by Diana Saco
“His computer minion,” Farm answered.
“Oh, I get it, ‘Heady,’ ” I said, pointing to my own head. “Like ‘brainy’?”
“No, Hedy as in Hedy Lamarr,” he replied. “Gizmo named his A.I. after her.”
“I thought you were the film buff,” I said to Farm.
“Hedy Lamarr was an actress and an inventor,” Gizmo said respectfully. “She helped create a system for hopping radio frequencies that formed the basis for the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies we use today. She was way ahead of her time.”
“Hmm, interesting. I did not know that. Did you?” I asked Farm.
He shrugged. “I just thought she was awesome in Samson and Delilah.”
“She had beauty and brains. The ideal woman,” Gizmo said.
We all sighed wistfully—Gizmo thinking of Hedy, Farm thinking of Scarlet, and me, surprisingly, thinking of Chloe. I really hope she doesn’t wind up in prison, I thought.
I looked at the screen, reminding myself that I was supposed to be looking for evidence that would keep that from happening. I noticed a lot of activity.
“Was Monica really going into her fridge all those times starting at 9 a.m.?” I asked.
Gizmo chuckled. “No, no way. It’s not just a continuous recording. If it were, we’d run out of storage in no time.”
“So what are we seeing?” I asked.
“You’re only seeing the times she went into the refrigerator.”
“Oh, yeah, I knew that,” I said, remembering our previous discussions of Snakstr. “What triggers the cameras? Motion?”
“No, light,” Gizmo said. “The master camera has a photosensitive triggering mechanism. When the fridge is opened, and the interior light goes on, the Snak-Cams start recording. When the door is closed, and the light goes off, they stop recording, upload the Snakshot files, and then go into sleep mode.”
“Got it. So is there a way of telling what times we’re looking at?”
“Yeah, we can do that. Hedy, display timestamps.”
I leaned toward Farm and surreptitiously asked, “So does she talk? Hedy I mean?”
“She sure does,” he whispered back. “Gizmo probably disabled vocals because he’s embarrassed that he gave her such a sexy voice and programmed her to flirt with him.”
“Sounds desperate,” I said.
Farm just nodded.
I turned back to the display. The playback was actually of four simultaneous videos.
“How come there are four images?” I asked.
“For adequate coverage,” Gizmo said. “Because a fridge has shelves full of stuff that can get in the way of a good shot, the Snakstr system uses multiple cameras with fisheye lenses—one on each shelf facing out to capture the snacker. There’s also a door cam facing in so we can see what food he’s taking out—or worse, eating right there at the fridge with the door open—like now,” he said pointing. “Who is that?”
“Marvin Munch. The husband,” I said.
“Looks like the wife had a good reason for installing Snakstr,” Gizmo observed.
“I’ll say,” Farm agreed. “He just put away two cupcakes and is going for a third. Dude, chew!”
“The timestamp on that is 11:17 in the morning, right?” I asked, wanting to make sure I read the display correctly.
“Yes, there’s the date and that’s the time down to the second,” Gizmo replied, pointing to the numbers overlaid on the image in the lower right.
“Okay, that’s when Monica would have been at the farmers’ market getting the rhubarb leaves.”
Snakstr was designed to catch people in the act of taking food out of the fridge. In this case, however, I wanted to see what Monica put in. I actually found myself sitting upright in the lounger and scooting forward, literally on the edge of my seat as the next video came up.
“There!” I said excitedly. “Freeze that. Hedy, freeze image!” I commanded the A.I., not waiting for Gizmo to do it.
“Hedy, freeze,” Gizmo said. “She only responds to my voice commands,” he explained.
“Sorry,” I said distractedly. “What’s that? Those are leaves, right. Can you tell what kind?”
“Hedy, identify flora in the images.”
A chime sounded again and then a sultry feminine voice said, “The image provides insufficient data for 100% accuracy, Gizmo.”
“Give it your best shot.”
