The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  Good, Eleri thought. The timing was right, and Kaya often stopped in about now. "Hey.” She put on a genuine smile, glad to see the woman. “How are you doing?"

  "Apparently I’m doing better than you," Kaya said. "You look like you're about ready to kill that computer."

  "Job hunting," Eleri said. "It’s probably a good thing you interrupted me, or I might have strangled my laptop, and it’s just the messenger. Now that you're here, I'm going to get rid of it." She hit a button, quickly pulling the security footage from the screen and shutting the laptop. "Are you staying?"

  "I can. A little bit," Kaya said, and Eleri patted the seat beside her, motioning Kaya to come around to the side she was on so they could chat.

  "So the job hunt is not going well?" Kaya asked.

  "Less than stellar. I interviewed with several of the think tanks, but they don't seem to think they necessarily need a person with human physiology degrees."

  "That was one of the perks of moving in early," Kaya told her, taking a sip from her coffee. "We had jobs waiting. The town was empty, and we were filling it in. It got busy quickly enough, but Bennett made sure that all of us who were in the first round had secure job positions. Now, it's a little more like a real town. What are you drinking?"

  Eleri explained her order and they traded cups for sips.

  "Oh, that's good," Eleri said, as peppermint and a dash of vanilla hit her tongue, before taking her own coffee cup back.

  "I haven't had that before," Kaya said. "Could you maybe find a job in Lincoln in the meantime?" She changed subjects mid-statement and seemed to think Eleri would keep up.

  Eleri talked her way through options in Lincoln for a few moments, and Kaya eventually grinned and said, "Look, I was debating whether to tell you this or not, but I think it's funny. I know you see my kids sometimes, so you can't tell them I told you. Please don’t, or Joule would kill me."

  "Oh," Eleri asked, feeling a bit of juicy gossip coming on, and wondering whether it would be pertinent to the case. “I can keep a secret.” It was true in ways that Kaya Mazur had yet to guess.

  "It's the funniest thing. Joule is convinced that you're an FBI agent."

  If Eleri had been taking a drink, she would've choked on it or spit it across the table. Instead, she hoped the shock on her face looked like an actual reaction to being accused of being an undercover FBI agent.

  "Really?" she said. "Okay. This I've got to hear. Why would she think that?" In fact, Eleri was actually very, very curious why a high-schooler might have pegged her.

  "Actually, it’s more than that. She thinks you and your friend are both FBI agents, and that you’re here because we had a murder."

  "Really?" Holy. Fuck. They'd been made by a high school girl.

  Kaya continued, and as Eleri watched, she saw the mother really did find the whole idea humorous. Thank God.

  "Yeah. I mean, you know we live catty corner to Johanna's house and Marat's? Last week, Joule saw workers going into the house. One was tall and one was short, and she decided that they were you two. She insists they had the same walks as the two of you do. And she thinks your time of arrival in town is suspicious." Kaya grinned at her own silliness and took another drink from her coffee.

  Eleri was only glad that Kaya thought it was all a joke. "Well that's funny," she said out loud, adding, "I wonder what an FBI salary is. Maybe they’re hiring!"

  34

  After Kaya Mazur left Eleri reeling at the table in the Up N Atom, Eleri tried to regain her focus. She had the rest of the footage from the Rychenkov-Schmitt home to go through, but her brain was agog.

  Joule Mazur had made them. The teenager had seen them going into the neighbor’s house and scoping it out for themselves dressed as workers. She'd recognized their gaits and put it all together. She even accounted for their coincidental times of arrival in Curie. At least her mother thought her child was being silly, but Eleri wondered how much longer she and Donovan could hold out. Eleri wondered if Joule had managed to keep her suspicions a secret from her twin brother, Cage.

  The two kids seemed fairly close, maybe because they were so nerdy, or maybe because they were twins. But while they bantered a lot and teased each other, they didn't seem to truly bicker the way many siblings did. If Eleri counted that, then it meant Cage probably already knew Joule's suspicions, or he very shortly would. And if that were the case, then there was every possibility that Emersyn and Madisyn James would know in a few days, too. Again, if not already.

