I can feel the color rising in my cheeks. “Listen, Cal. I’m just a sergeant. If my boss tells me that his boss tells him that their identity is a national security issue, then I’ve gotta leave it at that.
“So it was Cathcart who played the national security card?” says Stammo.
I nod.
“It’s crap, Steve.” Stammo’s voice has risen a decibel or two. “Those women are hired killers and we’re sure they’re cops or ex-cops. Cathcart is your dirty cop and those women work for him.”
“You know what you can do here Steve,” Rogan chimes in, “check the prints on the SUV. Once you eliminate Morgan and Seth Harris’ prints, whatever’s left belongs to those women. It is evidence that they have committed attempted kidnapping and assault, then you can force the issue—”
“What SUV?” I ask.
“The Caddy that was used to try and kidnap Michael Chan and that put me in this.” Stammo expresses his anger by shaking the arms of his wheelchair.
I feel like I’ve stepped into another reality. “Where is this SUV?”
Stammo’s eyes narrow. “Forensics have got it.” There is exasperation in his voice. “When Rogan found it, he called me and I called it in. I phoned you but you weren’t there, so I spoke to young Eric Street and told him. He said he’d get it towed in. Are you saying he didn’t tell you?” His voice has a suspicious edge to it.
“Yeah, Nick, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” My tone sounds defensive even to me.
Stammo looks hard at Cal. “Tell him Rogan. Tell him what happened to you.”
Rogan looks uncomfortable. “I don’t think it’s—” He stops himself in mid-sentence. “OK,” he says and then blows my mind with the story of his kidnapping by fellow VPD members. Stammo completes the picture with, “Eric Street was one of them, he admitted it to me.”
Why didn’t I know about this? Someone wanted Cal out of the Department more than I did and it scares me that they went to such lengths. Who would condone…
“Are you thinking he might be tied in with Cathcart?” I ask.
“I am now.”
I pull out my Blackberry. He answers on the first ring. “Eric, it’s Steve. Did Nick Stammo call you yesterday about an SUV that needed to be pulled in by Forensics?” I can see Stammo bristling out of the corner of my eye.
“Yes, I sent them out but when they got there, the vehicle was gone. We figured that either Nick got it wrong or the owner drove it off.”
Stammo is waving his hand in my face. I put Eric Street on hold.
“Ask him about the Blue F150, I called it in about an hour later.”
I do.
“Yeah, we’ve got that but it had been wiped clean of prints.”
I hang up and tell them.
After their expletives have subsided, Rogan smiles. “That proves that either Eric Street or someone in Forensics is dirty. I saw that truck in the neighbor’s garage when I was at the church. There were fingerprints all over it that I could see with the naked eye. Someone wiped them clean.”
Now it’s me that feels uncomfortable; the thought of people I work with every day being criminals turns in my gut. I ask, “Who do you think these women are?”
Rogan looks me in the eye. “Steve,” he says, “I think they are rogue cops or ex-cops, certainly from out of town. The way they handle themselves and their weapons makes me think so.”
Stammo starts to say something but I wave him quiet. I need to process all this. I’m having a real problem coming to terms with the idea that Superintendent Cathcart, the most senior detective on the force, is dirty. And if he is, what do I do? Go to the Deputy Chief in charge of Investigations Division and tell him. If I’m wrong it’s a definite career killer.
Rogan’s phone rings.
“Hey, Damien,” he says. “That was fast… Yeah… That’s great… You’re kidding… Yeah, text it to me. Thanks man, I owe you big time.”
He looks back and forward between Stammo and me with a big grin on his face.
“What?” asks a frustrated looking Stammo.
“Wanna find out what happened to Terry Wright?” Rogan asks.
62
Cal
As I type the URL into Stammo’s computer, I tell them about the video cameras installed around the Wright’s house.
