Two Graves

23

LIEUTENANT D’AGOSTA SAT, SLUMPED FORWARD, IN VIDEO Lab C on the nineteenth floor of One Police Plaza. He’d left the scene of the third murder just an hour before, and he felt like he’d gone fifteen rounds with a prizefighter.

D’Agosta turned to the man working the video equipment, a skinny dweeb named Hong. “Fifteenth-floor feed. Back sixty seconds.”

Hong worked the keyboard, and the black-and-white image on the central monitor changed, going backward rapidly in reverse motion.

As he watched the screen, D’Agosta mentally went over how the crime had gone down. The killer had forced his way into the room—once again, based on the Royal Cheshire security tapes, he’d seemed to know just when the door was going to open—and dragged the unfortunate woman into the bedroom of the hotel suite. He’d killed her, then proceeded with his ghastly work. The whole thing took fewer than ten minutes.

But then the woman’s husband had returned to the suite. The killer had hidden in the bathroom. The man discovered the body of his wife, and his frantic cries were overheard by a hotel security officer, who entered the suite, saw the body, and called the police. The killer escaped in the resulting confusion. All this had been corroborated by the security tapes, as well as by the evidence found in the suite and by the statements of the husband and the detective.

It seemed straightforward enough. But the devil—the really weird shit, actually—was in the details. How, for example, did the killer know to hide in the bathroom? If he’d been disturbed in his bedroom work by the click of the front door lock, there was no way he could have made it to the bathroom in time without being seen by the husband. He must have hidden himself before the key card was swiped through the lock. He must have been alerted by some other cue.

Pretty damn clear the guy had an accomplice. But where?

“Start it right there,” D’Agosta told Hong.

He watched the corridor video for perhaps the tenth time as the husband entered the suite. Five seconds later, the front door opened again and the killer—wearing a fedora and a trench coat—stepped out. But then—against all logic—he ducked back inside the room a second time. A few moments later, the hotel dick rounded a corner and came into view.

“Stop it for a moment,” D’Agosta said.

The problem was, there was no accomplice in the hall to see the guy come. The hall was empty.

“Start it up again,” he said.

He watched morosely as the hotel detective disappeared into the room, alerted by the husband’s shouts. Almost immediately the killer stepped out again and headed for the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button, waited a minute, and then—as if changing his mind—walked the rest of the way down the hall, exiting through the stairwell door.

Moments later, the elevator doors opened and three men in suits stepped out.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said. “Let’s see the feed from the thirteenth floor. Begin at the same time index.”

“Sure thing, Loo,” said Hong.

They had already reviewed the tapes of the fourteenth floor—at that particular moment there had been several cleaning ladies at work, their carts blocking the corridor. Now D’Agosta watched as the killer emerged from the stairwell onto the thirteenth floor. He strode over to the elevator bank, pressed the DOWN button again, and waited. He let one elevator go by, then pressed the button again. This time, when the doors opened, he stepped inside.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said.

He had been through this again and again. Where was the accomplice? In several instances, there was nobody around to observe, and in other situations, where there were people who might be spotting, he could find no physical matches between them. Nobody could turn himself from an old, stooped gentleman of eighty into a fat Dominican cleaning lady in fifteen seconds. Unless the killer had half a dozen accomplices.

This was seriously, seriously weird.

“Lobby camera,” D’Agosta muttered. “Same time index.”

The image on the monitor jittered, then came into focus again, showing a bird’s-eye view of the hotel’s discreet and elegant lobby. The elevator doors opened, and the killer emerged—alone. He began to walk toward the main exit, then seemed to reconsider, turned, and sat down in a chair, hiding his face behind a newspaper. Seven seconds later a uniformed man—hotel security—went running past. Immediately afterward the killer got up, and—instead of heading for the main exit again—made for an unmarked door leading to the service areas. Just before he reached it, the door opened and a porter emerged. The killer slipped in as the door was closing again—he hadn’t even needed to extend an arm.

D’Agosta watched as the form was obscured by the closing door. Other cameras had shown him going out an exit in the hotel’s loading zone. Repeated viewings of the lobby and other video feeds again showed no sign of a possible partner in the murders.

Hong stopped the video of his own accord. “Anything else you’d like to see?”

“Yeah. Got any Three Stooges reruns?” And D’Agosta pushed himself wearily to his feet, feeling even older than when he’d first come in.

But as he was leaving, he was suddenly struck by an idea. The accomplice didn’t need to be in all those places. If he had access to the live video feeds, he would have seen everything D’Agosta had. And could have warned the killer accordingly. So he was either someone in the security department itself, or someone who had hacked into the CCTV system and was diverting a private feed for himself, in real time—perhaps, if those cameras were networked, even over the Internet. In that case, the accomplice might not even be in New York City.

With this brilliant stroke in mind, D’Agosta immediately began thinking about how to exploit it.