Bloodless

40

Wellstone sat, nursing a club soda and lime, at a window table in the bar of the newly opened Telfair Square Hotel. It was almost ten o’clock, and the bar was in the quiet period between the stampede of dinner-hour drinkers and the late-night revelers still to come. He, of course, was not staying here — his own suite was in the Marriott Riverfront — but this bar was a most convenient place to keep an eye on his target, directly across State Street.

The Ye Sleepe was a quirky hotel that cultivated a kind of seedy bohemian chic. It was clearly the latest of several generations of commercial lodging: the pentimento of a red-crowned Best Western logo could still be seen faintly, beneath the façade’s paint job, and the hotel’s external marquee looked suspiciously like the “Great Sign” of vintage Holiday Inns.

The waiter came up to his table. “Anything else, sir? Perhaps something with a little higher octane?”

“I’ll stick to club soda, thanks.” He’d put booze — especially red wine — off-limits for the time being.

He sat, gazing across the street while the waiter brought him a fresh drink. When he’d heard that Barclay Betts and his entourage were staying at the Ye Sleepe, his primary feeling had been one of disdain. Couldn’t the cheap bastard afford to put his people up on the waterfront? But sitting here across the street from the hotel, he could see method in Betts’s madness. The rooms — so the waiter had informed him — were old and very large, and the place catered to thirsty, horny young travelers on a budget. That meant Betts could afford a lot of room to spread out his entourage, and his donkey-like braying and yelling was not likely to elicit complaints from the management.

It had another advantage — for Wellstone, at least. Its on-site parking lot, currently being resurfaced, was barricaded off and unlighted. It took up the rest of the block on the building’s western flank, and it was naturally deserted. That side of the hotel was where Betts had booked a block of rooms, all on the first floor.

And Gerhard Moller’s room was the fifth window in from the street.

It had taken only a little research and surveillance for Wellstone to learn this. The layout was better than he’d hoped — in fact, it made what had initially seemed like a somewhat far-fetched scheme into something very workable. Very workable indeed.

He’d suffered nothing but setbacks in his progress to unmask Barclay Betts, most recently Daisy Fayette’s eviction from the graveyard shooting set. The feral cunning he sensed beneath the southern belle’s veneer had, ultimately, failed him. And now, thanks to his graveyard shenanigans, Betts was working with an even higher profile. Under normal circumstances, Wellstone would have returned to Boston and not bothered with this hack. But he could still practically feel the warm crème anglaise dribbling down his back as Betts laughed. And ironically, it was Daisy’s humiliation — which he’d heard about in querulous detail — that had given him an idea that might turn everything around.

As part of her breathless litany of injustices done by Betts & Co., Daisy described how Moller had taken photos with that special camera of his and then distributed them, via Bluetooth, to the crowd of reporters and rubberneckers. After leaving Daisy’s house with vague promises of retribution, Wellstone had immediately gone to the tourist ghetto along Bay Street, where most of the reporters were staying, and managed to get his hands on copies of Moller’s photos. There were three of them, with normal-enough subjects: a CSI worker, a tomb with a marble angel, another broken tombstone. But each one was also overlaid with a sinister apparition, indistinct but disturbing nonetheless — an outstretched bony hand; a huge, sinister face; and a wispy-haired skull and claw emerging from the earth.

Those were the words — overlaid, indistinct — that convinced Wellstone he knew what Moller was up to. It was obvious these were real photographs, taken in real time; after all, the “doctor” couldn’t have known in advance precisely what he’d be photographing in the cemetery. That meant there had to be some apparatus within the camera to create, in effect, a digital double exposure.

That had to be it. The camera Moller was so protective of contained a mechanism for manipulating the photos it took by overlaying on them the ghostly images. This, Wellstone speculated, could only be done if the camera already held a large set of supernatural images — previously created by Moller. All he’d have to do was take a “real” photo, then use whatever he’d retrofitted into the camera to add an appropriate overlay from his stock of sinister images, ready and waiting. Wellstone guessed he’d use the viewfinder to frame his double exposure in the most believable way — then, with the click of a button, he’d take a photo and some algorithm in the camera would blend the two layers into a final image — to be passed on to the credulous dupes.

But what exactly was the mechanism? Was there an SSD flash drive inside the camera, preloaded with fake ghostly images, ready to overlay? That was almost certainly the case. If Wellstone could snag that drive with its store of fake pictures, he could show Moller as the fraud he was — with Betts complicit in the whole scheme.