“They were tiny. He’d installed them under the gutters. They were Wi-Fi and connected through Wright’s network to an internet server. I gave one of them to my buddy Damien—the guy who cracked the oboe code for me—and he found out the URL of the server where the videos are stored.” I hit Return and there is a window asking me for a username and password.
“Oh, shit,” Stammo grunts.
I enter the username cal and password rogan. I am presented with a list of dates.
“How did you know the password?” Steve asks.
“Damien texted the URL to one of his employees. It took him about fifteen minutes to hack into the site and create an account for me.”
“So much for Mark Wright, the computer security expert,” Stammo chuckles. “He spent his career helping other people with their security but didn’t follow his own advice.”
I scroll down the list of dates and click on the eleventh, the day that Terry was killed.
There are thumbnails of over a hundred mpeg videos.
“So where do we start?” Steve asks.
I study the screen for a while before I spot the pattern.
“Look at the file names,” I tell him. “Each one has the date, then a time, then a two-digit number that I’m guessing is the number of the camera. Terry and Mark got home at five-thirty and Elizabeth Wright got home at eight and found Terry gone. We should look at the videos for that time.”
There are twelve videos with the time 18:00 in the filename. I download them to Stammo’s laptop and open the first one, for camera 01; it is two hours long. With twelve cameras, we’ve got twenty-four hours of video to look through and if they yield nothing, we’ll have to look through the twelve videos for the previous two hours which cover the time period from five-thirty until six.
“Let’s do it!” says Stammo.
It looks like mission control. Set up around Stammo’s bed are six laptops: his, mine and Ellie’s and three that Steve has scrounged up from VPD. They are all using QuickTime’s fast forwarding feature to speed through half of the videos from the twelve cameras, at four times normal speed. We have been doing this for two hours and it is deadly boring, but we dare not take our eyes from the screens for a moment for fear of missing something. A nurse who came in to check on Stammo was politely asked to leave.
Without moving his eyes from the screens he is watching, Stammo says, “You know what? We’re not going to find anything. If there was anything on any of these cameras, Mark Wright would have seen it and told us. Shit, we’re wasting our time.”
“Not if he was the one who killed Terry,” counters Steve.
“If he was, he would have erased any video evidence for sure. So we are still wasting our time.”
“You’re right,” Steve says and slumps back in his chair.
“Keep watching,” I say and out of the corner of my eye, I see Steve respond to the urgency in my voice. Stammo has triggered a thought in my mind. I can think of a reason why Terry Wright might witness his step-son’s murder on video and not report it to to the police. The thought leads to another. If I am right, we have solved Terry’s murder but at what cost? As much as I want to solve Terry’s murder, I don’t want it to be this.
“There!” Stammo shouts. He is pointing at the right hand laptop of the two he is monitoring. It shows a section of the garden and the path that leads to the front door. The only movement is in the top right hand corner of the screen, which shows a section of the road. Two cars flash by.
I pause the videos running on mine and Ellie’s laptops and Steve does the same on his. Stammo has paused the video and is taking it back three minutes. He clicks Play and the video recommences at normal speed.
Nothing moves.
A car goes by.
I am holding my breath, dreading what I know I’m going to see.
Nothing.
Don’t let it be, I pray silently.
“I was sure I saw something.” Stammo’s voice has a defensive ring to it.
I check the time display. One hour and twenty-three minutes into the video and we must be close the the point where Stammo stopped it.
Then someone enters the frame.
It’s a man.
I let all the air out of my lungs in a long, silent sigh of relief.
Thanks to the excellent quality of the video, I can see that he is dressed in what looks like a black coat and a scarf wrapped twice around his neck, obscuring the lower half of his face. He is wearing a fedora and is studiously keeping his head down; he knows about the cameras. I can feel the adrenaline flooding my system; it can only be one of three people. As I think about it I eliminate two of them.
The man’s head swings to the right and he turns and steps off the path, vanishing off camera. In all, he was only on the screen for a total of about four seconds—one second at four times fast forwarding.
