Michael Crichton - Rising Sun

"Keep 'em in the trays down here," he said, bending to show us several long, thin drawers. "We keep everything off the cameras for seventy-two hours. That's three days. So we keep nine sets of tapes all together. And we just rotate each set through, once every three days. Get me?"

Connor hesitated. "Perhaps I'd better write this down." He produced a small pad and a pen. "Now, each tape lasts eight hours, so you have nine different sets . . . ."

"Right, right."

Connor wrote for a moment, then shook his pen irritably. "This damn pen. It's out of ink. You have a wastebasket?"

Phillips pointed to the corner. "Over there."

"Thank you."

Connor threw the pen away. I gave him mine. He resumed his notes. "You were saying, Mr. Phillips, that you have nine sets . . ."

"Right. Each set is numbered with letters, from A to I. Now when I come in at nine, I eject the tapes and see whatever letter is already in there, and put in the next one. Like tonight, I took out set C, so I put in set D, which is what's recording now."

"I see," Connor said. "And then you put tape set C in one of the drawers here?"

"Right." He pulled open a drawer. "This one here."

Connor said. "May I?" He glanced at the neatly labeled row of tapes. Then he quickly opened the other drawers, and looked at the other stacks of tapes. Except for the different letters, all the drawers looked identical.

"I think I understand now," Connor said. "What you actually do is use nine sets in rotation."

"Exactly."

"So each set gets used once every three days."

"Right."

"And how long has the security office been using this system?"

"The building's new, but we've been going, oh, maybe two months now."

"I must say it's a very well-organized system," Connor said appreciatively. "Thank you for explaining it to us. I have only a couple of other questions."

"Sure."

"First of all, these counters here– " Connor said, pointing to the LED counters on the video recorders. "They seem to show the elapsed times since the tapes began recording. Is that right? Because it's now almost eleven o'clock, and you put in the tapes at nine, and the top recorder says 1:55:30 and the next recorder says 1:55:10, and so on."

"Yes, that's right. I put the tapes in one right after another. It takes a few seconds between tapes."

"I see. These all show almost two hours. But I notice that one recorder down here shows an elapsed time of only thirty minutes. Does that mean it's broken?"

"Huh," Phillips said, frowning. "I guess maybe it is. 'Cause I changed the tapes all one after another, like I said. But these recorders are the latest technology. Sometimes there are glitches. Or we had some power problems. Could be that."

"Yes. Quite possibly," Connor said. "Can you tell me which camera is hooked to this recorder?"

"Yes, of course." Phillips read the number off the recorder, and went out to the main room with the monitor screens. "It's camera four-six slash six," he said. "This view here." He tapped the screen.

It was an atrium camera, and it showed an overall view of the forty-sixth floor.

"But you see," Phillips said, "the beauty of the system is, even if one recorder screws up, there are still other cameras on that floor, and the video recorders on the others seem to be working okay."

"Yes, they do," Connor said. "By the way, can you tell me why there are so many cameras on the forty-sixth floor?"

"You didn't hear it from me," Phillips said. "But you know how they like efficiency. The word is, they are going to kaizen the office workers."

"So basically these cameras have been installed to observe workers during the day, and help them improve their efficiency?"

"That's what I heard."

"Well, I think that's it," Connor said. "Oh, one more question. Do you have an address for Ted Cole?"

Phillips shook his head. "No, I don't."

"Have you ever been out with him, socialized with him?"

"I have, but not much. He's an odd guy."

"Ever been to his apartment?"

"No. He's kind of secretive. I think he lives with his mother or something. We usually go to this bar, the Palomino, over by the airport. He likes it there."

Connor nodded. "And one last question: where is the nearest pay phone?"

"Out in the lobby, and around to your right, by the restrooms. But you're welcome to use the phone here."

Connor shook the guard's hand warmly. "Mr. Phillips, I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us."

"No problem."

I gave the guard my card. "If you think of anything later that could help us, Mr. Phillips, don't hesitate to call me." And I left.

Connor stood at the pay phone in the lobby. It was one of those new standing booths that has two receivers, one on either side, allowing two people to talk on the same line at once. These booths had been installed in Tokyo years ago, and now were starting to show up all over Los Angeles. Of course, Pacific Bell no longer was the principal provider of American public pay phones. Japanese manufacturers had penetrated that market, too. I watched Connor write down the phone number in his notebook.

"What are you doing?"

"We have two separate questions to answer tonight. One is how the girl came to be killed on an office floor. But we also need to find out who placed the original call, notifying us of the murder."

"And you think the call might have been placed from this phone?"

"Possibly."

He closed his notebook, and glanced at his watch. "It's late. We better get going."

"I think we're making a big mistake here."

"Why is that?" Connor asked.

"I don't know if we should leave the tapes in that security room. What if somebody switches them while we're gone?"

"They've already been switched," Connor said.

"How do you know?"

"I gave up a perfectly good pen to find out," he said. "Now come on." He started walking toward the stairs leading down to the garage. I followed him.

"You see," Connor said, "when Phillips first explained that simple system of rotation, it was immediately clear to me that there might have been a switch. The question was how to prove it."

His voice echoed in the concrete stairwell. Connor continued down, taking the steps two at a time. I hurried to keep up.

Connor said, "If somebody switched the tapes, how would they go about it? They would be working hastily, under pressure. They'd be terrified of making a mistake. They certainly wouldn't want to leave any incriminating tapes behind. So probably they'd switch an entire set, and replace it. But replace it with what? They can't just put in the next set. Since there are only nine sets of tapes all together, it would be too easy for someone to notice that one set was missing, and the total was now eight. There would be an obvious empty drawer. No, they would have to replace the set they were taking away with an entirely new set. Twenty brand-new tapes. And that meant I ought to check the trash."

"That's why you threw your pen away?"

"Yes. I didn't want Phillips to know what I was doing."

"And?"

"The trash was full of crumpled plastic wrappers. The kind that new videotapes come wrapped in."

"I see."

"Once I knew the tapes had been replaced, the only remaining question was, which set? So I played dumb, and looked in all the drawers. You probably noticed that set C, the set Phillips removed when he came on duty, had slightly whiter labels than the other sets. It was subtle, because the office has only been active two months, but you could tell."

"I see." Somebody had come into the security room, taken out twenty fresh tapes, unwrapped them, written new labels, and popped them into the video machines, replacing the original tapes that had recorded the murder.