“What’s that, Harry?” Shuttles asked.
“You’ll know when you see it.”
Nautilus removed the tape securing the wrap. A small slip of paper fell out, INSPECTED BY NUMBER 57, underscored by a line of bar code.
Beautiful, Nautilus thought. He owed the multitalented Claypool a big dinner. Nautilus revealed a small assemblage of metal, plastic, and circuitry surrounding a tube like the front barrel of a rifle sight, a large optic glinting from the center. There was a mounting bracket and a cigarette-pack-size control panel with buttons and LEDs. The ad hoc contraption looked like a sidearm from a Star Wars movie.
“Now do you understand, Tyree?”
“I don’t know what that thing is, Harry.” Shuttles couldn’t keep the scared out of his voice.
“One of the new cameras for the detective cars.”
“ What cameras?”
“Like the ones in the patrol cars, but the next generation. Pace never told you?”
“Told me what?”
“Pace and me met with the chief a few weeks back. We discussed who’d get the first one, the test camera. Brand-new super-high-resolution cameras, fifteen grand per. It was scheduled for your car, Pace having the most seniority. But Pace didn’t want the camera. So Carson and me got it installed in our car.”
Sweat beaded on Shuttles’s forehead. He had the dry-mouth swallow.
“Pace doesn’t tell me anything. He probably forgot. The asshole doesn’t care about this kind of stuff. He won’t even use a computer.”
Nautilus went to the door, opened it, yelled, “Where the hell’s the monitor I asked for?”
Glen James was standing across the room talking to Lieutenant Tom Mason, the head of the department. James glanced down at his cupped palm, reading from the script Nautilus had prepared.
“On its way, Harry. Settle down. We can’t use a regular TV, it’s got to have the special screen. Like HDTV, where you see the pores on people’s faces. They’ll have it here in a few minutes.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
“You gonna watch a porn flick, Harry? You’ll be able to count twat hairs, that much I can tell you.”
Glen James, improvising.
Nautilus slammed the door, sat back down. He rarely swore or slammed doors, making it that much more effective.
“I don’t give a fuck about cameras, Tyree. What would I want with a picture of Taneesha Franklin’s car as we pull in? No one even looked at the tape until this morning. Hell, I didn’t even want to test the camera that night, all the damn rain, but you know Carson. He was playing with the thing like a toy.”
“Franklin?” A tinder-dry whisper.
“I want you to explain something to me, Tyree. Something that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The camera’s on, it’s switched to extreme night vision, something to do with lux rating or whatever. A regular camera wouldn’t show jack shit, all that rain, distance. But this new camera is taking in everything.”
Nautilus glared through the window into the detectives’ room, like he was angry the monitor wasn’t there yet.
“It’s maybe fifty feet from our cruiser to you in the shadows behind the Mazda. What does supercamera show when we slow the playback, Tyree?”
The kid was too scared to speak. Roll the dice, Nautilus thought, about to make the jump suggested by Logan’s observation. Here’s where I win or lose…
“It shows you pulling a plastic bag from under your rain gear, Tyree. You open it, take out a knife, drop the bag into the gutter. Then you start yelling, ‘Knife.’”
Shuttles’s mouth made shapes, but no words came out. Nautilus said, “Why’d you bring the murder weapon to the scene in a plastic bag, Tyree?”
“It wasn’t my idea, I swear…”
“You never cruised more than eight blocks from the murder scene. How long were you supposed to wait for the Franklin car to be found? All night?”
Shuttles pressed his hands to his eyes, as if blotting out reality. Tears fell from beneath his fingers.
“Harry, I…”
“Then you tried to convince Carson that Logan was messing up the Carole Ann Hibney investigation. But it was really you throwing wrenches into the works. That idea come from Crandell? Or setting Logan up as paranoid, so if he voiced suspicions about you, it’d seem part of his paranoia. Right, Tyree? Have I got your sorry ass nailed?”
Shuttles pitched forward on the table, buried his face in his arms.
“They gave me so much, Harry, but then they wanted so much back.”
CHAPTER 45
“Good morning, brother,” Lucas said into the phone. “Did you get my fax? My equations? Did you have a professional read it?”
Lucas listened for a minute, shook his head.
“You showed it to who, Buck? Of course he didn’t know what it was, he’s a pissant banker, a schmoozer. It’s the Black-Scholes equation for modeling stock-option prices. Economics 101, for crying out loud. I simply took the ’76 Ingerson adjustment regarding assumption of zero taxes and transaction fees, removed CIRs per Merton, then added my own twist regarding…”
Shit. It was like talking business to a fish. Lucas shook his head, then relaxed. Remembered his mission.
“Forget the fax, Buck. Listen, in the long run…does it matter?”
Lucas watched a dark-haired young woman walk past the phone, tight pink jeans, her hips moving like a polka, one — two, one — two. He’d be there soon enough, he thought, a bed full of metronomic buttocks he would pluck like fruit from a yard-high tree.
“What do I want to do, Buck?” Lucas said. “Shit, you know that. It all comes down to what your gut instinct tells you is the profitable course.”
A smile crossed Lucas’s face, but he didn’t allow it to enter his voice, his business voice.
“That’s what I thought you’d say, Buck.”
Lucas hung up and returned to his insecurities firm-never more aptly named than today. He ran up the stairs, arriving in his office panting, part from exertion, part from the rush of adrenaline. Lucas swiveled the spotter scope to the KEI offices. Buck Kincannon was in his office, door closed, feet on desk, thumbs twirling around one another as he mulled over the phone conversation.
He hadn’t shared the call with the others. Buck was sitting there thinking I, Me, Mine.
Every brother was thinking I, Me, Mine.
Perfect.
Nautilus watched Shuttles walk out, a uniformed cop on each side. In his first burst of fear, Shuttles had answered questions, but once he realized how deep the water was getting, he’d started mewling about a lawyer. Shuttles even had the temerity to ask if he could make his exit without the bracelets. Nautilus told the little shit to be happy he wasn’t cuffed to a kayak and floated in front of a supertanker.
Nautilus headed to Forensics, stopping at the morgue first. He’d debated whether to tell Clair Peltier anything at this stage, but she’d been in since the beginning and deserved to know.
He stepped into her office, closed the door. The woman looked used up, eyes red, face drawn and sleepless. The fresh flowers normally changed every third day were limp as dead birds. A tear rolled down her cheek and she blotted it with the back of her hand.
“I left Carson’s. I didn’t want to, but I had work to finish.”
“Listen, Doc,” Harry said. “Some things have come to light. There’s a chance-slim-that Carson might be alive.”
