was trying to say something to you, like ‘I want to walk along the beach or out on the lane and have you tell me what it is that’s so special about this place.’ That’s what I meant, I think. I come from a long line of Sicilian explorers.”
“And flirts. Did you practise that?”
“No. Did it work? … I mean, I’m serious—I’m not a saputo.” He put his hand on his heart and then, realizing how that might look to her, dropped
it quickly, but not quickly enough.
“Wow, you’re good. Hand on heart … No, Detective, I don’t think you’re a saputo. By the way, what the hell is a saputo?”
“Well, he’d be the opposite of me.”
She looked him over and said, “I’ll go change. You’re making me look bad in your suit and all.”
As he waited, Vertesi picked up an old copy of National Geographic and flipped idly through its pages. When he came to several spreads of South American insects in full colour, he put it back on the table next to a mosquito candle that looked as if it had been there for years. All around the wick were dead insects partly submerged in the yellow wax.
Rachel returned in a white cotton tank top and a pair of blue shorts like the ones he used to wear in gym class with the stripes down both sides. “Where do you want to go, Detective Vertesi—for a boat ride?”
“No. To tell you the truth, it made me nauseous yesterday. Let’s just walk.”
She laughed. “But I thought you were an Italian explorer.”
“Yeah, well. I guess we explored Europe, maybe Sweden … or Russia.”
“Come on, we’ll take the beach road down to the point.” She nodded in the general direction of the spit of land beyond which, somewhere in the distance, was a cottage surrounded by yellow police tape.
JESSE WILSON, THE SENIOR security manager, was a pale, slim man in his mid-thirties. Easily manoeuvring the joystick, he controlled the speed of the video so that people walked back and forth like Keystone Kops. Each time he came to Lydia he slowed it down to normal speed.
It took just over three hours to review a week’s worth of digital video from the drive-by, the lobby, the elevators and the sixteenth-floor cameras. Flickering images of people going and coming, unloading groceries, carrying lapdogs, holding hands, pausing to pick up mail or stealing kisses in front of the elevators—aware or unaware that they were being captured on camera. Daily footage of Lydia Petrescu breezing out, violin over her shoulder, carrying a black backpack, and returning in the evening with her violin case and the same black backpack.
Under his breath MacNeice said, “We’ll find the laptop and the entire digital age in that backpack.”
“Sir?” Aziz said.
“The backpack. She was into portability; I bet she used a laptop for music class, emails, everything. With the possible exception of the trip to the beach house, she probably never went anywhere without it.”
On two occasions—one on the previous Tuesday at 8:10 p.m. and the other on Wednesday morning at 9:42 a.m.—Lydia came in with the tall, bushy-haired young man. MacNeice marked the dates and times in his notebook. “Where did he go afterwards?”
Wilson looked up at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“Where did he go? He came in—he must have come out. Why aren’t we seeing him come out? She comes out two hours later in her gown, but he’s not with her.”
“Maybe we missed it.” Wilson pushed the joystick in the opposite direction and everyone rushed comically backwards, but they couldn’t spot the young man leaving the building.
“Do you recall ever seeing him in the lobby?”
“Not me. There are 450 units in this complex. We have a two-man team on day shift, and that means I’m either here in the office scanning the screens or I’m out there shaking hands or opening doors. At night we have just one concierge, and that would be Ted Zazulak. He might have spoken to them. The concierge desk has three screens—one for the drive-by, one for the front doors and the third for the ground-floor elevators—but they all feed through to this room, where we have rotating views of the elevators on each floor. If he breezed on past Zaz, he didn’t mention anything in the logbook.”
“Is there another way out of the building that isn’t covered by your cameras?”
“Yeah, the back exit out of the underground parking. If you took the elevator to the parking level and came out that exit, you’d avoid all of the cameras—except for the one that caught you going into the elevator.” He smiled as if that made the system foolproof.
“Is there a camera that covers the stairwell?” MacNeice asked.
“The stairwell?” Wilson looked up at the wall of screens.
“Yes, I noticed that the camera that covers the elevator is facing away from the exit stairwell.”
“Well, yeah, but nobody takes the stairs here. We’ve got four super-fast elevators.” Wilson was still looking at the wall as if the strategic placement of the video surveillance cameras was obvious.
MacNeice stepped up to the console and pointed to the screen for the sixteenth-floor elevator camera. “This camera will catch anyone coming out of either elevator, but it’s pointed away from the direction of Lydia Petrescu’s flat. So if you were someone who didn’t want to be seen, wouldn’t you just go down the stairs to the parking level and out the exit to the street?”
