by Jake Needham
Jackson hesitated and Tay held his breath. If Jackson asked for formal authorization from CID in Singapore, then this little adventure was over before it even started.
But he didn’t.
“Sure,” Jackson said after a moment. “I guess that wouldn’t be a problem. Let’s just call it a cop-to-cop favor.”
A cop-to-cop favor. Right. Let’s call it that.
“Why don’t you come back to my office?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
It took almost three hours and a full pot of coffee, but Tay eventually found her.
At least he was pretty sure it was her. How many slim, expensive-looking foreign women wearing jeans and snow-white shirts buttoned at the cuffs and carrying green leather messenger bags could there have been in Pattaya at exactly the time August met the messenger at Secrets? Tay was reasonably certain what the right answer to that question was.
Jackson had hung around for a while when Tay started going through the hotel’s video archives for the right period. He said he wanted to help Tay understand how to operate the software and retrieve the video, but Tay thought it more likely that Jackson just wanted to make sure Tay was doing what he said he was doing. Tay could tell that Jackson knew perfectly well he wasn’t being told the truth concerning what this was really all about, at least not the whole truth, but it didn’t appear to bother him. He seemed to Tay to be more curious than concerned.
After a while Jackson got bored and went out and came back with a pot of coffee and two mugs, but after drinking less than half of his coffee Jackson got bored again, made some kind of lame excuse, and left for a second time. Tay certainly didn’t blame him.
The coffee was extremely good, a lot better than the coffee Tay had gotten from room service, and he wondered briefly if the hotel staff put aside the good stuff for themselves while the guests got the standard commercial bilge. Maybe that was being overly suspicious, Tay decided after he thought about it briefly. He knew he was probably inclined to look at far too many things from a standpoint of suspicion and mistrust. Probably this pot of coffee was just fresher. He decided to stop thinking about it.
Tay had set the search parameters to a period an hour either side of the time that August and the messenger had met at Secrets. It was no more than a fifteen-minute walk between the Hilton and Secrets, even if you were walking slowly because of the heat and humidity, so he was pretty sure that was a big enough window to catch the woman either coming or going from the hotel. Or maybe both. That is, it would be if she was actually staying at the Hilton at all. If she wasn’t, a week’s worth of video wasn’t going to do him any good.
It was slow, tedious work. The Hilton had a lot of cameras, and even at double and triple speed, Tay had to review forty to sixty minutes of video for each camera he accessed to cover the whole timeframe.
It was a stroke of good luck that he found the woman in the archives of the fourth camera he looked at. He tried three outdoor cameras first, ones that covered the side of the hotel near the motorcycle taxi stand where the two drivers claimed to have seen her, but he found nothing. He was anything but surprised. There were so many ways into and out of the hotel that she could have passed in full view of the motorcycle taxi drivers taking a dozen different routes.
But then Tay switched to the lobby camera that covered the elevators coming down from the guest room floors and he found the woman almost immediately. He nearly missed her. Trying to identify someone on video while watching people move by at double-speed required unwavering concentration, and Tay’s was flagging badly after nearly three hours of watching outside cameras with wide-angle lenses that showed hundreds and hundreds of people moving through their fields of vision.
The camera focused on the elevators, however, was at the end of an interior lobby just big enough for three elevators to open into it. People stepped out of the elevators into the small space, turned and walked directly toward the camera, and then turned again to go either into the lobby or in the opposite direction toward another bank of elevators that took them down into the shopping mall beneath the hotel.
The woman wore a blue baseball cap with the New York Yankees logo on it and she had it pulled down to just above her eyes with her head tilted toward the floor. Tay could tell the woman knew the camera was there and wasn’t going to let it get a clear picture of her face. If a classy-looking foreign woman hadn’t been as conspicuous in Pattaya as a camel in the Kentucky Derby, Tay probably would have missed her entirely.
Tay froze the video at the moment the camera provided the best view of the woman. He was disappointed that it wasn’t a very good image. Certainly not good enough for anyone to make an identification from it. With her head tilted down and the bill of the Yankees cap covering her face, the woman had given them nothing anyone could use to identify her, which had obviously been her intention. Still, that didn’t make the image entirely useless.
Now Tay had two things he had not had before.
First, he knew the woman was almost certainly a guest at the Hilton. There might have been other reasons for her to be coming down in the elevators from the guest room floors, of course, but the most obvious reason was still the most likely one. She was staying there.
And second, he knew an exact time when the woman had walked through a precise location in the lobby. With a time and a location, now he could track the woman’s movements on the other hotel cameras without spending God only knew how many tedious hours searching locations and times more or less at random.
