Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

The tech who was spraying shrugged.

“And what about all that powder?” Nick went on, fake-indignant. “How the hell am I going to get that out?”

The tech with the spray bottle turned around, blinked a few times, a lazy, malevolent grin on his face. “You got a housekeeper,” he said.

“Eddie.” Nick, calling from his study, scared out of his mind.

“What?” He sounded annoyed.

“They were here today.”

“I know. Here too. It’s bullshit. They’re trying to put a scare into you.”

“Yeah, well, it worked. They found something.”

A pause. “Huh?”

“They found a metal fragment. They think it might be a piece of a shell casing.”

“ What? They recovered a shell casing?”

“No, a piece of one.”

“I don’t get it.” Eddie’s swaggering confidence had evaporated. “I recovered both shells, and I don’t remember any fragmentation. You said you fired two rounds, right?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? Now you think so?”

“I was freaked out, Eddie. Everything was a blur.”

“You told me you fired two rounds, so when I found two shells, I stopped looking. I coulda spent all night on that fucking lawn walking around with the flashlight.”

“You think they really might have a piece of ammunition?” Nick said, a quaver in his voice.

“The fuck do I know?” Eddie said. “Shit. Tell you this, I gotta start digging into this lady detective. See what skeletons she has in her closet.”

“I think she’s a good Christian, Eddie.”

“Great. Maybe I’ll find something real good.”

And he hung up the phone.

“We got shit, is what we got,” said Bugbee.

“The search warrant,” Audrey began.

“Was as broad as I could make it. Not just .380s, but any firearms of any description. On top of the usual. No blood or fibers in Rinaldi’s car anywhere.”

“We didn’t expect he took the body home with him.”

“Obviously not.”

“Any .380s?”

Bugbee shook his head. “But here’s the weird thing. Guy’s got a couple of those wall-mounted locking handgun racks, right? Found it in a closet behind some clothes, bolted onto the wall. Each one holds three guns, but two of them are missing.”

“Missing, or not there? Maybe he only has four.”

Bugbee smiled, held up a finger. “Ah, that’s the thing. There’s two guns in one, two in the other, and you can see from the dust patterns that there used to be two more. They’ve been removed.”

Audrey nodded. “Two.”

“I’m saying one is the murder weapon.”

“And the other?”

“Just a guess. But maybe there’s a reason he didn’t want us to find that one too. Two unregistered handguns.”

Audrey turned to go back to her cubicle when a thought occurred to her. “You didn’t warn him you were doing the search?”

“Come on.”

“Then how’d he know you were coming? How’d he know to remove the guns?”

“Now you get it.”

“Conover knew we were coming to search his house,” Audrey said. “I’m sure he told Rinaldi, and Rinaldi knew it was only a matter of time before we searched his house too.”

Bugbee considered for a few seconds.

“Maybe that’s all it is,” he conceded.

An e-mail popped up on Audrey’s computer from Kevin Lenehan in Forensic Services, asking her to come by.

The techs in the Forensic Services Unit all went to crime scenes, but some of them had their specialties, too. If you wanted to get a fingerprint off the sticky side of a piece of duct tape, you went to Koopmans. If you wanted a serial number restoration, you took it to Brian. If you wanted a court exhibit, an aerial map, a scene diagram rendered in a hurry, you went to Koopmans or Julie or Brigid.

Kevin Lenehan was the tech most often entrusted with, or perhaps saddled with, retrieving information from computers or video capture work. That meant that while his co-workers got jammed with all the street calls, he had to waste vast amounts of time watching shadowy, indistinct video images of robberies taken by store surveillance cameras. Or poring over the video from the in-car cameras that went on automatically when an officer flipped on his overheads and sirens.

He was scrawny, late twenties, had a wispy goatee and long greasy hair that was either light brown or dark blond, though it was hard to tell, because Audrey had never seen him with his hair recently washed.

The rectangular black metal box that housed the digital video recorder from Conover’s security system was on his workbench, connected to a computer monitor.

“Hey, Audrey,” he said. “Heard about your little bluff.”

“Bluff?” Audrey said innocently.

“The bullet fragment thing. Brigid told me. Never knew you had it in you.”

She smiled modestly. “You do what it takes. How’s this coming?”

“I’m kinda not clear on what you wanted,” Kevin said. “You’re looking for a homicide, right? But nothing like that here.”

It was too easy, Audrey thought. “So what is on there?”

“Like three weeks of the moon moving behind the clouds. Lights going off and on. Coupla deer. Cars going in and out of the driveway. Dad, kids, whatever. Am I looking for something in particular?”

“A murder would be nice,” she said.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“If the cameras recorded it, it’s going to be on there, right?” She pointed at the box.

“Right. This bad boy’s a Maxtor hundred-and-twenty gig drive connected to sixteen cameras, set to record at seven-point-five frames per second.”

“Could it be missing anything?”

“Missing how?”

“I don’t know, erased or something?”

“Not far’s I can tell.”

“Isn’t three weeks a long time to record on a hard drive that size?”

Lenehan looked at her differently, with more respect. “Yeah, in fact, it is. If this baby was in a twenty-four-hour store, it would recycle after three days. But it’s residential, and it’s got motion technology, so it doesn’t use up much disk space.”

“Meaning that the camera starts when there’s a movement that sets off the motion detector and gets the cameras rolling?”

“Sort of. It’s all done by software here. Not external motion sensors. The software is continually sampling the picture, and whenever a certain number of pixels change, it starts the recording process.”

“It recycles when the disk gets full?”

“Right. First in, first out.”

“Could it have recycled over the part I’m interested in?”

“You’re interested in the early morning hours of the sixteenth, you said, and that’s all there.”

“I’m interested in anything from the evening of the fifteenth to, say, five in the morning on the sixteenth. But the alarm went off at two in the morning, so I’m most interested in two in the morning. Well, 2:07, to be exact. An eleven-minute period.”

Kevin swiveled around on his metal stool to look at the monitor. “Sorry. Just misses it. The recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen A.M.”

“You mean Tuesday the fifteenth, right? That’s when it was put in. Some time on the afternoon of the fifteenth.”

“Hey, whatever, but the recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen in the morning. About an hour after the time you’re interested in.”

“Shoot. I don’t get it.”

He spun back around. “Can’t help you there.”

“You sure the eleven-minute segment couldn’t have just been erased?”

Kevin paused. “No sign of that. It just started at—”

“Could someone have recycled it?”

“Manually? Sure. Have to be someone who knows the system, knows what he’s doing, of course.”