dot-com stock and the sale of his Florida condo.”
“How did he luck into buying shares of InTouchSpace before it went big?”
“Word on the street, I guess,” she said.
“He was on the wrong street for that word,” Monk said, shrugging his shoulders. “Something doesn’t fit.”
“So what’s next?” I asked.
“We talk to the suspects,” Monk said. “But we don’t touch them under any circumstances.”
“Why not?” Danielle asked.
“Warts could run in the family,” he replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The surveillance footage from the Dorchester Hotel was delivered by Lansdale to Disher’s desk on several CDs. The lobby, all the entrances and exits, the stairwells, and the elevators were covered by cameras. The various floors themselves were not.
“What kind of half-assed security system is that?” Disher said.
“I asked them the same thing,” Lansdale said. “Their reply was that they are a hotel, not a Vegas casino, and this isn’t a totalitarian state.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“They’re cheap and irresponsible,” Lansdale said. “But nobody could have gotten in or out of the hotel without being caught on camera.”
“Unless they climbed up the face of the building and entered through Braddock’s window.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“Never rule out any possibility, even if it’s impossible,” Disher said. “The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible. Why aren’t you writing that down?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It would if you had my years of experience on the mean streets. I’m giving you pearls of wisdom here. You’ll want to remember them.” Disher handed half of the CDs to Lansdale. “You look at these, I’ll go through the rest.”
Lansdale retreated to his desk and Disher stuck a CD into his computer.
For the next hour, Disher scanned through footage of the loading dock and the stairwell, but didn’t see any activity. There were no deliveries and nobody used the staircase.
When he was finished with those CDs, he started going through footage from the lobby. He was twenty minutes into that when he saw someone come in at ten p.m., go up the grand staircase to the conference area, and then disappear.
Disher glanced around to see if anyone was watching him. Lansdale was slouched in his seat, staring at his screen, going through elevator footage and taking notes. Disher turned back to his screen and fast-forwarded until he saw the same man come down the staircase and leave about thirty minutes later.
“Hey, Jackal, do we have any surveillance footage of the conference floors?”
Lansdale shook his head. “Nothing on the second and third floors, except the stairwells.”
“Anything unusual show up on the elevator footage?”
“Yeah, I was just about to tell you about it,” Lansdale said. “Around ten fifteen one of those guys in the beefeater costumes got on at the second floor and went up to the seventh, got off, then came down again about twenty minutes later.”
“Can you see his face?”
“Nope,” Lansdale said.
This wasn’t good, Disher thought. Not at all.
He got up and knocked on the captain’s door. Stottlemeyer waved him in from behind his desk.
Disher stepped in and closed the door behind him.
“How’s the investigation going?” Stottlemeyer asked, looking up from his work.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Captain?”
“About what?”
“About you and Braddock?”
“It’s all in the file,” Stottlemeyer said. “Except the part about me punching him yesterday at Bill Peschel’s wake, but I assume you’ve heard all about that.”
“You also didn’t mention that you were at the Dorchester Hotel last night.”
Stottlemeyer sighed wearily. “I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I got a call around nine thirty last night from a guy who said he was a cop attending the conference. He said he had evidence that Braddock was taking bribes from a gang that’s running meth labs out of mobile homes in the desert. He asked me to meet him in one of the small conference rooms at the hotel.”
“Who was the cop?”
“He wouldn’t tell me until we met face-to-face, which didn’t happen,” Stottlemeyer said. “I got there at ten, waited around for twenty minutes, and when he didn’t show, I left.”
“And you didn’t think that was relevant to the investigation?” Disher asked, failing to hide his irritation with his boss.
“I was one of hundreds of cops and tourists in the hotel last night. I was only there for a half hour and then I left. I didn’t see what it had to do with your investigation.” Stottlemeyer narrowed his eyes at Disher. “But since you think it’s relevant, I’m guessing that Braddock’s time of death was ten-ish.”
“It could have been,” Disher said. “The killer jacked up the air-conditioning in Braddock’s room to make it harder for us to pinpoint the exact time of death.”
Stottlemeyer stroked his mustache, a nervous habit he had while he was thinking. “Do you suppose that the call I got might have been a ruse to get me to the Dorchester at the same time that Braddock was being killed?”
“I don’t think so. Like you said, there were lots of other people there at the same time, including some of the best homicide detectives in the nation,” Disher said, heading for the door. “I wouldn’t worry about it, sir.”
Disher walked out of the office. But he could feel Stottlemeyer’s gaze on his back like a heat lamp.
I picked up Monk at nine on the dot and we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County.
The lanes going into San Francisco from Marin County were clogged with the last of the rush-hour commuters, Starbucks coffee in their dashboard cup holders, Bluetooth devices in their ears, and NPR playing on their radios.
How do I know what station they were listening to on their radios? Because I know Marin County residents are well educated, own at least one Bob Dylan or Van Morrison album, and are notoriously liberal for people with so much money.
And because I like to embrace cliches that have some truth to them and I enjoy making broad generalizations that support my biases. If you haven’t learned that about me by now, you haven’t been reading very closely.
The Barnes & Noble smelled more like a coffeehouse than a bookstore. The tables of their cafe were full of young, well-dressed people hunched over their MacBooks, idly picking at pastries and sipping their hot drinks, trying to look busy and deep in deep thoughts.
Phil Atwater wasn’t among the self-consciously studious in the cafe, probably because the menu was too expensive for a man whose unemployment checks had just run out. He was getting his gourmet coffee from McDonald’s and slipping a Starbucks cardboard heat sleeve around the cup that didn’t entirely hide the Golden Arches. We found him drinking his coffee in an easy chair at the farthest corner of the store, where he was reading a book entitled The Thirty Steps to Becoming a Millionaire in Thirty Days.
“Is one of the steps murdering your father-in-law?” Monk asked.
