The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  She’d laughed. “We cast foot prints better than we cast broken bones.”

  That had earned a small grin and an, “Amen.”

  At least today had been good for Donovan—but now it was Eleri talking through clenched teeth. "I've watched all this footage. Our intruder is coming almost every day. Which—if Johanna’s records are correct—shows an increase in visits. But it hasn’t been enough days to statistically establish that pattern yet."

  “Did Johanna tell you that?”

  Eleri glared up at him until he tried a different tack.

  "Did you figure out who it is, or at least find any leads?" He'd seen the videos she was pulling up each evening, though she'd also gone through hours and hours of footage with no movement from multiple cameras. She’d marked the time where their visitor showed up.

  "I don't know," she said. "You can’t see much. Though I can see the person going in and out of the house and moving things around, I can’t get much information on them. And today's episode of Visiting Johanna Schmitt's House While She's Out did not yield anything new. In fact, I'm not even convinced it's always the same person.”

  "Are you serious?" Donovan’s expression seemed to snap to a more grave look at that news.

  "I'm serious.” She pointed at her screen as though it might explain. “Look. The perp appears to be two different sizes on different visits." She pointed to the video she’d opened of the first visit they’d caught on film.

  Though the intruder was thoroughly covered, he was wearing worker apparel from the local gas company. He'd gone around the back of the house with his meter reader in one hand and his work bag in the other. However—as was clear from the video and guarded from street view by the fence—he went right past the gas pipes and headed for the back door. That was something a meter reader would likely never do.

  From the hidden camera Wade had installed there, Eleri was able to see the intruder punch in the door code, correctly, on the first try. The door opened—exactly as they planned for it to happen—and he'd gone in. It appeared he had no idea he was being watched this time. He'd checked Marat Rychenkov’s office again, then the kitchen, carefully putting each thing he touched back in its place before leaving.

  She told Johanna about the intrusions when they happened, and Mrs. Schmitt would avoid those areas until Eleri or Donovan or Wade could go dust for fingerprints. But the video showed flashes of blue each time the perp reached his hands out from under the cover of the long jacket sleeves. The color told Eleri his hands were covered in common, latex-free gloves, which was probably why he'd covered them so efficiently with the jacket while heading inside. The flash of blue on his hands would've given it away to anyone who saw him.

  Eleri flipped ahead to her marked footage from the next day. This time, their perp came to the front door and stood blocking the street view as he entered the code. Then he acted as though he was speaking to someone inside and being allowed in. This strategy would only raise flags if someone already knew that Johanna Schmitt was not home, and since she’d been keeping such odd hours, the timing alone wouldn’t alert a neighbor.

  Cuing up video from the third visit, Eleri pointed again and said, “This is where I become uncertain that it’s all the same person.”

  One the third day, a person had come in from over the fence in the backyard. This meant a car didn't even pull up in front of Johanna Schmitt's home or even on her street. The car—if there was one—was likely on the street that ran parallel behind her home. Again, the perp was dressed just like a meter reader.

  “Here. And here.” She pointed to the house that shared a backyard fence with the Rychenkov-Schmitt home. “So I think they parked at this house and went into the back yard as though to read the meter. But instead, they hop the fence into Johanna’s place and go right to the back door. This requires both houses to have no one at home, but that’s more than plausible, since it was mid-day.”

  “Do you have evidence of him coming over the fence? Can you see it?” Donovan motioned her to rewind.

  She shook her head. “But he appears in the middle of the far back of the space—as far back as the cameras reach, because we were certain no one would come over the fence.” She sighed. “And we do have cameras telling us he didn’t come in the front or around the sides. So unless he dropped onto the roof and then jumped there—facing toward the house, mind you—he came from the direction of the back fence.”

  They had an excellent array of cameras at the house—or so Eleri had thought. The first night, they’d had Johanna turn off her circuit breaker and Wade had come to the home again—though this time he was dressed as a Curie Power employee. Taking a ladder, he installed very small cameras under the eaves, covering almost every corner of the home and getting clear views of both porches, under the guise of checking every power line at the house.

  After he'd installed all the cameras, they flipped the circuits back on, making it appear as though Curie Power had showed up and fixed the problem. Eleri was then able to see in and around the house in live feeds and recordings.

  The first thing these recordings told them was that Johanna Schmitt was right. Someone was repeatedly entering her home and searching for something. The second thing it told them was that the intruder didn’t seem dangerous. Despite Marat’s murder, this perpetrator was carefully avoiding Johanna and not even causing damage. Eleri was holding out hope that they might find what he took and use that the help find out why Marat was killed.

  Eleri pointed to the images going by on her screen, hoping to show Donovan why she now thought there were two people involved. "Look. Look how tall he is next to the back door. He's shorter than the first day. And smaller."

  “Probably.” They both knew not to trust first appearances on camera images. Eleri hated pictures. Donovan leaned over, motioning for her to flip back and forth between the two pieces of footage. They watched both snippets several times. “He does look shorter. He doesn't come up to the same brick."

  "No," Eleri said. "So now we have at least two people involved in breaking into Rychenkov’s home."

