“Let’s go question them, then,” I said, standing up. My back gave a sharp stab, and I hissed in agony.
“You all right?” Grimal asked.
“It’s nothing.” What the heck was causing that?
“You can’t question the suspects,” he said. “It’s against procedure.”
“Shall I call my former boss?”
I had scared him with the CIA director before. It always worked.
This time, it didn’t.
Grimal tapped his chopsticks impatiently on the desk, leaving little lemony dots all over a case file. “Think about it. You were the first person to find the body. You might have even been intended as the second victim. If you question the suspects and they go to trial, their lawyer will make a big deal about it. They’ll say the police investigation was biased.”
Hmm. He had me there. Grimal was definitely getting better at this whole police-work thing. He was almost at the level of a rookie in his first month of basic training.
I found it irritating.
He found it exhilarating.
Treating me to a smug smile, he said, “Don’t worry, they’re in good hands. I’m sure I’ll wring a confession out of them quickly enough. Why don’t you go play shuffleboard or something?”
Oh, those were fighting words.
“I’ll drop by if I have any questions,” I said. “And I’ll inform you when I crack the case.”
I turned and left in a huff.
The problem was, I didn’t know where to start the investigation.
I did know the first thing I needed to do, though, and that was go home and take an aspirin and a piping hot bath.
Nothing like relaxing the muscles to get the brain working. First off, I called Albert. It took three tries to get him.
“Whaaaah?” he said.
I could hear sitar music playing in the background.
“Albert, this is Barbara Gold. I was wondering if you are working the night shift at SerMart tonight.”
My question was answered with loud coughing.
“Are you smoking?” I asked.
“Huh? Uh, no. No! I just, like, got a cold and stuff.”
“Are you working the night shift tonight?” I asked the question slowly, enunciating my words to cut through the fog. It looked like poor Octavian put too much faith in the boy.
“Yeah, totally I’m working. The midnight to six shift. I’m about to take a nap. It’s hard working nights, you know.”
“My heart bleeds for you. I want you to keep your eyes open, you hear? I’ll call you while you’re on the job and ask you to do some things for me.”
“No way, José. We’re not allowed to have cell phones at work.”
I groaned. “Oh, of course you’re not. Bring it anyway.”
“The cameras will see.”
“Not when you’re up on the catwalk. Put it on vibrate so no one hears it, and only answer if you’re up there and out of sight.”
“Um, okay. Like, what are you going to have me do?”
“I’ll tell you when the time comes. Now stop smoking, and take a nap to clear your head.”
“Okay, grandma.”
He hung up.
The truth was, I didn’t know what I was going to have him do, but having a man on the inside (or a brain-addled half boy) could be a great asset. I didn’t see how I could get in there myself. While I could bypass the alarm, the cameras would spot me, and so would the employees.
At the moment, Albert was the only person I had to work with. Grimal was quite right in telling me that I couldn’t interview the suspects or be seen conducting an investigation considering that I may have been directly involved. Of course, he was only telling me that to get me to go away.
Fat chance.
I needed to figure out a way to get close to the case without seeming to, and using someone a little more useful than a red-eyed twentysomething.
But then I got a surprise break from the person I least expected.
Police Chief Grimal himself.
Eight
“The surveillance video at the house has been altered too,” Grimal told me by phone later that day.
“Really?”
“A clip has been taken out of about two hours from one to three in the morning. It was replaced with footage of empty grounds.”
“Don’t say ‘footage.’ That’s an old term from the days of film. Everything is electronic now.”
“Har har. You want to be filled in on this case or not?”
I did. But I wasn’t sure why he was telling me anything. I thought he wanted me as far away from the case as possible.
“All right. Fill me in.”
“We had a computer expert look at it and at the surveillance recordings at SerMart. Both were deleted and replaced with earlier footage via an external server. What server we don’t know, because they masked that with something called a VPN. That stands for…” I heard a rustle of papers on the other end of the line. “… a virtual proxy network. Apparently, you can run your Internet access through a bunch of servers in various countries, making it almost impossible to trace you. Whoever did this used a secure wiping program that makes it impossible to recover the deleted video.”
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“That’s where you come in.”
“Well, I didn’t do it. I didn’t even know what a VPN was until you told me.”
I could practically hear the eye roll on the other end of the line. A wet, squishy sound of utter exasperation. I love that sound.
“Of course you didn’t. I mean, I want you to use your, um, connections to find out who did. We think it happened via the security company that monitors the video. Both SerMart and Montalbion’s mansion were covered by Escudo Security. We can get a warrant, but it will take time, and they might still be trying to cover their tracks. Your… friends… in government can get into their system quicker.”
“All right. I’ll make a few calls.”
“Thanks.”
I blinked. That thank-you sounded genuine.
“That will be all I’ll need you for at the moment,” Grimal said with an officious tone.
Well, he just ruined that, didn’t he?
He hung up without saying goodbye.
Humph. Well, at least it was an interesting lead.
Then a