“Well, if you insist, Big Boy.”
Big Boy? I mouthed at Farm, who just nodded with a smirk.
Hedy came back with an answer. “Based on the shape of the leaves, the plant appears to be rheum rhabarbarum, more commonly known as rhubarb.”
“Is that what you needed, Nina?” Gizmo asked.
“It’s a start. Is that the best image we have of Monica?”
“The problem is partly the fisheye distortion, although we can probably correct for that. But she’s also wearing stuff,” Gizmo said.
The person in the video had on a knit cap and huge glasses, matching Jeff’s description. I could also see red hair poking out from under the cap, but Loyal could claim it was a wig. The mouth also lacked the usual garish lipstick, making it harder to confirm that it was Monica. But really, who else could it be given that we already knew Maxi was in Amherst that day?
“So what does this prove?” Farm asked.
“Maybe nothing. But assuming that is Monica—and it’s unlikely to be anyone else—it shows that she was doing something with rhubarb leaves, which is suspicious to say the least. She wasn’t making a rhubarb dessert for the bake-off, and you wouldn’t use the leaves for that anyway. Right now, it just supports my theory that she’s responsible. It doesn’t actually show her contaminating Chloe’s rhubarb.”
“I don’t suppose Chloe has Snakstr?” Gizmo asked.
“Unfortunately, she doesn’t.”
“Well, should we keep watching?”
“Can you make sure I get a copy of this one? But yeah, let’s keep watching. I would really like to see how the tainted sugar got in there. The only problem is that I have no idea what dates to look at.”
“Hedy can scan the videos and analyze the images, but I need to give her some parameters. Do you know what kind of container the sugar was in?”
“Hang on.” I called Al and put him on speaker.
“Dupree.”
“Al, it’s Nina with Farm and Gizmo. I remembered that Monica had Snakstr installed on her second refrigerator. I’ve been reviewing the videos with the guys, and we already found evidence that someone, probably Monica, stored rhubarb leaves in there on July twelfth.”
“That’s the date Woo said someone picked up some of those leaves, yeah?”
“Exactly. Now we’re trying to see if we can spot the sugar, but we need to know what the container looks like. Is it a bag?”
“No, the sugar was in one of those tall plastic containers, like for cereal. And it had a red snap top with a big ‘X’ on it in black marker. I took a couple of pictures before the deputy bagged it. I’m sending them to you now.”
“Ooo, a big ‘X.’ Wonder what that could mean?” Farm quipped.
“Is that enough detail?” I asked Gizmo.
“You bet. But forward the pix anyway so Hedy can key off of them.”
My phone dinged, alerting me to new mail.
“Okay, Big Guy, I got the images,” I said, already forwarding them to Gizmo. “That’s the info we needed. Thanks.”
Al hung up without another word.
“That was abrupt,” Farm observed.
“He’s still mad at me,” I said.
“You mean because you broke into the Munch house?” Gizmo asked.
“Yeah. You heard, huh?”
He nodded. “When I went to pick up the thingy they wanted unlocked. Everybody was sort of talking about it.”
“So how long before Hedy finds something?” I asked, obviously changing the subject.
A chime sounded again before Gizmo could reply. “Looks like s
he found something already.”
The display came up and showed Monica putting a cake into the refrigerator. The timestamp was July 14 at 13:46:17 hours, which put it at a quarter to two in the afternoon on the Sunday before the bake-off.
“There!” I said, seeing the sugar container. “But it’s already in there. When did it go in?”
“Hedy, analyze the container in the top right shelf. Show video immediately before its appearance.”
The video cued. I focused on the image from the door cam and could easily see an arm placing the sugar container into the refrigerator. “Stop it there!” I said.
“Hedy, freeze playback.”
I heard the guys gasp and flicked my eyes over to the displays from the other cameras. The identity of the person who put the tainted sugar into the refrigerator was unmistakable.
It was Chloe.