This meant getting his hands on the camera. And the way he planned to do that could technically be considered breaking and entering. But Wellstone brushed this aside. This could go under the heading of true investigative reporting — on the level of the Pentagon Papers or Deep Throat.

Just then, Wellstone saw movement at Ye Sleepe’s main entrance. A burly-looking man — the same Cro-Magnon bastard who had pushed him away from Betts in the restaurant — came out onto the street. He was followed by the scruffy-looking young man Wellstone knew was Betts’s researcher. These two were followed in quick succession by the attractive DP; Betts himself, the fartbiter — and then, Deo gratias, Moller. Wellstone noticed the charlatan was not carrying his case.

That meant he must have left it in his room. Exactly as Wellstone hoped.

A few more people joined the entourage; they milled around outside the lobby for a minute or two, then set off down State Street toward Barnard.

Now he rose, fresh club soda untouched; dropped a twenty on the table; and moved quickly out into the lobby and onto the street. As usual, he hadn’t anticipated the heat and humidity, which wrapped him like a soggy Hudson Bay blanket. There weren’t many streetlights here, especially on the far side where the parking lot was broken up and being repaved, and Wellstone could just make out Betts’s group as they turned onto Barnard and disappeared.

Still moving quickly, yet careful not to arouse curiosity or suspicion, he crossed the street. He’d planned this down to the last detail — but that didn’t mean he could afford to dawdle.

He walked along the façade of Ye Sleepe, ducking past the construction barricades at the far end and turning into the parking lot. It quickly grew even darker. He paused to make sure nobody was around and no security cameras were aimed his way. Except for some paving equipment, he was alone and essentially invisible in the darkness.

Hurrying along, he counted the windows until he reached Moller’s room. He tried peering in, but the curtains were tightly closed. Reaching into a pocket, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Then he pressed his fingers against the window, feeling appraisingly along its lower edge.

It didn’t open from the outside. No surprise there. But — thank God — it wasn’t one of those sealed portholes one found in modern hotels that made you feel you were inside a fish tank. Reaching into his pocket, Wellstone pulled out a narrow-bladed chisel and a rubber mallet. Inserting the chisel into the gap between the window and the sill, he tapped quietly with the mallet — once, twice, three times — until the steel end of the chisel was seated firmly in the narrow channel. Then, grasping the end of the chisel, he pushed up, gently at first and then with increasing force. If he could possibly avoid it, he didn’t want to break the glass — that would mean switching to the less appealing plan B, in which he’d have to overturn things and make it appear an aborted robbery. But luck remained with him: the window was unlocked and the sash slid up easily and noiselessly.

He raised the window about two feet, then turned and once more made a careful reconnoiter. He was in complete darkness, and in any case the closest person he could see was in a car waiting at a streetlight two blocks away. Quickly, hand on the sash, he hoisted one leg over, then the other, slipping between the curtains and letting them close again behind him. No point in shutting the window: he didn’t plan to be here long.

He took out a flashlight and, using its low beam, looked around the room. With a rush of adrenaline, he saw Moller’s unmistakable equipment case, closed and sitting on the floor at the end of the bed. Now there was no doubt: he was in the right room. Daisy’s images had shown that the case was zippered and latched. Moving quickly to the door, he examined its locks. In addition to the usual hotel doorknob, it had both a chain and a hinged privacy bolt. He couldn’t secure the chain — that would be a dead giveaway — but he could swing the small latch halfway across the jamb, which would buy him extra time while not arousing suspicion. This probably wouldn’t be necessary, but Wellstone wasn’t the kind to take chances.

Now he returned to the suitcase at the end of the bed. Leaving his flashlight on and placing it on a side table, he took out his phone and snapped several shots of Moller’s case from different angles. Would it be locked? He lifted it and placed it gently on the foot of the bed. It was surprisingly heavy. He unzipped it and tried the latches, and they snapped open — unlocked! He took a brief video of its contents, plucking out one item after another and turning it this way and that for the camera. He’d seen a lot of this stuff already, thanks to Daisy, but up close the items appeared a lot more fake, especially the silver wand, which felt as light as aluminum, and the smoked glass, distressed to look like obsidian.

There it was: the camera. It was snugged into its padding in a far corner of the case. Wellstone lifted it up and, still wearing gloves, took great care when placing it on the duvet cover. This was what made the case so heavy, and this was what he’d come for: the instrument of his vengeance.

