Under Suspicion
Page 21
“Jesus Christ.” It was the first time Tebbins had said such a thing—swearing—in her presence, and it conveyed his reaction more adequately than a hundred other words might have.
But Anna didn’t want to think about being a human sacrifice. The very notion sickened her and terrified her with its enormity. She couldn’t afford to start thinking about that or she’d wind up a gibbering idiot.
“I’m worried about Gil,” she said again. “He’s been gone way too long.”
Wiggins saw it happen. He saw the impossibly huge cat suddenly leap toward Gil, he saw Gil take an instinctive step back. But not far enough.
Gil heard an almost inaudible scrape against wood crating and spun around, gun leveled. What he saw was a huge cat leaping toward him. It was the biggest damn cat he’d ever seen outside a zoo, ginger in color, with large green eyes. Feral eyes. A second too late, he recognized the terror in them.
As he jumped back, a crate crashed onto him.
Wiggins leapt up from the console, but not before he saw a flash of something else moving. He couldn’t make out what it was. It disappeared behind another box too quickly.
Grabbing his radio, he called the campus police for backup. Then he abandoned his post, stopping just long enough to lock the door behind him.
Running past the corridor where the equipment room was, he called out, “Trouble at the loading dock! Cop’s been hurt.” Then he forced himself to speed up, and wished he were fifteen years younger and thirty pounds lighter.
* * *
Tebbins heard the guard’s shout. So did all of them. He scanned the startled faces. “You all stay here. Lock the door behind me.”
Dinah nodded, but Anna started to follow him as he hurried out of the room.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said sharply. “You can’t help.”
She nodded and fell back, but he saw the worry and fear in her eyes.
On his way to Shipping, Tebbins radioed for backup. In five minutes the place would be crawling with cops. None too soon. He drew his gun. It didn’t make him feel any safer.
He reached the doors of Shipping almost at the same instant as the guard. Wiggins was winded.
“Damn, I’m outta shape,” Wiggins gasped.
“Too much time at a desk,” Tebbins said. But the words came out on autopilot. He was thinking about what lay behind those doors, and whether Wiggins would be a help or a hindrance. “What happened?”
“Hell, I don’t know. This giant cat leapt out of nowhere at your cop friend, then a huge packing crate fell on him.” He paused. “And I think I saw something else moving in there.”
Tebbins’s mind began to construct scenarios, rapid-fire, one after the other. They all ended at the same place. Gil was hurt, maybe seriously, and if the bad guy was in there, he’d probably use the opportunity to kill Garcia.
“We’re going in,” Tebbins said. “Unholster your weapon.”
Then, hardly were the words out of his mouth when he heard the sound of a huge metal door being raised. A garage door, by the sound of it. Damn!
“Don’t fire unless you’re sure what you’re shooting at,” he told the guard as he reached for the door and began shoving it open. “Now!”
Gil lay under the packing box, face up, his skin pricked by splinters. The fall had knocked the wind from him, but not for long. The fingers of his right hand still clutched his gun.
Except for minute twitches here and there to test for major injuries, he didn’t move. He tried not to breathe, partly so an assailant wouldn’t hear him, partly so that he could hear any approach.
There was nothing. He thought he might have heard the padding of paws, but he wasn’t sure. He certainly didn’t hear any panicked footsteps. What was going on?
Finally, he moved a little, testing to see if he could knock the crate off himself, but found it was too heavy. Lying as he was, he couldn’t get the leverage.
He felt about as exposed and helpless as a fly on flypaper.
Then he heard a loud click, and the sound of the loading door rolling up. A few moments later, another click, the door paused, then began moving again. With a thud, it hit the concrete.
At that instant, another door opened.
“Garcia!” Tebbins shouted.
“I’m okay, but I can’t move. I think the guy just slipped out the loading door.”
“I’m on it. Stay here, Wiggins. See if you can get that crate off him.”
“You got it.”
Gil heard Tebbins’s remarkably light feet racing across the floor.
“Hey, is this the cat?” Tebbins asked.
Then the loading-dock door started rolling again, and Tebbins’s footsteps faded away.
The crate moved. Splinters scraped at Gil’s face and his left hand. “Watch it,” he said. “I like my skin where it is.”
“Sorry, guy. This thing is damn heavy. You sure you don’t have any broken bones?”
Gil heard the sound of approaching sirens; backup was arriving. “I don’t think so.”
“Then maybe we should just wait until the cavalry gets here. Can you breathe okay?”
“Well enough.”
“Then we wait,” Wiggins said firmly. “It’s gonna take more than one old guy with a bad back to get this off of you without turning you into mincemeat.”
“Hey, I like mincemeat pie.”
Wiggins gave a chuckle. “Not if you’re an ingredient.”
This is humiliating, Gil thought. Trapped under a crate, unable to be out there with Tebbins hunting for whoever had shoved it down on him. All because a damn cat had startled him. A big cat, unquestionably. But still a cat.
