“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.”
Eddie Rinaldi, she thought. “Then it would have recorded over the part I’m interested in?”
“Right. Records over the oldest part first.”
“Do you have the ability to bring it back?”
“Like, unerase it? Maybe someone does. That’s kind of beyond what I know how to do. The State, maybe?”
“The State would mean six months at least.”
“At least. And who knows if they can do it? I don’t even know if it can be done.”
“Kevin, do you think it’s worth looking at again?”
“For what, though?”
“See if you can figure anything else about it. Such as whether you can find any traces. Anything that proves the recording was recycled over or deleted or whatever.”
Kevin waggled his head from one side to the other. “Take a fair amount of time.”
“But you’re good. And you’re fast.”
“And I’m also way behind on my other work. I’ve got a boatload of vid-caps to do for Sergeant Noyce and Detective Johnson.”
“That serial robber case.”
“Yeah. Plus Noyce wants me to watch like two days’ worth of tape from a store robbery, looking for a guy in a black Raiders jacket with white Nike Air shoes.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Eye-crossing fun. He wants it done-”
“Yesterday. Oh yes, I know Jack.”
“I mean, you want to talk to Noyce, get him to move you up in the queue, go ahead. But I gotta do what they tell me to do, you know?”
65
The next morning was jam-packed with complicated, if tedious, paperwork, which Nick was actually grateful for. It kept his mind off what was happening, kept him from obsessing over what the cops might have found in the house. And that fragment of a shell casing had ruined his sleep last night. He’d tossed and turned, alternating between blank terror and a steady, pulsing anxiety.
There was a bunch of stuff from the corporate counsel’s office outlining the patent lawsuit they wanted to file against one of Stratton’s chief competitors, Knoll. Stephanie Alstrom’s staff insisted that Knoll had basically ripped off a patented Stratton design for an ergonomic keyboard tray.
Stratton filed dozens of these complaints every year; Knoll probably did too. Kept the corporate attorneys employed. The legal department salivated at the prospect of litigation; Nick preferred arbitration, pretty much down the line. It kept the out-of-pocket costs down, and even if Stratton won the ruling, Knoll would have already figured out a workaround that would pass legal muster. Go after Knoll in a public courtroom, and you blow all confidentiality-your secrets are laid out there for every other competitor to rip off. Then there’d be subpoenas all over the place; Stratton would have to hand over all sorts of secret design documents. Forget it. Plus, in Nick’s experience, the awarded damages rarely added up to much once you subtracted your legal expenses. He scrawled ARB on the top sheet.
After an hour of sitting at his home base, going over this sort of crap, Nick’s shoulders were already starting to ache. The truth was, home base wasn’t feeling especially homey these days. His eyes settled on one of the family photographs. Laura, the kids, Barney. Two down, three to go, he thought. The curse of the House of Conover.