“Nicely spotted, Nick.” Steve claps Stammo on the back and I give him a broad grin. Stammo just nods but I know he’s pleased.
We turn our attention back to the video; nothing moves for ten minutes so I lean forward and pause it. “Let’s look at the other cameras for that time period,” I suggest.
One after the other, we set the other videos to one hour and twenty three minutes and click play. Six pairs of eyes drill into the screens for ten minutes. Nothing.
I’m about to curse when I remember that there are six other videos from the other six cameras. I grab Stammo’s laptop and set up the first one to one hour and twenty-three minutes in. It is a view of the west side of the house and sitting on a thin strip of glass, his back to the neighbor’s fence and looking straight up at the camera is Terry Wright. I drag the time control to the left, moving back in time, until he is no longer in the frame, then click play.
After a couple of seconds Terry walks into the frame; he is wearing a yellow winter jacket and grey sweat pants, haunting me with the picture of his dead body stretched out in the Endowment Lands. “This is the west side of the house. Terry’s bedroom was on this side. It looks like he did climb out his bedroom window,” I say.
Terry walks over to the chain-link fence. He kneels down and starts zig-zagging his fingers down the wire strands. He does this for several minutes then stops suddenly, turns round, sits down and draws his knees up to his chest. He wraps his arms around his shins and hugs his legs tightly to his chest then looks directly at the camera and starts saying or mouthing something, his head nodding in time to each syllable. This goes on for several minutes and with a flash of intuition, I say, “He’s reciting the oboe code.”
Before anyone can comment, Terry glances up and to his left then snaps his head forward so that he is staring fixedly at the wall of the house. He is continuing to mouth what I am now sure is the code but he is saying it faster and rocking his whole body back and forth in time to each syllable. He starts moving his head to the right while his eyes keep flicking to his left, as into the frame walks the man in the fedora.
Due to the camera angle, we are looking down at the back of the man’s head. He crouches on Terry’s left and the boy moves his head to his right, studiously avoiding eye contact. From the slight movements of the man’s head, I infer that he is talking to the boy although Terry’s mouth keeps moving faster and he is turning his head further away from the man. The speed of his rocking is increasing.
My mind flashes back to Michael Chan repeating ‘O—B—O—E Shhhh!’ his volume increasing with every iteration.
The man is gesticulating at Terry; he seems agitated. Suddenly his hand, encased in a leather glove, strikes out and clamps over Terry’s mouth. The boy attempts to squirm away but the man’s other hand grabs the scruff of his neck and drags him to his feet. His arm snakes around Terry’s body hugging the boy to his chest, and, keeping his back to the camera, he steps backward toward the wall of the house, until he vanishes out of the bottom of the frame.
We all inhale and I know that, like me, my colleagues have been holding their breath as we watched the opening scene of the murder of Terry Wright.
We have scoured all of the tapes for further footage of Terry’s captor but, as I expected, have found nothing. It lends credence to my theory.
“Whoever it was knew the location and positioning of all of the cameras,” Stammo snorts in frustration.
“It was Mark Wright,” breaths Steve, barely above a whisper. “He killed his own kid. That was why he committed suicide.”
“Killing your own kid is a bit extreme, Steve,” Stammo objects.
“Terry was his step kid,” Steve counters.
“It wasn’t Mark,” I tell them. “Apart from the fact that Elizabeth assured me he truly loved Terry, if he had done it, first thing he would have done is delete the videos for that time slot and replace then with videos from a different day at the same time.”
They grunt acknowledgement of the logic. But Stammo spotted that I called Elizabeth by her first name, I saw the look he cut me.
Stammo scratches his head and says, “It could have been that nasty piece of work Seth Harris or maybe Cathcart.”
“No, they’re professionals.” I say. “If they had caught Terry repeating the oboe code, they wouldn’t have panicked and killed him. They’d have taken him into the house and had Mark deal with him.”
Stammo can see the look on my face. “Well?” he asks.
“Thanks to you Nick, I’ve got a good idea of who it was.”
