The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  "Does he have patents on any of this work?" Eleri asked.

  "I don't think so, not on this work," his wife said. "Just things he was messing around with. You know, he would come out here and solder a motherboard, or plug two of them together in some way, put up the oscilloscope. He'd use the voltmeters and test them to be sure everything worked. He has a box of batteries, but some of those are strange batteries that even I don't know what they go to."

  Donovan had leaned over and peeked into the box, almost bonking heads with Eleri. The container was several feet wide and several more deep, and while it was mostly filled with nine volts and triple- and double-As, also in it were a variety that Donovan had to admit he did not have a ready letter for.

  Now, back at home with Eleri and speaking freely, Donovan was forced to admit several things. “Though it seems clear that he was murdered for something in that house, I don't know how we'll find it. I don’t think the killer has found it either, though. So our job should be to find it first. But how?”

  Eleri turned and looked at him. “I'm just grateful that he was organized. At least if we do get a tip in any general direction, we'll have a better idea where to start looking. But my God, he must've been working on forty different projects at once. If any one of them was a thing that got him killed—well, I agree—I don't know how we'd ever figure it out."

  The one thing Donovan was glad they had cleared up was that they did not think Marat Rychenkov had a lover on the side. In his normal life, Donovan would've looked at Marat and thought, "This was a man who was too nerdy, not attractive enough, and far too involved in his work to be having an affair on the side." But as a medical examiner, and later as an FBI agent, it had been drummed into him that there was no way to determine those things from looks alone. He'd seen actors and Hollywood elite, faithful as the day is long, and others, the ones you would never suspect, managing to carry on multiple affairs, even behind the back of a spouse who suspected it.

  However, Johanna Schmitt was quite certain her husband was not having an affair. Normally, Donovan and Eleri would've needed more evidence, but the widow had quickly provided it before they even asked.

  "If he was having an affair, it would have to have been with a ghost," Johanna made her case. "He was here all the time. When he wasn't here, he told me where he was going. And he came home on time and he never smelled like anyone else's perfume. I could always track his phone, and I can't tell you the number of times he butt-dialed me and I heard his whole conversation and he didn’t know it."

  Though a spouse convinced their partner was faithful was a useless piece of evidence, Johanna made a compelling case. She told them to look into her husband’s case, to check everything. If they found he was having an affair, she would accept the results. But she didn’t think they would find a secret lover.

  Donovan was ready to agree with her. He wasn’t about to declare it so, but his firm belief was that Marat Rychenkov had not been killed over love gone wrong. It had to have been over his work. But which part?

  It was Eleri’s last question to Johanna Schmitt that still gave Donovan pause.

  “Did your husband have any idea that he’d been targeted? That someone might want to murder him?”

  Johanna had gone still, her eyes widening with grief again. “No. He didn’t say anything to me, and he wasn’t acting differently. I don’t think he had any clue he was about to be killed.”

  14

  Eleri headed into the Up N Atom again the next morning, once again with her laptop tucked under her arm. Once again, her plan was to pretend she was looking for work while actually doing what she needed to be doing to solve a case that now more than just the mayor and his staff knew about.

  The idea was for her to get out and about, to be visible, and to talk to as many people as she could. Assess everything she could see. ID as many people that passed by as possible. So, no big deal, just sit and sip her drink and do all the work of a local encyclopedia with a built-in facial-recognition program. She was going to need the extra shot of Climate Change for this.

  A second option—the one Eleri personally liked better—was that she might see and greet people and get an opportunity for conversation. Because yet another job she had was to sort through the full set of video recordings that were coming in from the Rychenkov-Schmitt home.

  Within several hours of her and Donovan leaving Johanna's Schmitt's house, the night before, Wade had turned up on her doorstep. First, he showed up as himself. In his pocket, he carried a hard copy of a program that he’d had designed and sent to him from the Omaha FBI branch office. His first job was to upload it to Mrs. Schmitt’s phone and the main smart-system in the house.

  The most important thing about the program was that it piggybacked an existing alarm that triggered her phone from the house. While it wouldn't change her codes or anything visible or functional, it would report immediately when anyone entered the home—whether through a door or window or air vent, with or without a code.

  Joanna would now need to enter a second, additional code into her phone either before or just after she entered and exited her own home. This would let the upgraded home system know that the visitor was the owner and not to ping her. Now, no matter where she was, she would know immediately if someone was coming in. And so would the FBI.

  Johanna had already changed her access code once earlier in the week, hoping that would thwart her intruders. But she found they could still get in without breaking anything. This, in turn, led her to doubt the intruders even existed. She began doing basic testing for mental faculty loss, figuring she must be going crazy. She’d finally broken down and told Maggie her suspicions. That was why having the FBI confirm her thoughts had been such a huge relief, Eleri knew. That’s why Mrs. Schmitt was willing to play along with all their requests.

  The person who’d been entering her home appeared to have used the appropriate code. While that should have provided a huge break in the case, it turned out to give them virtually zero forward momentum, much to Eleri’s frustration. Johanna had not been able to list a single name of anyone who might have gotten the code to her home. She believed only she and Marat had it, and said, no, they didn’t share it. Ever. She’d even put her hand to her chest and said, “That would be stupid!”