  She was likely well and truly screwed.

  Taking the worst-case scenario, Eleri had to account for the fact that there would now be four teenagers who were highly intelligent running around town who knew that Eleri and Donovan were FBI agents trying to solve a dual murder. At least Kaya Mazur hadn’t mentioned the new science teacher at the high school …

  Not cool, Eleri thought. She didn't think she'd ever had her cover blown quite so badly. She wanted to call Donovan, but the problem with that was the open phone line and the fact that she was still sitting in the Up N Atom. If she tried to drive right now, she was scrambled enough that she'd probably plow into a lamppost, and that wouldn't serve her purpose either.

  So she flipped the laptop open again and tried her hardest to watch the footage. As she did, she found she had another major problem on her hands. She'd been right the first time. No one had gone into the Rychenkov-Schmitt home in quite some time—twice the average time span between previous visits, in fact. Though the visitor had searched the home repeatedly and on a regular basis, they either had given up or had found something else that they thought was adequate.

  Maybe, in fact, the information that Eleri and Donovan were now pursuing—the notebooks and the drive—were either copies of the originals or had simply not been found. Maybe they’d been left behind by the visitor, because they were secondary to the real reason Marat had been murdered.

  Eleri had to consider all these possibilities now. Unfortunately, her mind kept going to the fact that the people who seemed to have most often been in the Rychenkov-Schmitt home when Marat and Johanna were alive were Joule and Cage Mazur, the two who already seemed to figure out that Eleri and Donovan were FBI agents.

  Eleri wanted to break cover badly, but there were so many protocols in place that would be blasted if she did it. She would have to first talk to Westerfield, to explain what they knew and that they'd been made. Thus, that breaking their cover wouldn’t really be breaking it. And even if she did all that, Westerfield would still have to agree that this was the best solution. He very well might not. Eleri did not look forward to telling Westerfield that she'd not only been discovered but had been discovered by a high school student.

  Secondly, she and Donovan couldn't just tell Joule and Cage that they were right. Legally, the twins were still under-aged—children, despite their obvious intelligence. Thus, the whole family would have to know, or at least one parent. Given that Kaya Mazur had already brushed the idea aside and found it silly, Eleri did not want to break that news to her. So she sat on it, as frustrated as it made her.

  And third, Eleri added with a frown, this made Joule look more like a suspect. Eleri could admit her own bias in not wanting to investigate the teenager, but it would have to be done.

  Eventually she’d watched all the video feeds and had seen nothing. Closing her laptop, she picked up her belongings and headed out, although it would still be a little while before Donovan ended his shift. So she took a turn to the right and made a few loops through the neighborhood of Kangaroo Court.

  The name cracked her up. The Shire, C’thulhu Heights, even her own Pythagoras Point—each name had an air of seriousness to it, but Kangaroo Court had another meaning entirely.

  Still, she saw several people out in the main fenced area playing with their dogs, Of course, she also spotted an actual kangaroo in with them, or maybe it was a wallaby, in the space she would have usually termed a “dog park.” She turned the corner and saw a miniature donkey playin
g in one of the front yards, kicking up its heels as the sprinkler system came on. It wore a collar, and Eleri could only assume the small white flags around the border of the yard must have meant there was an underground fence and a shock system.

  She passed Jivika Das's home and realized she didn't know what strange animal Das owned, if any. The backyards here were fenced with medium-height, wooden fences. Several had been built up taller, probably to contain whatever kinds of high-jumping animals the owners might have preferred.

  Eleri hadn't heard a dog when they’d placed the tracker the other night, but this morning, she looked up and caught a cat in Das's second story window, so at least there was that. After seeing the house, she wound her way out of the neighborhood. Though she was pretending to want to buy the empty house several lots over, she couldn't be seen there too terribly much. She couldn't afford for Das to become suspicious of her, which the biomimickry specialist would not do unless for some reason Das became aware of someone scoping out her home. But if Das was the killer, then, well, she would be watching. She would catch on to Eleri relatively quickly.