He looks askance. “What did I say?”
“You said that after Terry went missing, Mark Wright must have checked the videos and found what we’ve just seen. So why didn’t he contact the police straight away?”
I leave the question hanging.
Stammo shrugs but I see a glint in Steve’s eye. “Harold Varga,” he says.
“Exactly. The man in the video knew about the cameras. Apart from Mark Wright, there’s Seth Harris, Cathcart and Varga but Varga’s not a pro. He hears Terry repeating the oboe code and he panics and tries to silence Terry. When Terry goes missing, Wright checks the videos and recognizes Varga. But he and Varga are up to their ears in this money-laundering scheme. If Mark accuses Varga and we arrest him, it’s all going to come out: if he tells us, he’s screwed.”
“So what does he do?” asks Steve.
“He goes to Seth Harris. Under the orders of our buddy in Millhaven prison, Seth is the one who got Varga and Wright working together, so Wright is gonna go to him.”
“And Harris pops Varga’s wife to teach him a lesson,” Stammo says.
“No, I don’t think so. But let’s stick with Varga for a moment,” I say. “What actual evidence do we have?”
“None,” Steve grunts.
“A search of his place might turn up the clothes he was wearing in the video,” says Stammo.
“We’d never get a warrant,” I can hear the exasperation in Steve’s voice. “And even if we did, chances are Varga has got rid of those clothes and if he hasn’t, he would say that anyone could have the same clothes.”
“So what did Varga do after he walked out of that video frame?” I ask.
“Take Terry to his car?” Stammo suggests.
I nod. “If we discount the possibility that Varga took Terry into the house and that Mark Wright was in on the murder, I think that’s exactly what he would do. But what route did he take? He doesn’t appear on any of the other tapes, so his choice of routes would be very limited. Steve, if you sent a forensic team with a laptop displaying the feeds from all the cameras, they could plot out all of the possible routes that Varga took without being caught by a camera. Then they could examine those routes for any trace evidence.”
“I could do that,” Steve says.
&nbs
p; “If Varga took Terry in his car, there would almost certainly be evidence in the car, so, if we could get a warrant…” Stammo leaves the sentence hanging.
“So Varga gets off the Wright’s property without being seen again by the cameras,” Steve says. “He takes Terry to his car and drives off to the Endowment Lands to kill him. So where does he get the knife? Does he go home first and take one from the kitchen? Did he have one in the car and, if so, why? Did he stop and buy one from a store?”
“For that matter, when did he decide to make it look like a ritual killing?” I ask. “Varga’s a banker, whatever would give him the idea to—”
Oh.
I just asked the right question.
One after the other, the pieces click into place until I have it.
Stammo and Steve are silent, somehow they can sense that something is going on.
As my mind wanders through the facts, the murders of Terry Wright, Marguerite Varga, Mark Wright and Seth Harris all make complete sense.
But to prove it, Steve is going to have to take one hell of a risk. I wonder how willing he is going to be to take it.
63
Cal
Sunday
I’ve got to admit that Steve has guts. He has put his whole career on the line based on a theory with no really compelling evidence. He’s compounded matters by having Stammo and me here: I am still suspended and Stammo is on sick leave. The hospital promised dire consequences too, but Nick told them in no uncertain terms that it would take more than his nurses to keep him there.
We are letting Varga stew.
He is sitting in the interview room, alone. He is angry, for sure, but there is something else in his demeanor that I cannot quite read. Confidence? Whatever it is, it does not feel good to me.
The fact that it is Sunday morning is working in our favor. There are not a lot of people in and none of the brass. I don’t want to run into any of my colleagues. I know that if I do, I will be asking myself, ‘Are you one of the bastards who kidnapped me, took me to Riverview and shot me up to the moon, just to get rid of me.’ I feel my cheeks glowing at the humiliation. If, against all odds, I am reinstated tomorrow morning, will I ever be able to face them, let alone work with them?
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set) Page 61