  "Shit," Donovan muttered from over her shoulder.

  "Exactly," she said, though she felt her teeth clenching again as she said it, her frustration mounting. She'd held out hope that Donovan would look at the images and tell her she was wrong, that it was possibly—or even clearly—the same person and she'd just misinterpreted things. But he hadn’t. That meant two people, and two would be harder to find.

  It was more than possible any resident of Curie had already figured that out. One person could be known missing at the times the crimes were committed, but two people could tag each other out, alibi-ing themselves for at least a portion of the crimes and making the investigators’ job about ten times harder.

  “Okay, we’re screwed with that. Let’s see what we can find out.” Donovan rested a hand on her shoulder, and she was grateful for a direction that might yield something.

  The second day, the perp had gone into the garage. He’d stood for some time, carefully looking at all the pieces Marat Rychenkov had arranged on his shelves. Though Johanna had told them she would not have been able to tell if anything in the garage had been moved, at least now they knew the perp had gone in here.

  He or she eventually chose a few items and picked them up. He booted up an old laptop, carefully touching only the edges in an attempt to not disturb the dust that was settling on it. After a few moments, his fingers tapped on the keys and Eleri cursed.

  “Dammit! We should have turned on the cameras in all the monitors in the house!” She was mad she hadn’t thought of it before. If they’d enabled the laptop to snap a shot of anyone opening it, they would have the invader’s mugshot. “We could have seen his or her face! Right there!” She was jabbing her finger at the screen and trying not to break either.

  Donovan patted her on the shoulder again. “We’ll do that tonight.”

  They watched the perp tap the keys for a while, then leave. Eleri sighed. �
��We’ll have to check that. See if he emailed himself something… because he didn’t download anything physical, it seems.”

  They gave up and watched the third visit. It had occurred that very afternoon. Now, Eleri watched the video of the smaller person getting into the house. “This was just a few hours ago, while Johanna was still out,”she murmured. This time the intruder rifled through boxes in closets, examining what Eleri assumed were important papers.

  When the perp again failed to look up directly at a camera, or even hold a paper up for them to see what he was looking at, Eleri’s frustration rose again.

  “Let’s get that pizza now,” Donovan suggested. “I’m hungry, and pizza makes everything better.” He was standing before he finished the sentence. “Besides, maybe we’ll see something that cracks this whole case wide open.”

  Eleri felt better as soon as they left the angular house. And the pizza joint smelled good enough to make her hunger override her frustration. When the pizza arrived at the table, she had her plate ready and was reaching for a slice even as the server was asking if it looked okay. When Donovan held a hand out to stop her, she assumed it was to keep her from burning herself. She didn’t care.

  But he’d looked up at the server in stunned surprised and asked, “Do you use a template? Are all the pizzas cut so precisely?”

  She noticed then, the perfect sixths on the circle. As their second pizza showed up on the heels of the first, she looked and saw that it, too, was immaculately sliced. Eleri took her piece anyway and was already biting in as the server responded.

  “Yes, we started using a template when several of our cutters got sloppy and the guests complained …” There was a pause, then, “The residents around here can be … precise.”

  Eleri thought the young man probably had wanted to say “uptight,” but had politely held back.

  She’d eaten five slices, all the while waving at the few people she knew, but not managing to strike up any conversations or get anything meaningful done. In the end, though she was full, she was still frustrated. She couldn't recall the last time she'd eaten pizza while she was in such a foul mood. Despite the smile she pasted on her face, her thoughts churned while she was eating, and Eleri didn’t like where they were headed.

  When they arrived home, though, she was able to unleash. "We've got to get Johanna Schmitt out of that house!"

  Donovan nodded in agreement, but she wasn’t done letting her irritation roll off her tongue. "I know she wanted to stay and we needed that cover. But this murderer keeps looking for something in particular that they aren’t finding. I can only imagine how long it will take them before they get frustrated enough to try to get the information directly out of her. And she doesn’t know what it is."

  "Agreed," Donovan said, "but we need to catch these people. If we take her out of the house, then we save her but we may lose our opportunity to catch our perps. Is it possible the intruder and the murderer are separate issues?”

  Eleri understood what he was asking. “It’s possible, but not probable, and I think her safety is at stake now.”

  Donovan agreed and they began working out a plan. “Can we do this without alerting them that we were watching?"

  "I don’t know," Eleri said, now sad and worn out. Her was brain no longer running at full steam and her new level of worry wasn’t helping. “Maybe … maybe we get them to believe she's on vacation. That might encourage them to go into the home more carelessly."

  "We also need to up our camera game. We put them all up high, not thinking our perp would be smart enough to keep covered even inside the house, but. . ."

  "But," Eleri filled in, "this is Curie, Nebraska. Everyone is above average IQ and honestly, if I was casing that house, I wouldn't have taken my hood off, either—cameras or not. Keeping my face in the shadows only works to my benefit."

  She had been frustrated by the gloves, too. They hadn't been able to get a lead on something as minor as the perp's skin color or any possibility of tattoos. They'd vacuumed for stray hairs but found nothing.