He repositioned his flashlight, then carefully felt around the edges of the device. It looked like an old Hasselblad 50 °C box camera, except it was larger and covered with a wooden inlay. The standard controls for focusing and exposure were visible, but there was also a row of unlabeled buttons. A small metal box had been retrofitted to the antique upper lid, most likely the Bluetooth apparatus Daisy had told him of.

But enough gawking: time to figure out just how Moller worked his scam. Wellstone slid his fingers around the flanks of the camera, trying to figure out how it opened while being careful to leave no signs of tampering. Damn, it was like a Chinese puzzle box... and then, suddenly, he heard a click and the lid sprang open. He must have accidentally pressed a hidden detent. His luck was still holding.

Now, adjusting the flashlight once again, he carefully opened the lid. The interior was even more complicated than he’d expected: a couple of circuit boards, what looked like RAM chips, and a microprocessor, in addition to the guts of a 6×6 camera. But he searched in vain for the hard disk or SSD drive he knew must be somewhere inside. In his coat pocket, he had a disk cloner that could create a bit-for-bit image in ten minutes, as well as a two-terabyte flash stick. But he couldn’t copy the disk if he couldn’t find the damn thing.

Muttering a curse, he picked up his flashlight and bent over the device, peering more closely. No hard disk or SSD array for storage...

It was then that Wellstone noticed, hidden under a ribbon cable, a line of identical black chips, each the size of a thumbnail and thin as a communion wafer. They had tiny labels, which bore equally tiny printing in German. What the hell were these?

He looked at some of the labels. GEISTER. HEXEN. DÄMONEN. SKELETTE.

In an epiphany, Wellstone understood. Those small, identical chips were nonvolatile memory cards, such as one would find in a home security camera. And each held phony digital images. Wellstone knew enough German to translate the handwritten labels. Geister — ghosts. Hexen — witches. Dämonen — demons. Skelette — skeletons. That bastard would snap a photograph, and then — by manipulating this camera — choose a fake from his miniature gallery to superimpose over the final. It confirmed what he thought.

There was no hard disk in the camera, after all — but this was even better. He could take one or two of the chips — he’d snag the ones at the far end — and Moller probably wouldn’t even notice for a while. No need for any time-consuming copying. Pushing the ribbon cable to one side, he fished his fingers into the device, preparing to pluck out the last two chips in the array.

But it wasn’t as easy as he expected. The entire row of chips was held in place by a steel rod that lay across their upper edges and snapped into place on the camera’s inner body. It should be a simple matter of lifting this retaining rod and removing the chips. But the rod seemed stuck in place, and he couldn’t see what was—

All of a sudden, he heard voices in the hallway outside the door.

Wellstone felt his heart freeze over as he recognized Betts’s argumentative voice. “Couldn’t it wait?”

“I don’t wish to leave it unattended.” This was Moller’s voice.

Wellstone crouched over the bed, paralyzed by surprise and dismay. What should he do?

“Hurry up!” Betts shouted petulantly, not caring if he disturbed the entire wing of the hotel.

“Eine Minute!” Moller called back irritably. Then, in a lower voice: “Die dumme Ames geben mir keine Ruhe.”

The voice was now directly outside the door. Wellstone yanked at the retaining rod, first gently, then violently. It wouldn’t give.

He heard the click of a lock disengaging, heard a rattling sound as the latch he’d partially set kept the door of the room from opening. Wellstone realized he had no choice. He couldn’t take the entire camera. He didn’t dare break it apart. Quickly, he reached for his phone, took a series of burst shots of the camera’s interior.

More rattling at the door. “Dieser verfluchte Schlüsseloch!” came the mutter from just outside.

Moving like lightning, Wellstone put the camera back into its foam nest; closed, latched, and zipped the case; placed it back on the floor; smoothed the end of the bed; put his phone in his pocket; made sure his tools — flashlight, mallet, chisel, drive cloner, and USB stick — were all accounted for; then walked backward until he felt the window curtains brush against him, all the while keeping an eye on the door.

“Gerhard!” he heard Betts call in an impatient travesty of a German accent. “Move your schweinehund ass!”

“Halt deine Fresse!” Moller snapped in response as he gave the door a mighty shove. This time, the privacy latch slipped out of position and the door flew open. But even as it did so, the window beyond the curtains was silently closing. And by the time Moller had snapped on the light, Wellstone was jogging through the darkened parking lot, away from State Street and heading for Broughton. Only he wasn’t as silent as he’d been when approaching Moller’s room. Now he was repeating something under his breath as he ran:

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit...