One of the techs had his nose so close to the monitor that it was practically touching the screen. Mike provided the sound track as the grainy video began to play. I could see Monday’s date and time in the upper right corner.
“First of all, only the newest equipment-like the cameras in the main lobby elevators-have the latest technology. The hallways and stairs are mostly old-fashioned tape. They loop over again and again in twenty-four-hour cycles, and the images are so muddy there’s not much to see.”
I stepped back so Mercer could get a good look. “Useless,” he said. “I can make out movement, and a couple of suited men from time to time, but nothing or nobody you could recognize.”
“Out of the fifty-two cameras we started with,” Mike said, “more than a dozen of them are flat-out broken. Not working. Just there to rope-a-dope any would-be felons into thinking they’re being recorded.”
“Exits and entrances?” Mercer asked.
“I can give you some clear shots of those,” the tech said. He played with the computer and brought up footage from the Park Avenue entrance of the hotel, midday on Monday. “Your detectives have been over these films, reviewing the hours from noon to six P.M., dozens of times.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Different people see different things,” he said. “Your brain gets fried pretty quickly watching so many hundreds of people coming and going. Then the bellman brings the luggage in ten, fifteen minutes later, so you can’t possibly connect it to the people who might own it.”
“But big pieces? Anything like the trunk we think is involved?”
“Not so easy. Around two fifteen that afternoon a group of thirty people arrived from a cruise ship on some kind of package tour. There were trunks the size of my apartment,” Mike said. “Once they got loaded on the luggage carts and hauled inside, it was impossible to see any of the individual pieces. Impossible to tell how and when they got to the rooms.”
“You think someone could have slipped one into the pile?” Mercer asked.
“Hand one of the bellmen ten bucks? You could slip a boatload of contraband right through the front door.”
“But the fancy-dancy suites in the Towers?” I asked. “There must be a real effort at security. I mean, just for antitheft purposes, not expecting this kind of violence.”
“Give her the Towers elevators,” Mike said to the tech.
Again, the young man moved in so close to the monitor that I thought he’d leave some of the hairs from his goatee on the screen.
The tape started to roll. The images were the clearest I’d seen yet. We watched several elevator trips-a tedious task at best-with well-dressed guests going up forty flights, then others leaving their floors to return to the lobby. My yawns were so big they were audible.
Suddenly the screen went white.
“See what I mean?” Mike said. “Is this lame or what?”
Mercer moved closer to the tech. “How long does this go on?”
“I suppose it just died. Must go on this way to the end.”
“You mean no one has watched it all the way?”
“You’ll have to ask the detectives down the hall,” the tech said. “I have no idea.”
“Fast-forward for me. Can you do that?”
“What’s the-?” I started to ask.
Mercer shushed me. We watched for several minutes while the tech kept us informed about the time.
“That’s half an hour since it went dead,” he said. “Now we’re coming up on an hour. I don’t know how long you want me to do this, but personally I think it’s pretty futile.”
“Stick with it,” Mercer said.
At least fifteen minutes went by until the tech told us that the timer showed that three hours of this past Monday afternoon had elapsed.
“Give up the ghost, Mercer,” Mike said. “It’s dead.”
About two minutes later, as though suddenly resuscitated, the footage came on with perfect clarity.
Mike elbowed me out of the way. A couple had gotten on at the thirty-ninth floor and spent most of the ride down to the lobby kissing each other in the corner of the cab. “It’s not dead after all.”
“It never was,” Mercer said.
“Then how the hell do you account for three hours of a total eclipse, my friend?”
“The security camera was intentionally blinded, Detective Chapman.” Mercer pointed his forefinger at the light fixture above our heads and pretended to pull it like a trigger. “It was temporarily blinded by a laser gun.”
NINETEEN
Rocco Correlli moved us all into a slightly larger windowless room. The long table was half covered with trays of food that catering had sent down to the bleary-eyed detectives. The other half was covered with papers-police reports, hotel bills, records of the various tape recordings, and photographs of both victims and the antique steamer trunk. The tech guy loaded the software from the Towers surveillance equipment onto a larger computer at the far end of the room.
“How do you blind a camera?” Rocco asked.
“All too simple,” Mercer said. “Remember when that Russian oil billionaire had his yacht in the city last year?”
“Ivanovic? Vladimir Ivanovic?” Mike said.
“Yeah. Well, there were some people walking on the pier, up near the Intrepid,” he said, referring to the steamship piers along the Hudson River, on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. “One of them was a good friend of Vickee’s. They tried to take photos of the mega-yacht, but they couldn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“First of all, his staff goes nuts when anybody gets too close to the boat. When the story hit the Social Diary,” Mercer said, referring to the hottest gossip page in town, “it said that Ivanovic actually installed antipaparazzi shields all over the yacht.”
“So what do they have to do with this?” Rocco asked.
“They’re lasers, Rocco. They sweep the area around the boat, and if anyone tries to take photos or videos, the lasers blind the cameras. The cameras simply can’t take pictures.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Not for a second. You want to know how easy it is to do? For about twenty bucks-in case you’re not a billionaire with a yacht-all you need is a laser from an old DVD player, a lens you can focus, and a couple of double-A batteries.”
“What made you think of that?” Mike asked, gnawing on a turkey sandwich.
“Because it wasn’t the same as the other footage. It went completely white. It was never grainy or black. It didn’t look like it had been recorded over.”
“Does it mean our killer’s a high-tech operative?”
Mercer laughed. “Not really. Wouldn’t even need a second guy. It’s one of those things you can search online, like I did when Vickee told me the story about her friends’ attempts to take photos of the big yacht. Anyone can learn to do this-it’s even easier than surfing for cannibal codefendants.”
“But how?” Mike asked.
“The laser can be the size of a tiny flashlight,” Mercer said, looking at the elevator interior on the image frozen on the screen. “A piece of duct tape could hold it in place here.” He pointed to a spot on the elevator’s ceiling, directly opposite the surveillance camera. “All you need is a straight shot at the lens. The laser will actually cause some glare as it reflects off the end of the camera. Then-bam! The camera is completely disabled and the screen goes white.”
“But it recovered,” I said. “It started working again.”
“Some do, some don’t. But they’re out of commission for several hours, at least,” Mercer said. “That’s for sure.”
Mike pounded his fist against the wall. “So this adds another angle, doesn’t it? Plus our guys have to go back over every one of these tapes and see where else this happened.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Look, we know Thatcher was taken to the Towers, but how? Which way into the hotel is still the big question.”