Wiggins spoke, interrupting Gil’s self-disgust. “The cat I saw on the monitor was bigger than that tom over there. A lot bigger. Like a panther.”
Gil rolled a few frames back in his mind and remembered that insane instant when he’d seen the cat leap toward him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was all stretched out. Probably looked bigger that way.”
Their discussion ended as the backups began pouring through the door. A minute later, six cops had lifted the crate off Gil without doing any further damage.
Five minutes later, Tebbins returned. “You look great,” he told Garcia. “Sort of like a human pincushion.”
“Did you spot him?”
Tebbins shook his head. “I didn’t see a soul out there. This area of the campus is dead right now, but the university police are still searching. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Tebbins pointed to a large ginger cat that was lying on the floor next to what was probably the garage door control. “There’s your cat.”
Gil looked at it. “I guess so.”
“I’m telling you,” said Wiggins, “it ain’t the same damn cat. The one I saw was a lot bigger.” He spread his arms to indicate the size.
At that moment, the cat reached out a lazy paw and punched the button on the door control. At once the thing began clanging its way down again.
Gil started to laugh. “All that uproar over a damn cat.”
Moments later everyone else was laughing with him. All except Wiggins.
Wiggins returned to his post, muttering about strange doings and how he was damned if he was ever going to work there alone again.
Gil and Tebbins pretty much ignored him. Neither one of them believed the cat had knocked the crate over; it was too heavy. The question was how someone could have gotten into the room without triggering the motion detectors. They assumed he’d left by way of the garage door when it opened.
“Same problem times two,” Tebbins remarked. “I can hardly wait to meet our perp.”
“Me too. But for different reasons.”
They found a normal-sized door behind boxes on one side of the bay. The arrangement of boxes created a narrow path to it, and there was an opening large enough to accommodate someone trying to open the door. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that there was no motion detector on the do
or.
For good reason. It opened into what appeared to be a blind hallway with several offices, a unisex rest room, and a fire door. Anybody trying to go out that way would trigger the door alarm.
Back in the middle of the room, they stood looking around.
“It must be hard to rely on motion detectors in this room,” Gil remarked. “Too much stuff stacked around. So the detectors must all be limited to the doorways.”
“It appears so,” Tebbins agreed. “And what’s this cat doing in here? You’d think people would notice it on the cameras, or that it would trip the alarms occasionally.”
“You’d think.”
But the answer to that might have been that the cat wasn’t supposed to be in the shipping bay. There was a litter box, food, and water in one of the offices.
“So how did it get in here?” Tebbins wondered.
“Someone else came in here, and the cat came in with him.”
“Obviously. But that leaves the question of how our guy got into those offices without tripping the detectors on the door.”
“Do you feel like we’re going in circles?”
“Absolutely. Same problem, once again. If we figure out how this guy is evading the motion detectors, we’ll have it made.”
“If I were you,” Gil said, keeping in mind that he was there on sufferance, “I think I’d have the guard turn on the detectors back here right now. Then we see if we can trip them.”
“Good idea.” Tebbins pulled out his radio and called an officer at the security booth. “Mellors, have the guard in the booth turn on the motion detectors in shipping and receiving again. We’re going to see if they work. Let everybody know the alarm is going off.”
He hung the radio back on his belt. “Okay. Let’s hope it works.”
“Actually, I’m hoping they don’t work. We might discover his method before he can cover it up again.”
“Well, that’s what I meant.” Tebbins shook his head. “Give me more credit, Garcia. My brain is not one of my shortcomings.”
“Did I ever say it was? Besides, I’m the guy who’s tangled with this jerk twice already. That’s egg on my face, not blood.”
Tebbins used two fingers to smooth his moustache. “I wouldn’t say that. But you definitely need to get those splinters removed.”
“I will. Later.”
Tebbins’s radio crackled, and a voice told him the motion detectors were on. Tebbins waved his hand grandly. “You first.”
Gil headed for the double doors leading into the corridor, but before he reached them, one of them opened and Anna burst into the room.
“Are you okay, Gil?” she demanded. Then, before he could answer, she turned to Tebbins. “Don’t ever leave me locked up like that without information again. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.”
Tebbins looked at Gil. Gil looked at Tebbins. They didn’t respond to her.
“I don’t hear an alarm,” Gil said.
“Nor I.”
“Now why do you suppose that is?”
“Oh, if I were feeling grandiose today, it might occur to me that it has something to do with our perp.”
“What are you talking about?” Anna demanded.
Gil spoke. “Let’s check the loading door.”
“Absolutely.” Tebbins passed the happy-looking feline on his way, and said, “Open the door, cat.”
Much to his and Gil’s amazement, the cat pawed at the button, and the door began to rise. Tebbins froze.
“He’s trained,” Anna said impatiently. “The supervisor taught him the trick. He’s been doing it almost since I started here.”
“My, my,” said Tebbins and continued to the door. “Shouldn’t an alarm have gone off when the door opened?”
“We’ll have to ask Dinah Hudson,” Gil said. “I’d’ve thought so.”