  With the decision made, Eleri called Johanna Schmitt's phone and let her know they had a new plan. But the woman didn’t answer and she wound up leaving a message.

  “What?” Donovan asked, looking up from something on the table. “You look worried.”

  “It’s eight p.m. and Johanna Schmitt didn’t answer her phone for me …”

  16

  "Shit." Donovan muttered it, though he would like to have yelled it at the top of his lungs. He couldn’t, though. It might alert others in the vicinity to what he was seeing.

  He and Eleri had begun an active search for Johanna Schmitt barely thirty minutes after Eleri's first phone call didn't go through. His partner had set a timer just after leaving the first voicemail, then dove back into viewing the footage from the Rychenkov-Schmitt house.

  They'd learned early on that you couldn't just remember to do something later—not when a case was at stake. Unfortunately, they hadn't realized far greater than the case was at stake tonight.

  When the timer had gone off, they had been fully absorbed back into the work and were both startled that the thirty minutes had already passed.

  Eleri checked her phone before looking up at him. "Mrs. Schmitt hasn’t called me back. Your turn."

  So Donovan had placed a call very similar to the first one Eleri had made. He'd tried the landline at the house, though they had cameras there and could see she wasn't home. He wondered what the likelihood was that she was in fact home, but out of camera range, but he came to the conclusion that it was incredibly low, given that her car wasn’t in the driveway.

  He hoped she’d forwarded her home phone line to somewhere else; people around here might do that. Still, it yielded no answer. When he got her voicemail, just as Eleri had earlier, he left a second message with greater urgency and called her cell phone, once again getting no answer other than her recorded message.

  Deciding action beyond dialing was now necessary, they'd tried her local haunts, trying to remember where it was she had gone that afternoon. Though Johanna Schmitt had very readily handed over as much information as she could about herself and her husband each time they asked, she’d not been good about remembering to make frequent and regular updates. She was inconsistent at best about letting them know where she was going each time she left the house. Her phone and GPS had always confirmed what she told them after the fact.

  She had a class to substitute teach tonight on the high school campus—they knew that much. If she had arrived safely there, then their worries should be lower. It was the trouble she might have run into before that which concerned Donovan. No one would have reported to them if Mrs. Schmitt hadn’t shown up to teach or likely even have called the police.

  He'd wanted to knock on the door of the Mazur family across the street to see if they knew anything. If it came to that, he might just do it—but right now, he didn’t even know the woman formally, only what he’d investigated of her. Even Eleri's position as new friend to Kaya was not a strong enough bond to simply knock on the neighbors’ doors and ask if they knew what had happened to Johanna.

  "Is she possibly in the house?" Donovan asked, wanting to be sure they hadn’t overlooked the obvious.

  "Unless she's in the bathroom or on her bed, and got there via teleportation, no. I’ve double-checked all the footage. We saw her leave and we don't see her come back."

  "She could have drilled a hole into the upstairs bathroom via the roof,” he offered. “We don't have cameras there." While it might have sounded snarky, he had to remember that they thought they had a thorough sweep of cameras, and yet someone had managed to come in, probably over the back fence. And they couldn't prove it, because their visual sweep was not as thorough as they had originally thought. It was normal for a thief, or a perpetrator, to thwart the best-laid plans—and he suspected that in Curie, Nebraska, that was an everyday circumstance.

  After a short discussion, they opted not to check the hou
se—not because they didn't believe Johanna Schmitt could have dropped in through the ceiling, but because they believed the likelihood of that was lower than of her being somewhere else. It had taken thirty minutes to work up a plan. They had to have ready answers and be in agreement if asked about why they were out and who they were visiting at each location. Their answers had to make their visits seem absolutely normal. But they’d taken the time to do it right, as they fully expected to find everything was okay.

  So they had walked down the halls of the high school, with Eleri making casual comments the whole way. “I’m thinking about applying for work here. I saw that the school offered Anatomy and Physiology last year, but not this year. Perhaps they are missing a teacher.”

  Donovan answered her, encouraging the fictional Eleri Miller to apply to teach, even though she didn’t have a teaching certificate. They kept the faked conversation going until they got to Room 342.

  “Donovan, I don’t even know what to say. This is one of the most beautifully designed high schools I’ve ever seen.” That part of her conversation was probably quite real. Donovan hadn’t yet brought her on an official tour here, though he'd come through with Marshall Bennett showing him the way earlier. He suspected the high school was Bennett’s crown jewel for prospective residents that the Mayor liked. The tour had been far too smooth for it to be Marshall Bennett’s first time showing the place off. Now Donovan repeated some of the information to Eleri as they walked the halls.

  The place sparkled, the floors mopped to a high gloss, the hallways sporting lockers, but above them papers, artwork, all of exceptionally high caliber for a high school. One set of lockers featured what appeared to be a small, hand-built rollercoaster, with a marble rolling across it. Underneath it was a small plaque that read, "Perpetual motion experiment. If you see the marble has stopped, please note the time and place the marble back at the designated starting point." Donovan watched as the marble rolled on and on, around and around the long track, even though no one else appeared to be here at this hour.