  Now that she was the only one living in the home, she believed she was the only one who knew the newest code—which led to her willingness to entertain the idea she’d been going crazy rather than believe she actually had an intruder. With Eleri and Donovan’s evidence, it now looked like someone had managed to obtain the new, altered code to the home, though she’d given it to no one. Worse still, the list of people who had the skills to hack into the home system didn’t include any suspects from the list of local residents—except maybe Eleri and Donovan. Eleri had not admitted her lack of skills in front of Johanna.

  Johanna had scoffed. “Bennett brought in the best designers for the houses, and he brought in good quality construction workers, but. . . well, they were good, the house is solid, not like a lot of new construction. But they weren’t that intelligent, as best I can tell. I mean, calling this a Smart House? I think the high-schoolers across the street could hack their way in. I’m honestly surprised we don’t have more crime than we do!”

  Eleri almost said maybe they did have more crime, but the crime was so well committed that no one had discovered the missing pieces yet. She bit her tongue, instead. She had enough on her plate without looking for more cases to solve in Curie.

  Even so, now she had fourteen-plus hours of footage from several views around the Schmitt house. Wade had come back and installed the cameras last night, and now Eleri needed to scan it all to see if anyone had been around Joanna's house since the night before. Probably not, since Mrs. Schmitt had been home overnight but if anyone was casing the yard or coming close to the front door, Eleri wanted to know who they were.

  She hadn't mentioned that the cameras he installed inside the home would also tell them what
Johanna did and everything she talked about there. Still, Johanna had probably figured that part out for herself.

  Eleri headed into the line for coffee, laptop bag over her shoulder, and tried to keep an eye on the shop while she scanned the menu. The door opened behind her with a slight squeak and a loud ding, and a few more people got in line behind her. The next time it dinged, she turned to look over her shoulder, just as a course of habit, and she saw her friend from a couple of days ago.

  "Oh hey, Eleri," Kaya Mazur waved and Eleri—understanding that Kaya was now part of a small loop leading back to Marat Rychenkov—hopped out of line and let the two other people between them step in front of her.

  "How are you doing?" she asked.

  "Good. Aside from losing Marat, life’s been good. Are you now able to order your coffee on your own?" Kaya’s eyes had dimmed at the name, and the fact that she mentioned the man’s death meant he’d been a friend.

  Eleri laughed at the comment about her ordering skills and replied, "Yes!"

  "What are you getting today?"

  Good, Eleri thought, she was in the right place. But she said, "I'm getting the Functional Adult." It referred to a blended drink with an extra shot of protein powder and extra caffeine.

  "Oh, those actually work," Kaya said. "Just beware. You'll have energy for the next five hours. You won’t be able to nap or change course!"

  "I need to stay on course. Today, I'm also trying the extra shot of ‘Dopamine’."

  "Ah. The white chocolate. Sounds like a plan. Do you mind if I order the same?"

  "Do it with me," Eleri offered grandly, trying to make a friend. “I’m buying.”

  As always, the pang hit her that she was being deceptive. She wondered: If I ever see this woman sometime in the future, will Kaya Mazur hate me? She'd always relied on her gut instinct and had even learned recently it was often more than just a hunch or an idea. But she had to trust it when it told her Kaya and the Mazurs were not her prime suspects in this murder.

  Her instincts aside, she refused to discount good, old-fashioned leg work, as she was petrified that one day someone would break her system and her gut instinct would be wrong. She was petrified of failing in that way, because she'd had to defend information she got through intuition so many times in the past—and also because she didn’t know how she even would defend her method, if she was called upon to do so. At least she knew Donovan and Westerfield had her back.

  Eleri turned to her new friend said, "I'm hanging out looking for jobs again, but you're welcome to join me if you want." She'd thrown the last offer out casually. It was a practiced line, trained in the FBI to be thrown out as though it were off-the-cuff, to catch a suspect and make them an unsuspecting friend. Adults in general were not good at making new friends, and the Bureau trained its agents well. Thus Eleri was here to make as many new “friends” as she could.

  "Hm. Maybe for a little bit, if you don't mind."

  The baristas kept the patrons moving through very quickly and, in a moment, they had placed their orders. It pleased her that Kaya simply said yes and let her buy the coffee as a thank-you for her previous help, but it was even better when Kaya replied, "I'll buy the next time I run into you."

  "Sounds like a plan."

  They set up in the corner. Kaya checked in on her phone while Eleri put her laptop out on the table as though she were truly going to do work. She couldn't check video footage with Kaya here, but she could at least open things up and pretend she was looking at email. She logged into a dummy account under the name Eleri Miller. It was already subscribed to several different online programs, so ads for shoes, life insurance, and even erectile dysfunction pills popped up and filled her inbox as she opened the page.

  When Kaya looked up from her phone, she made an odd face. "Joule said she saw you over at Johanna Schmitt’s house the other day."