Tebbins stepped out onto the dock, then back into the bay. “Nothing.”
“Very interesting,” Gil remarked. “Maybe we should check the exhibits, too. But first…”
Tebbins nodded. “We don’t leave this room unprotected until we get Hudson and her band of merry men down here to check this out.”
Anna spoke. “What in the world is going on? And you have to get those splinters out of your face, Gil. They could get infected.”
He turned to her and gingerly smiled. “They can wait a little while. Meanwhile, the motion detectors are on. Did you hear any alarms?”
Her face paled a little, and her eyes widened. “You mean this place is unprotected? My God, we’ve got a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of artifacts in here from the sunken galleon.”
“But nothing from the Maya exhibit?”
“No, of course not. That’s all in the exhibit….” Her voice trailed off. “Oh, my God, what if the alarms aren’t working there?”
She spun on her heel and nearly ran from the room.
“Methinks we lit a fire,” Gil remarked. “But she shouldn’t be running around in here alone.”
“Go after her,” Tebbins said. “I can wait for Hudson and the henchmen.”
Gil paused long enough to arch an inquisitive brow at him. “Do I hear a change of heart?”
“A small shift. A very small shift. She was, after all, with me when the crate attacked you.”
“She was also with her sister when I chased the dweeb all over Temple Terrace. Keep that in mind.”
“I keep everything in mind,” Tebbins said pleasantly, twisting his moustache. “Everything. You’d do well to do the same.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dweeb. The watcher didn’t much like being called that, but he supposed it was better than creep. He had more important things on his mind anyway.
He’d screwed up twice, and his life was going to be considerably more difficult. Especially after this foul-up. At least after the first one, when Garcia had chased him through Temple Terrace, the cops hadn’t been certain that he wasn’t just a routine prowler. But this time… this time they’d figured out too much.
And it was his own fault; he knew it. He wasn’t one to lay blame elsewhere. When he’d heard the rumor that the cops and security techs would be in today to check for back doors, he’d decided he needed to be there, too. He needed to know just what they were thinking and how close they were to uncovering his methods. Instead of learning, he’d handed them a plum.
And all because he’d had to dismantle the shipping-bay motion detectors so he could hide out without being disturbed by the guards, who sometimes had a penchant for opening all the locked offices and checking them out.
He wasn’t a killer. He didn’t want to kill any more guards. Eddy Malacek had died only because there was no way around it. Not only had he needed to make sure that Eddy didn’t remember anything about that night, he’d also needed to point the finger as far away from himself as he could. Killing Eddy made it look possible that the guard had been involved in the theft, and Eddy wouldn’t be around to deny it.
But he didn’t want to kill some rent-a-cop who happened to open the wrong office door during the night. So the previous afternoon, he’d slipped into the security equipment room and typed a code into the security program. Characters he’d learned by looking over the shoulder of one of the technicians while they were testing the system.
There had been glitches at the beginning; there always were, the techie had told him. So they had a hidden function that allowed them to disconnect any part of the system while it was still operating. They had to be able to test the functioning system without setting off alarms.
The watcher had made good use of that knowledge, along with the code keys he’d picked up by looking over the tech’s shoulder.
But now they were bound to discover how he’d done it. He’d been able to cover his tracks last time, but not this time. And he feared that would bring them closer to him.
God, he’d messed up. Hanging around trying to hear what the security-systems people were up to had only resulted in nearly being caught. But how could
he have known that Garcia would get it in his head to come to the loading bay? He must have seen the damn cat on the monitor.
As a result, he’d been forced to move swiftly through the halls, just ahead of his pursuer. He’d thought he would be safe in the bay because everyone thought the motion detectors were on.
Big mistake. And if he didn’t figure out something soon, it might prove to be his last mistake.
Gil caught up with Anna as she reached the lobby. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said courteously, “but where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to check the exhibits. What if something else has been stolen?”
People were beginning to enter the lobby in noticeable numbers, lining up at the ticket windows. Four additional guards were in evidence, and cops were still hanging around here and there.
“Let’s go then. But first let me make sure the alarms are off.”
Wiggins, who was still grumbling to himself, told Gil that he’d shut off all the motion detectors. The damn place was getting as busy as Grand Central, according to him.
“Okay,” Gil told Anna. “Let’s check it out.”
They headed for the Pocal exhibit.
Turk and Boomer exchanged looks as a Tampa cop told them they needed to go to the loading dock and why.
“Jeeeeeez,” Turk said.
“You screwed up, man,” Boomer said, shaking his head.
“Like hell I did. You and your magic men screwed up.” “Boys,” Dinah said warningly. “Boomer, let’s check it out.”
Gil and Anna passed through the Pocal exhibit in record time. Apparently Anna simply wanted to make sure nothing was missing. She didn’t say much, but her face was tight.
They boarded the staff elevator for the second story, and Gil spoke. “I’d almost bet there’s nothing gone. This guy isn’t after anything else, or he’d have taken it the first night. And nobody else knows the system was down.”