“That could happen, I guess.” Wilson went back to the joystick and pulled it towards him. The images whirred forward.
“Stop the camera.” MacNeice had seen something he’d been looking for, something that didn’t look like anything else. “Go slowly now … stop again.” The image froze with a diagonal shiver of static lines. Two men were coming through the door. Both wore black leather jackets that hung straight to just below the waist. “Who are these two? Are they residents?”
“No way they live here. Maybe they’re delivery guys.”
“Not likely, since they’re empty-handed. Okay, line up all the other cameras to this time frame. I want especially to see the drive-by and the sixteenth-floor elevator footage. And when you get them together, let them play in real time.”
It took several minutes, but to his credit, Wilson didn’t fume or fuss about it. Finally he said, “Okay, here we go. I’m giving it to you in real time, left to right—left being the drive-by.” He pushed a button on the console and sat back to watch the screens.
A black Range Rover pulled slowly into the drive-by and stopped at the far edge so that only the wheels and lower body were visible. After several seconds a figure got out of the front passenger seat, closed the door and waited. It was just possible to see the bottom of his black leather jacket. He was wearing jeans and what looked like black hiking boots. In a moment another figure walked into the frame from the right, presumably the driver, and as the two passed under the camera, one glanced up directly into the lens. He smiled briefly. Both wore sunglasses and had short-cropped fair hair.
The next screen showed them coming through the lobby door, where they would have had to use a resident’s key fob or punch in a code. They did neither. The one who’d looked up at the drive-by camera turned around and looked up again. His body was shielding the taller man, the driver. In a moment they were both through the door.
“How’d they do that?” Wilson said, suddenly sitting up. He reached for the joystick.
“Let it run,” MacNeice said.
At the elevators, both kept their heads down to avoid the more direct stare of the camera. The doors opened and they walked quickly inside.
“Why aren’t there cameras in the elevators?” Aziz asked.
“There are, but when the building opened, the residents’ association asked that they be turned off to avoid invasion of privacy. I don’t know what they get up to in the elevators that’s so private, but they were deactivated in the first six months of operation.”
The two men appeared briefly on the sixteenth floor. They turned left, in the direction of the Petrescu apartment. Again Wilson moved to stop play.
“Let it run,” MacNeice said again.
“Sir, look at the drive-by.” Aziz was looking three screens to the left.
The rear door of the Range Rover opened and someone stepped out. He stood by the vehicle, walked slowly forward, kicked the front tire as if checking the air pressure, and walked back. He leaned against the side of the Rover.
“He’s havin’ a smoke,” Wilson said quietly.
“I think you’re right. N
otice anything else?” MacNeice said.
“Uh … well, no. But I’m a smoker and I can spot the walk—that dumb wandering to kill time while you’re havin’ a butt.”
“Black trousers with a very tight crease. His shoes, even with this feed, look as if they’ve been shined by a professional, and so far as I can tell, he’s not wearing a leather jacket. His suit looks expensive.”
“Wow, that’s impressive.” Wilson really did seem impressed, and he rocked back for a moment in his chair.
On the far monitor the two men appeared at the bottom of the screen. As the second elevator opened they walked up-frame and into it, and for a moment it was possible to see both of them clearly.
“I make the lapsed time between exiting and returning to the elevator roughly five and a half minutes,” Aziz said.
“Big boys. They look like cops to me,” Wilson said.
“They’re not cops,” MacNeice said flatly.
“How can you tell for sure?” Wilson watched as the two exited the elevators and came into view of the lobby camera.
“Well, for one, cops don’t drive Range Rovers with guys with sharp creases sitting in the back seat. But there’s something else about them.”
“What’s that, sir?” Aziz wanted to see what MacNeice was seeing.
“They don’t walk like we do. It looks military, but it’s not a North American military walk. I’m sure of it.”
The two men left the building and joined Shiny Shoes next to the vehicle. A butt descended from the top of the frame, falling parallel to the creases. When it hit the pavement, one of the shoes ground the life out of it. They all got into the Rover and disappeared slowly from the screen.
“Told you he was a smoker.” Wilson smiled.
“We’ll review all of this footage again to see if these boys show up anywhere else, but we can have our people do it. What’s the resolution?”
“Probably in the eight megapixel range, like a still camera. This system is the best I’ve ever worked with—you could make a billboard out of this stuff. Okay if I give it to you on a DVD?”
“That’ll be fine. How long will it take to download it?” MacNeice checked his watch—10:58 a.m.
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