*****
I asked Farm and Gizmo to avoid telling anyone about what we found. I had to talk to Mason, Chloe, and Al first. I was sure there had to be a logical explanation. Barging into the team meeting about ten minutes late, I announced, “We have a problem.”
All three of them listened attentively as I filled them in on the Snakstr videos.
“Could the videos have been altered in any way?” Mason asked.
“No, I asked the guys that. Only a handful of their people have access to the server data. They also have file logs and confirmed that the hashes match the logs, proving that the files haven’t been altered.”
“Well, I hate to ask,” Mason continued, “but Chloe, were you at the Munch house in July putting a container in the bakery refrigerator?”
“Maybe,” she said casually.
“Chloe,” I said, “we’re talking about a container that probably had tainted sugar. You were recorded putting it there, and it doesn’t look good if that’s what poisoned Marvin. So could you think hard and explain why you might have gone to the Munch house that day?”
“What day are we talking about?” she asked impatiently.
“Saturday, July 13, a little after three in the afternoon.”
Chloe took a deep breath and tried to remember. “I have been to their house several times, always under duress,” she added exaggerating. “I’ve gone there for homeowners’ meetings or planning meetings for various social functions.” She consulted the calendar on her mobile phone. “But I don’t see anything for that day.”
“Nina, you said the thirteenth, right?” Mason asked.
“Yes, why?”
“Because it contradicts the timeline from the prosecution’s standpoint. Chloe got the oxalic acid from Randall Kirkland on the fourteenth, so how could she be putting tainted sugar in the Munch house on the thirteenth?”
“I didn’t think about that. It also contradicts Loyal’s narrative of events. Why would Chloe put poisoned sugar in Monica’s house if she had been planning to use her own rhubarb dessert to poison her?”
“I remember,” Chloe blurted suddenly. “That day, that Saturday, Monica called me to say she thought she left the oven on. Again. And she wanted me to check.”
“Did she do that a lot? Forget to turn off her oven?” I asked.
“It’s happened a few times. On that day, she said she was called away from the house on an emergency and that she thought she had started warming up the oven and thought she might have forgotten to shut it off. She begged me to go over and check. When I refused, she threatened to keep calling me until I went over there. I gave in since she could be unbelievably annoying. And it was just across the yard anyway.”
“How’d you get in?” I asked.
“The way I always did. She kept a backdoor key in one of the flower pots. She stayed on the phone with me the entire time to make sure I went over there. I let myself in, checked the stove, and let her know it was off. She asked if I was sure that everything was okay. And then she went through her list—stove off, water faucet off, no milk or cream left out. I looked around quickly and noticed only a plastic container of flour or something on the kitchen island.”
“What did that container look like, Sha?” Al asked her.
“Tall and thin with a red top.”
“Did it have an ‘X’ mark on the top?” I asked.
“Funny, that’s what Monica asked me. When I said it did, she got nervous saying she didn’t mean to leave that out. She said it was sugar and that Marvin wasn’t supposed to have any, which was news to me since he was constantly eating the sweet desserts she made. Anyway, she asked me to stick the container in her refrigerator, and she made sure I understood that she meant the one in her sunroom.”
“It wasn’t locked?” Al asked.
“No, but I did say something appropriately sarcastic about the latch on it. I think I asked her if she thought burglars were going to steal her gold-medal marzipan because I remember she said, ‘Not burglars, Chloe Owens, just husbands. But you wouldn’t know about them!’ And then she snickered at me.”
Chloe mimicked what I assumed was Monica’s heavy Okie accent. It was more pronounced than Maxi’s. I didn’t know if that’s because Maxi toned down her southern twang during her years of teaching in a Yankee university or whether Chloe was just laying the accent on thick.
“Anything else?” Mason asked.
“She thanked me for checking the stove, made sure I locked up the house and that I had put the key back, and then she hung up. I was happy to be able to get back to my chores, so I didn’t give it a second thought. Until now, of course.”
