“I only got two tapes,” the owner told Murphy. “I rotate them so they last longer.”
The two men stood just inside the work bay.
“Which tape did you have in last night?” Murphy asked.
“It’s still in the machine,” the man said. He was tall, six three, about fifty years old, with big, powerful shoulders. He looked prison hard.
Murphy glanced at the heat waves rising off the street. A breeze would be nice, he thought. “Can I take a look at it?” Murphy said. His feet hurt. He was sweating bullets. It was too damn hot to be pounding the pavement in a suit and tie.
“Sure,” the big man said. Then he turned around and walked toward his office at the back of the shop.
Murphy fell in behind him.
The office was small and cluttered. A pile of tire catalogs, stacks of receipt books, a gray metal desk, a file cabinet, a bookcase-all jammed into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot square. An old videotape recorder and a thirteen-inch black-and-white television sat on a shelf over the desk.
“I got broke into a little over a year ago,” the tire man said. “Little bastards just kicked open the front door and came right on in.”
“What’d they get?” Murphy asked.
“Tires and rims, and my cash box. I don’t keep cash around here no more, and I put a security camera on the corner of the building to watch the front door.” The shop owner punched a button on the video recorder and grabbed the VHS tape when it popped out.
“How long does a tape last?”
“About twelve hours. The camera only takes a picture every few seconds. They call it time… time something. Time delay, I think.”
“Time-lapse,” Murphy said.
A label stuck on the edge of the tape had the words Speedy’s Tire-Tape One handwritten across it.
“Are you Speedy?” Murphy asked.
The man nodded. “My daddy gave me that name.”
Speedy held the tape out to Murphy. “You can take it with you. Just bring it back when you’re finished.”
Murphy nodded. “I don’t even think we have a VCR at the office that works. You mind if I watch a little of it here?”
“Be my guest,” Speedy said. He shoved the tape back into the machine and mashed a flattened thumb against the power button on the TV. Then he hit the rewind button on the VCR.
“I’m sorry about the time,” Speedy said as soon as the tape started playing.
At the bottom of the TV screen the date and time flashed “01-01-01/12:00 AM.”
“The power keeps going out and I can’t ever remember how to reset it.”
“It’s not a problem,” Murphy said. “What time did you start recording last night?”
“About six o’clock.”
According to the coroner’s best guess, the woman had probably been killed between 9:00 PM and 1:00 AM. That meant Murphy didn’t need to watch the first three hours or the last five. Just that four-hour stretch in the middle. He had a VCR at home that would show the elapsed time, as long as he started the tape at the beginning and reset the counter.
But what if the killer had cruised the neighborhood earlier in the evening to get a feel for it? Or drove around afterward to stay close to the victim? Murphy realized he was going to have to watch the whole tape. He punched the eject button. “I better take it home. This is going to take a while.”
“I’m sorry about that, Detective. You go on and keep that tape as long as you want. I’ll use the other one until you get done.”
Even on fast-forward, watching the entire tape was going to take at least three hours.
Great, Murphy thought. Just great.
At the recently refurbished criminal district court building, the images from the surveillance cameras fed into a digital recorder. Unlike Speedy’s, the time stamp on the sheriff’s video recorder was set properly.
At 4:00 PM, Murphy sat down at a desk in the third-floor security office and started watching video.
There were four cameras on the outside of the building, but only two of them had views of the street. One camera was aimed at the prisoner gate at the back of the building and another monitored the main door facing Tulane Avenue. One camera shot images of Tulane and Broad, where there were too many cars to count. The last camera had a view of South White Street, which ran along the west side of the courthouse.
Murphy watched the recording from the camera facing South White Street at four times bodytext speed, but even then it took until after 7:00 PM to get through it. By the time he finished, the courthouse was closed and a deputy had to let him out through the staff door.
Twenty-eight cars had driven down South White Street between 3:00 PM yesterday and three o’clock this morning. Before Katrina there would have been three or four times that number. The camera was close enough so Murphy could read the license-plate numbers on twenty-six of the cars. One didn’t have a tag, and one went by so fast he couldn’t read the numbers.
On the way home Murphy stopped at the Star amp; Crescent and had two beers. Then he went home to watch the videotape from Speedy’s tire shop.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thursday, July 26, 9:30 AM
“How was court?” Murphy said as he stepped into the squad room.
Gaudet swiveled his head away from his computer keyboard. “A waste of time.”
Murphy dropped into the chair behind the desk he shared with a detective on another shift. “They didn’t call you to the stand?”
“I sat there all day and they didn’t even finish picking the jury.”
“Couldn’t the assistant DA put you on standby?”
Gaudet shrugged. “He’s some new tight-ass prick, said he needed me there to help with jury selection.”
Murphy looked at the clock on the wall. “What time do you have to be back?”
“He said he wanted me there by nine.”
“So why are you still here?”
“I told him I had to be at the firing range until noon.”
“We’re not going to the range today,” Murphy said. “I can’t even remember the last time we shot.”
“The DA don’t know that.”
“Good point.” Murphy spun around and started thumbing through the stack of pink message slips on the desk.
“How did it go with the surveillance cameras?” Gaudet asked.
Murphy didn’t see any messages he felt like returning. He threw the entire pile in the wastebasket next to his desk. He looked at Gaudet. “I got a bunch of license-plate numbers from one of the courthouse cameras. The other cameras were pretty much a bust. I also got a few tags off of a security camera at a tire shop.”
“Speedy’s?”
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “You know him?”
Gaudet nodded. “I bought some retreads from him once for my nephew’s car. He did some time back in the day, but he’s straight now.”
“I got that impression.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, while you were wasting time in court-”
“Hey, brother, I’m sorry about that. You know I would have been there if I could. I love walking around in the hot sun for hours on end, sweating my balls off.”
“You probably didn’t even have court. I didn’t get a subpoena.”
“It’s an old case,” Gaudet said. “From back when you were off the job, drinking heavily and trysting with barmaids.”
“Did you say trysting?”
“Damn right, I did. What of it?”
“Do you even know what a tryst is?”
“I used the word correctly, didn’t I,” Gaudet said, his voice loaded with feigned indignation. “Just because I’m black and went to Delgado instead of Notre Dame, don’t mean I’m not ed-u-cated.”
“I only went to Notre Dame for a year.”
“Then you went to Loyola.”
“Yeah, for another year.”
“Still, you’re a white boy and you went to two fancy schools. It’s not my fault you weren’t smart enough to graduate from either one.”