The Night Stalker

Fifty-Eight

Hunter had spent the rest of the night on the computer discovering who Whitney Myers really was.

In the morning, after a strong cup of black coffee, he made his way back to Culver City and Kelly Jensen’s studio. The blinking red light he’d seen last night from her window was a wireless CCTV camera, hidden away in an alcove in the wall. The camera was pointing straight at the small parking lot. There were no computers in Kelly’s studio, so the camera couldn’t have belonged to her.

At 6:00 a.m. only one of the shops that shared the car parking lot with Kelly’s studio was open — Mr. Wang’s convenience store. Hunter’s luck was in; the wireless camera belonged to the elderly bird-like Chinese man.

Mr. Wang’s wrinkled face and observant eyes only hinted at how much he’d lived, what he’d seen and the tremendous knowledge he’d accumulated over so many years.

He told Hunter that he’d asked his son, Fang Li, to install the camera at the back after his old Ford pickup truck was broken into one too many times.

Hunter asked him how far back he kept the recordings.

‘Year,’ Mr. Wang replied with a wide smile that seemed to never fade.

Hunter’s face lit up in surprise. ‘You have recordings going back a year?’

‘Yes. Every minute.’ His voice was like a whisper, but the words came out quickly, as if he was about to run out of time for what he wanted to say. His pronunciation was perfect, indicating that he’d been in America for many years, but the sentences were staccato. ‘Fang Li too smart. Good with computers. He make program that box files. Twelve months — files delete automatic. Don’t need do nothing.’

Hunter bobbed his head. ‘Clever. Can I have a look at them?’

Mr. Wang’s eyes narrowed to such a thin line, Hunter thought he’d closed them. ‘You wanna see in store’s computer?’

A quick nod. ‘Yes. I’d like to see the footage from a few weeks ago.’

Mr. Wang bowed and his smile spread even wider. ‘OK, no problem, but me no good. Need talk to Fang Li. He not here. I call.’ Mr. Wang reached for the phone behind the counter. He spoke Mandarin. The conversation didn’t last longer than a few seconds. ‘Fang Li coming,’ he said, putting the phone down. ‘Be here very fast. Not live far.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Not go to work yet. Too early.’

Hunter asked Mr. Wang about Kelly Jensen. He said that she came into the shop almost every day when she was around, but sometimes she’d disappear for weeks. He liked Kelly very much. He said she was very polite, always happy and very beautiful.

‘In my country, whole village be asking her to marry.’

Hunter smiled and looked around the shop while he waited. He bought a cup of microwavable coffee and a packet of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky. A few minutes later Fang Li arrived. He was in his late twenties, with longish black hair that shined like in a shampoo commercial. His features were striking, a replica of what his father must have looked like when he was younger, but much taller and well built. He quickly spoke to his father before turning and offering his hand to Hunter.

‘I’m Fang Li, but everybody calls me Li.’

Hunter introduced himself and told him the purpose of his visit.

‘OK, come with me and I’ll show you.’ Li guided Hunter through a back door that led into a large, well-organized storage room. The entire place carried a sweet and pleasant smell, a combination of exotic spices, condiments, soaps, fruit and unburned incense. At the far end of it, up a set of wooden stairs was the shop’s office. Hundreds of Chinese calendars hung from the walls — Hunter had never seen so many. It was like they used them as wallpaper. Apart from the calendars there were several old, metal filing cabinets, a wooden shelf rack, a water cooler and a large desk with a computer monitor on it. Chinese characters danced across the screen.

Li chuckled as he read them.

‘What does that mean?’ Hunter asked.

‘Be yourself. There’s no one better suited for the job.’

Hunter smiled. ‘Very true.’

‘My father likes this kinda thing. Proverbs and all, you know. But he prefers to create his own, so I programed a little screen saver for him. It reads from a list of his own wise sayings.’

‘So is that what you do? Computer programing?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Your father said that you could store as much as a whole year’s worth of footage.’

‘That’s right. My father’s pretty much obsessed with organization.’ He pointed out the window at the storage room. ‘Nothing’s ever out of place with him.’

Hunter nodded.

‘He’s also big on security. We’ve got five cameras filming twenty-four hours a day. One picking up the front door, one facing the parking lot out back, and three inside the shop. There’s no way we could archive that much data without having a ridiculous amount of hard drive space or compressing the hell out of the footage. So I created a small program that automatically compresses the files that are over three days old and then archives them into external high-capacity hard drives.’ Li rolled his chair back and pointed at four small black boxes under the desk. ‘At the end of twelve months, those files auto-delete to create more space.’ He paused and faced Hunter. ‘So what do you need, Detective?’

Hunter wrote something down on a piece of paper and placed it on the desk in front of Li. ‘I need a copy of all the footage you have between those dates.’

Li looked at the paper. ‘An entire week’s worth? From all five cameras?’

‘Maybe, but let’s start with the footage from the one in the parking lot.’

Li coughed. ‘That’s one hundred and sixty-eight hours of footage. Even compressed that’ll take. .’ his eyes narrowed and his lips moved without a sound for a second, ‘. . around thirty DVDs. Maybe a few more. When do you need them for?’

‘Yesterday.’

Li’s face paled. He checked his watch. ‘Even if I had a professional multi-DVD copier, which I don’t, it’d still take most of the day.’

Hunter thought about it for a beat. ‘Wait a second. You said that older files are stored in those external hard drives, right?’ He pointed at the black boxes. ‘Will the files from those dates be in one of them?’

Li quickly picked up on what Hunter was suggesting and his lips spread into a smile. ‘They will be, yes. Very good idea. You could take the whole hard drive. There’s nothing in them but archived CCTV footage. Nothing that my father would need, anyway. You can link the drive to any computer, easy. It will save you tons of time, but you’ll still have to uncompress the files on your side.’

‘We can do that.’

Li nodded. ‘Let me show you how to find them.’