“Chloe, can you pull up your cell phone bill for July?” I asked, sliding a keyboard over to her so that she could bring it up on the conference room display.
After a few keystrokes, she brought up the bill. I skimmed over it quickly. “There,” I said. “That call matches the date and time you were in Monica’s house. Do you recognize the number?”
“No, but then I have no idea what Monica’s cell number was or where she might have been calling from.”
Al had been tapping away on his tablet. “That matches Monica’s cell.”
“That’s weird,” I said genuinely flummoxed. “Why would Monica send Chloe over to her house to set her up like that and use her own phone? She’d have to know that the cell phone records would show that she had called Chloe herself.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a setup,” Chloe suggested. “I’m telling you, Nina, that woman was flighty. She pretended to be perfect, but she was easily distracted, especially with Marvin around. It wasn’t the first time she thought she’d left her oven on. And a couple of times, she really had left it on.”
“But then why ask you to handle that sugar container and put it away?” I added.
“Maybe it was exactly as she said,” Chloe suggested. “She didn’t want Marvin getting into it. More so if she knew it was poisoned, no?”
“And it could be we’re also getting ahead of ourselves,” Mason said. “We don’t even know yet if that sugar was poisoned. Al, when do the police get the lab results back on that?”
“Lab doesn’t open until Monday. Harry said he’d email the report as soon as it came in, but he said it would probably be after lunch.”
“If it is poisoned, how will that impact my case?” Chloe asked Mason.
“Loyal will undoubtedly submit the video as evidence.”
“Does he have to find out about it?” she continued.
“Absolutely. Full disclosure. In fact, Nina, can you make sure he gets a copy of the videos with an explanation of how they were obtained and what they show? Send a copy of the cell records, too.”
“I’ll do it right now.” I had already asked Gizmo to write up a report. He finished it after I left his office and had already emailed it to me. After skimming it over, I keyed in Loyal’s email address, attached the report with the video files and with Chloe’s phone bill, copied Mason and then hit the Send button. As Chloe and Mason continued discussing the repercussions of this new discovery, I sidled over to Al.
“Al?”
/> “What?”
“Are you ever going to forgive me?”
“Maybe. Are you gonna do anything like that again, ya think?”
“No way. Not me. Straight and narrow from here on out.”
“Nina, I know you creative types sometimes need wiggle room. But what isn’t right is you wigglin’ on your own. So here’s the deal. Next time, you bring me in on the decision. That way, I have a chance to tell you it’s a dumb idea or else to decide it’s a risk worth takin’—together. That’s the way it’s gotta be. Either we’re partners, or we’re partin’. Comprends?”
“I understand. And I don’t want to lose our partnership, Al,” I said, a lump forming in my throat at the thought.
“Okay, then. But you don’t have a PI license for the next six months. So you’re on probation. You can come to the office, but no detectin’ there. You will only answer phones, take messages, fill out the paperwork and do all the billin’.”
“But—”
Al held a finger up to shush me. “All the billin’,” he repeated with emphasis.
Probation was going to suck. “Okay,” I said.
I returned my attention to Chloe and Mason’s conversation in time to hear Mason say, “Yes, on the surface it looks like a smoking gun. But it doesn’t really help his case. Several aspects of his story unravel, including the incident with Kirkland, which is the more serious charge.”
“What difference does it make if his story has a few holes?” Chloe asked. “The one consistent theme is that I’m the bad guy, and that’s all anyone is going to hear.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong,” Mason said. “We have a logical suspect to point at now—Monica herself. She knew about the tainted sugar. She asked you to hide it for her.”
“But it’s my word against—well, against the evidence in that video, I guess.”
“And the phone bill,” I added. “Don’t forget that. It shows that Monica called you. Plus we still have the diaries.”
“But you said Monica’s sister wouldn’t open her tablet, so we can’t get to her diary,” Chloe countered.
“No, not Monica’s diary. The cooking diaries that her aunt gave her. I saw them when I was in the house.”
