‘Where are the rest of them?’
‘Back of the closet. There’s a false panel. It slips right out. You just have to find the latch. There’s a box in there. That’s where I keep them.’
Thirty-Seven
Word of the spycams spread fast. By the time McCabe and Maggie walked in with the box of videos, the conference room was full, everyone gathered and waiting. All of McCabe’s detectives plus Starbucks and Bill Fortier. Even Shockley was there, seated at the head of the table, impatience written all over his face.
Maggie found a chair between Fortier and Tasco. Sturgis slid a foam rubber seat cushion across the table. ‘Here you go, Savage. I heard you weren’t as much of a hard-ass as I thought. I figured this might help.’
‘Why, thank you, Carl,’ said Maggie, slipping the cushion under her. ‘How very thoughtful of you.’
McCabe waited for them to settle, then ran through the two-minute drill on what he hoped to find on the two disks they were about to watch. Brian Cleary volunteered to review the rest of Barker’s stash. On the house. No overtime. McCabe declined. Maggie rolled her eyes. Shockley glared.
‘Can we get moving here, people?’ asked McCabe. ‘The clock is ticking.’
The two disks Barker had handed McCabe were differentiated by a letter code and dates handwritten across the top in red marker. Seemed Barker was an organized guy. One was marked LR-1/3/07. That would have been last Tuesday. The day of Lainie’s death. The other read LR-12/20/06. Two weeks earlier. He figured LR stood for living room as opposed to bedroom or bathroom. Jacobi told him Barker’s spycams were motion activated. That was good. There’d be no need to waste time looking at nothing happening.
McCabe slid the disk from January third into the machine and hit PLAY. The room went quiet. No gossip. No cracking jokes. Nobody nibbled on a sandwich or even sipped a cup of coffee. At first all they could see was a blank screen, then black, then a flash of white, then a view of Goff’s living room as the apartment door swung open, activating the camera. A shaft of light from the hallway hit the Angela Adams rug, the glass coffee table, the white chairs and couch. A fish-eye view looking down from the ceiling. The time code read 2:33:19 AM 1/03/07. The middle of the night. Or, more accurately, very early morning, the Tuesday of the murder. A dark figure entered, dressed in a dark hooded coat. The same kind of coat they’d seen fleeing Leanna Barnes’s apartment. It was impossible to tell whether the figure inside the coat was John Kelly or someone else. All they could see was a hood pulled up over the head and a pair of shoulders. The intruder turned, closed the door. The image went black, then lightened as the lens automatically adjusted to the ambient light entering through the windows.
The intruder turned on a flashlight and scanned the beam around the room, the lens once again adjusting the aperture to available light. He went through the living room and disappeared into the hall between the kitchen and bedroom, making sure, McCabe guessed, that the place was empty. Ten seconds later he was back.
‘Alright, you’re alone,’ McCabe murmured to the figure on the screen. ‘Now take off the hood and show us who you are.’
Almost as if reacting to the request, the guy reached up, put a hand on the dark cowl, and held it there.
‘C’mon, baby, just pull it off.’
The guy paused. There wasn’t a sound in the conference room. They were all holding their breath. The intruder dropped his hand.
There were moans and grumbling from around the table.
Still hooded, the intruder walked to the bookcase on the right side of the room. He shined the light at the top shelf. The camera angle was down and at his back, and you couldn’t see a damned thing except the coat and hood and the flashlight beam running along the row of books. The light stopped at one of the books. Then another. Then it went back to the first and stayed there. He reached up and pulled it down from the shelf. It was an oversized volume, maybe an art or travel book. He set the flashlight carefully on one of the lower shelves and rotated his body to the right. A thin sliver of face became visible. But not enough. You could tell he was a white guy, but that was it. He stood there, angling the book so the light was pointed directly at the pages. Happily, so was the spycam.
They watched him riffle through the pages until he found what he was looking for. A nine-by-twelve orange envelope. He removed the envelope, closed the book, returned it to its space on the top shelf. He turned the envelope in his gloved hands. Once. Twice. He paused.
McCabe could make out something written in the upper left-hand corner, where a return address would go. He froze the image, then moved ahead one frame at a time, but it was impossible to read what the words said. Palmer Milliken? Maybe. Maybe Starbucks could enlarge it and play with the focus so they could read it. Maybe not. McCabe hit play again. The guy turned the envelope over again. Probably debating whether to open it here and now or wait till later. Apparently here and now won, because he removed the leather glove from his right hand and slid a bare finger under the seal. He reached inside and pulled out what looked like a stack of black-and-white photographs. McCabe again froze the image and advanced the frames one by one. He couldn’t tell what the pictures were of. Again he’d have to depend on Starbucks to manipulate the images. The intruder slid the pictures back in the envelope and folded it lengthwise and pushed it into his coat pocket, not seeming to care if he bent the pictures. The pictures must have been what he was looking for, because he took his flashlight, headed for the door, and left. The time code read 2:36:15. He’d been in the apartment less than three minutes. He’d turned out no drawers. Dumped nothing on the floor. McCabe was certain it wasn’t the same guy who tossed the apartment night before last. This guy had found what he wanted. That guy hadn’t. McCabe fast-forwarded through the rest of the disk. It was empty. He hit eject, and it slid out.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ asked Shockley. ‘Is that your murderer?’
‘I’m sure it was,’ said McCabe. ‘Unfortunately, we still don’t know if it was Kelly or someone else.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake McCabe, every piece of evidence we’ve got points to Kelly. Even the DNA says it’s him. I say we arraign the sonofabitch and stop screwing around watching TV shows.’
‘Let’s just see what’s on the next disk.’
He inserted the disk marked LR-12/20/06. The camera turned on when the top of Lainie Goff’s head entered frame. Same fish-eye view as before. The time code read 12/20/06. 8:34:44. Seventy-two hours before her abduction. Two weeks to the day before her death. Lainie turned on a table lamp, the sudden light creating a white flash in the upper corner of the frame. There was a knocking sound. She crossed the room, opened the door a crack, and peered out.
She said something to whoever was on the other side of the door. A male voice said something back. Both voices too far from the mike to make out what was being said. The male voice spoke again. Lainie seemed to hesitate, as if debating whether or not to let him in. She apparently decided she would and opened the door all the way. If she knew he was a killer, why would she do that?
The guy was wearing the same dark hooded coat as before, only this time the hood was down. Now you could see the top of his head but not his face. Still, it was enough to tell them it wasn’t John Kelly. This guy had neatly cut gray hair, parted on the left and combed across to the right. It looked like Henry Ogden’s hair. Like Wallace Stevens Albright’s hair. Even kind of like Kyle Lanahan’s, only a little shorter. In fact, it could have been any number of parties both known and unknown. Mr Gray Hair looked nervously around the room, then moved to the white couch and sat down. He was sitting almost directly under the lens, head down. Lainie sat across from him in one of the white chairs.