  "Yes," Eleri said, grateful they had prepared Johanna for this. "Yeah, my friend and I were in the neighborhood, so we stopped in. I was with Maggie Wells earlier yesterday and she said Johanna was really concerned about her husband, and she hoped I could help. I’m not a doctor, but I am a Human Biologist, and anyway, I can read the autopsy and toxicology reports, and I just. . . I wanted to be helpful."

  “She was frustrated with the way things were handled and how long it took to give her no answers,” Kaya reported, proving the earlier theory that the Mazurs were friends with Johanna Schmitt.

  Eleri tried to hide the gears in her brain turning. Kaya was another insight into Johanna’s thoughts on Marat’s death. She waited, hoping Kaya would offer more, and was pleased when she got lucky. "They held his case for long enough, I got the feeling she was suspicious of something."

  "I think she was," Eleri said, able to confirm that much. Johanna would continue to tell people how she felt, though at least she would now be able to say that she had spoken to Eleri and Eleri had helped to allay her fears. "I helped her look through the report and see that some of the things that were in there actually did make sense. I mean, not that it would make anyone happy, but it was why they had held his case for longer."

  "Well that's good," Kaya said. "I hate the whole situation and I really hate seeing Johanna upset on top of it. Well, I made a casserole and I took it over, but I didn't really feel there was anything else I could do. At least you were able to give some real help," Kaya said.

  “Casseroles are real help.” She wanted to tell about her sister’s funeral, and that her mother ate only when people brought food. Eleri thought maybe her mother only ate out of obligation, so friends bringing food had been beyond helpful—but she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t give out pieces of her real life, because she wasn’t really a friend. Eleri knew the sadness from holding back showed on her face and could only hope that it would be read as concern for Marat Rychenkov.

  The topic changed and Eleri let it, though she cataloged what she could about Joule and Cage and Kaya’s husband Nate. She shared pre-selected details about Donovan and their friendship. But nothing else emerged about the murder. Kaya left about fifteen minutes later, saying she had to get into work, and Eleri got down to the business of watching the footage from in and around the Schmitt house.

  As she filtered through hours of nothing happening from camera after camera through the night, Eleri told herself to be proud that she'd managed to stitch this small loop of friends a little closer. She'd covered for Johanna's change in feelings and maybe made another connection.

  Clicking her way through the footage absently, Eleri forwarded through places that seemed pointless. Then she slowed and carefully watched the areas that seemed more important in only slightly faster than real time. Still, she turned up nothing.

  Until the cameras read 8:15 that morning.

  Johanna Schmitt had left her house, locking up and heading out the front door to the car, which was still sitting in the driveway. Not fifteen minutes later, a man in uniform headed around the side of the house and into the backyard to read the meter. Only he never read the meter. Instead, he headed to the back door and let himself in, getting the code right on the first try.

  15

  Three evenings later, Eleri sat at the dining table, frustrated enough to feel it in her skin. She sat with her irritation, hoping something would pop or an idea would come to her, or the phone would ring and things would change. Her frustration came from the abundance of information she had, none of which solved anything or even pointed her in a direction to start. It seemed the more she learned, the more complicated the case became—not less. She let herself seethe and boil as she waited for Donovan to walk through the door.

  He came in by way of the garage and took one look at her as he turned the corner from the kitchen. "You look upset. And here I was thinking we should get pizza."

  "Jesus,” she groaned, putting her head into her hands. He hadn't been gone that long and pizza was probably a good idea. "You're right, we should go out for dinner. In fact, we should probably do it as often as p
ossible. It lets us both eat and be seen. Hopefully, we’ll see some people we know and get somewhere. Anywhere!"

  "What's going on?"

  He'd been at the CDC again. Donovan had gotten the dreaded call the day before to be a backup physician with the local walk-in clinic, and though he believed he'd relatively passed muster, he was pretty sure he hadn't impressed anyone—or so he said. Unfortunately, that was a balancing act between getting him out and about in town and him exhibiting an anxiety level Eleri had not witnessed in him before. But they needed him in that job. Being a walk-in clinic doctor gave him access to a lot of information about people that the agents would not otherwise get.

  Still, he’d been stressed enough that he'd gone off to the CDC this morning to avoid getting called back in. He said he would re-check the clothing being held in evidence from Marat Rychenkov and also see if he could come up with anything they had missed.

  When she asked him if the clinic was really that bad for him, he’d replied, “The day may have stressed me out more than it possibly helped any patients.”

  Frowning, she’d asked, "You don't think you missed anything or caused any problems, do you?"

  Though he looked defeated, he’d at least shaken his head in the negative. "No. I can correctly identify and test for strep when necessary. It just freaks me out. I'm always afraid I've treated them for strep and missed something big. I'm not actually a live person physician." He'd said it through clenched teeth, despite the fact that his current MD licensure claimed otherwise.

  Eleri had brushed it off the evening before. “Well, you all survived, and people got their antibiotics.”

  “And I re-set a dislocated shoulder, but not the broken bone. That one I handed off. No one wants to see my casting technique.”