  Eleri brushed that thought aside. Hell, the high-schooler already had already figured them out.

  By the time she made it back to the Frank Lloyd Wright home, Donovan had arrived. "You're early," she offered by way of greeting.

  "Ah, we got a lull. They sent me home."

  "How are you doing with seeing live patients?" she asked, remembering how stressed he’d been the first day.

  "It gets easier. They all have the same thing, so that helps."

  She didn't comment that maybe they didn't all have the same thing, because surely Donovan knew what he was doing. He had attended and graduated medical school, after all. On top of that, he would never knowingly go into a clinic and perhaps under-treat or mis-diagnose anyone. Then again, maybe he could smell strep or the flu.

  She pointed to him and then pointed to the couch. "You need to come in here and sit down."

  He offered up a wary look from the sides of his eyes. He’d been scrounging in the fridge, and his expression seemed to ask if it could wait until after he had food. But she shook her head; it couldn’t. "Now."

  Sitting him down and perching on the comfy chair across from him, she told him her two disturbing revelations of the morning. Both about Joule Mazur and about the fact that whoever was intruding into the Rychenkov-Schmitt home was no longer coming back to look for anything.

  Donovan leaned back on the couch and sighed. "So you think they found what they were looking for?"

  "I have no idea," Eleri sighed. They talked for a while about what to do about the high school kids and realized their job had just become infinitely harder. Donovan agreed that they didn't want to call Westerfield.

  "We can't break cover anyway," he told her. "We can't trust high-schoolers to keep the secret."

  Eleri agreed with all the points, even though she desperately wanted to be able to speak freely with even just one of the town’s residents. Someone who might know something. Getting information out of people without them knowing was an art form. She was even relatively good at it; the patience was the part she lacked.

  Eleri was just accepting her fate when her computer made a loud, buzzing noise. Within the same second, so did Donovan’s. In one motion, both of them leapt toward the main table and flipped up screens and started clicking buttons.

  “That’s the home alarm alert.” Eleri felt her heart still as she realized what it was.

  “At Johanna Schmitt’s,” Donovan added the words without looking up from his screen. They’d set the alarm to call them every time it was activated—not just when it alerted the police or the fire department. It was another backup system that Eleri hadn’t expected would ever get used.

  Now, here it was.

  She was starting to call up the video feed to see what was happening, when suddenly the alarm shut off.

  35

  "Shit!" Donovan practically shouted as he reached for the laptop Eleri had just aimed his direction. A minute ago, she'd offered to show him nothing, and now there was something.

  Donovan watched as Eleri’s fingers flew across the keyboard, clicking the trackpad buttons to bring up the images from the security cameras. She quickly dialed up the common, four-screen split view. And he watched as the image from the front door of the Rychenkov-Schmitt home loaded into the top left of the screen. Another appeared to be streaming an image of the back door. The third showed the inside of the garage, and the last one scanned inside the living area.

  What became apparent was that someone had busted through the glass in the back door. It appeared, from the broken shards on the floor, that they must have broken the glass and reached in to open the door from the inside knob. The security feed was ever-so-slightly delayed, but the alarm was practically on point. Thus, it had activated but already turned off. Donovan frowned, not quite catching why that was important.

  The alarm was set to signal the police or fire department, depending on what triggered it. But it alerted him and Eleri regardless of the cause. Now he could see the box, just inside the back door. Though no one was visible on the camera feed, the box was silent—no lights, no sound—with the broken glass scattered on the floor beneath it.

  Then his brain clicked as to why the alarm ending was an issue. The person who had entered had put the correct code into the alarm system, thus silencing it. If it was done quickly enough, the police would not be alerted, and the backup protocol—a call from the security company—would not have to be activated. Whoever was in the home would not have to answer the three system security questions that Marat and Johanna had set.

  Donovan and Eleri had not messed with anything internal to the system, only piggybacked it to alert them if it went off. So Donovan frowned at the screen. No, he hadn’t figured it all out yet.

  "Let's go!" Eleri jolted him from his thoughts. She was already gathering her bag and heading to the door in the kitchen that led to the garage. "If we leave now, maybe we can get there before they leave."

  "But we can watch the footage," Donovan said, "and get the person later."

  "If we catch them in the act, we don't—Shit," she said, "we will have to break cover. But we’re probably going to have to do that either way. I say we can catch them in the act," Eleri said, "Don't you think we have a better chance of getting them to talk if we are doing so inside the Rychenkov-Schmitt home? Rather than tracking this person down later today or tomorrow?"

  "Damn." Donovan had to agree. Before he’d finished the word, Eleri was flying out the door into the garage. He'd been hungry when he walked in. Eleri had interrupted his digging in the fridge to tell him important news. While he agreed the news had been important, he was still hungry. Now he had no idea how long it would before he could eat. Haphazardly, he reached into the pantry as he jogged by and grabbed a fistful of granola bars as he headed out the door. Trailing along behind her, he asked her to please drive.

  Climbing into the passenger side of her car, Donovan peeled the wrapper on one bar, shoving half of it into his mouth in one bite as she backed rapidly out of the driveway.

  The problem with this scenario was that they were heading to the home in the middle of a break-in, but they still had not seen the intruder—or intruders.

  He chewed as Eleri took the turn, exiting Pythagoras Point just a little too sharply. His hand automatically reached up to hold on to what his father had always referred to as the "oh shit" bar as he spoke. "This isn't the same intruder, and we don't know who we're encountering."

  "Why is it not the same?" she asked, obviously not following the same line of thought.

  "Because the old intruder knew the new code that Joanna Schmitt had changed it to. This one didn't. In fact, this one went so far as to break the glass. So they not only didn't know the code, they don't even know how to hack the system and find the code."

  “True," Eleri replied, "but they knew the inside code to turn off the alarm. And it seems they mana
ged to do that quickly enough to not have even alerted the police. They were prepared to use that code. It only alerted us because we had it rigged."

  "El," he said, more cautiously, even as she hooked the car around another sharp turn, “this means our intruder knew Marat well. But not Johanna. This person knew him well enough to know the alarm code to his house. It’s an old code, probably. Johanna never said she reset that one. But this person knows it, most likely because they had been there with Marat. He either trusted them enough to give them the code to his alarm system, or else they were able to watch him put it in.”

  He imagined the scenario they raced toward. “So they came in, probably thinking they could walk right into the house with the codes. Probably they knew the old code for the digital lock. Obviously, he or she didn't have a good workaround plan, because they wound up breaking the glass. But, once they got into the house, Marat's silencing code worked on the alarm system. Hopefully, it means they think they’re okay as it is. No worries until someone finds the broken glass in a home no one lives in.”

  “Which means they are probably still in the house right now." Eleri took another sharp turn, this time to the left, throwing Donovan against the door. He reached out and pushed the button to lock all of the doors. Even as he pressed up against the side of the car, the clicking sound comforted him. The way Eleri was driving, he wasn't so confident that even his seatbelt would keep him from rolling clear.

  "El, I know we want to get there, but we can't get pulled over. None of the police officers know who we are … or what we are. We can't be seen driving erratically to get to a stranger’s house. We have to look like we just randomly arrived in the neighborhood."

  "Shit, Donovan," she growled, apparently realizing he was right, even as she slowed the car. "I was in Jivika Das’s neighborhood this morning. Just driving around. Can I be ‘just driving around’ this one, too? Am I showing you something? A house for sale?" Eleri kept asking questions Donovan didn’t yet have the answers to. "Why are we there? What are we visiting for? We're not. We have no good excuse. We don't even have our workman's uniforms on. Can we park on the street behind?"