Tay fiddled with the camera menu trying to remember the instructions Jackson had given him for printing a frame. Across the room, a printer clicked to life and whirred for a moment. Tay walked over, lifted the sheet of paper from the tray, and examined it. It was a clear, sharp reproduction of the image from the screen.
The Hilton’s video surveillance system was pretty slick and the software that managed it offered more ways of viewing and organizing the archived video than Tay could ever hope to understand. Fortunately, he had at least worked out how to search the video archives by time so he put in a time one minute following the woman leaving the elevator and almost immediately struck gold.
The woman appeared on the video recorded by a wide-angle camera that was focused on the reception desk in the lobby. She stood quietly waiting until a desk clerk was free, then went up to the clerk and initiated a brief conversation. Toward the end of the conversation, she handed the clerk something. The clerk bent down as if she was reaching under the desk, then handed something back. The angle made it impossible to see what was changing hands, but Tay’s guess was that nothing sinister was going on. Probably it was the same sort of interaction that at least a hundred guests a day had with the desk at the Hilton. They asked for directions or perhaps changed some money into local currency.
Tay sorted through all the other cameras focused on the area around the reception desk looking for a better angle, but he couldn’t find one. The woman was obviously very conscious of cameras and very careful about keeping them from picking up her face. Tay could see her on three of the other video feeds, but none of those feeds had captured an image adequate for identification either.
Two of the feeds did, however, have something else of interest to Tay: a clear image of the desk clerk with whom the woman had talked. She was young, probably no more than twenty-five. She was slim and attractive with her shiny black hair cut short and brushed tight to her head and she wore dark red eyeglasses with big round lenses.
Tay printed off stills of the young woman from both feeds and had just gotten up to retrieve them from the printer when Jackson walked back in.
“Did you find her?” Jackson asked when he saw Tay at the printer.
Tay took the sheets out of the printer tray and handed them to Jackson.
“Who’s that?”
Jackson looked back and forth from one picture to the other and shook his head.
“How should I know? You can’t see her face anyway.”
“N
ot the woman. The desk clerk.”
“Why are you interested in the desk clerk?”
“Because she’s talking to the woman I’m looking for and maybe she’ll remember something that will help me find her.”
Jackson studied Tay for a moment before he answered, searching for some sign of hidden meaning in his comment. Finally, he shrugged.
“I don’t know her real name. Everybody calls her Apple.”
“Apple? Seriously?”
“Thais have weird nicknames. What can I tell you?”
“If you can find her for me, I want to ask her—”
“She’s working today. You want me to talk to her?”
Tay thought for a moment. His first thought had been to get Jackson to find the clerk so he could ask her if she remembered anything about the woman. But maybe letting Jackson talk to her would be better. He knew Thais weren’t all that comfortable talking to foreigners. Since Jackson was a recognizable face, she would probably feel more relaxed talking to him. If he got anything at all, Tay could always go back then and push the clerk for more.
“Good idea,” Tay said. “Show her those pictures and see if she remembers the woman. Maybe she can think of something that might help me.”
“Yes, boss.”
Jackson tossed Tay a salute and headed out the door.
Tay used the software’s search function to bring up all the camera archives from one minute after the woman left the reception desk. He methodically worked his way through each of the feeds, shuttling them back and forth for a minute or two around the targeted time, but he could find no further trace of the woman. Had she been so careful about locating the cameras and so concerned about keeping her face away from all of them that she had been able to leave the hotel without appearing on any other feed? If she had, it gave Tay pause. Who was that capable, that professional, that good? Somebody with a lot of training, of course. Maybe law enforcement, or some government agency.
He was still thinking about that when Jackson returned and handed Tay the printouts without a word.
“That’s disappointing,” Tay said. “She didn’t remember anything, huh?”
Jackson just looked at him and pointed to the printouts.
That was when Tay realized he was holding a thicker stack of paper than he had given to Jackson. He flipped past the two pictures he had captured from the video feed and found himself looking at a copy of a Canadian passport. The next page was a copy of an American Express card and a registration card, and the third page was a copy of the woman’s hotel bill.
“This is her?”
“In the flesh, so to speak. Apple checked her in so she remembered her.”
The passport bore a picture of a pleasant-looking woman who had apparently gone to some pains to play down her natural attractiveness. It said her name was Susan Brandstetter. It said she was a Canadian citizen born January 19, 1972. Tay doubted any of that was true, of course.
He glanced at the hotel bill. One night’s lodging, a room service breakfast, and nothing else. No phone calls, no faxes, no movie charges. Phone calls would have made it too easy, wouldn’t it? How much luck could he expect to have?
The American Express card, however, was much more promising. It was naturally also in the name of Susan Brandstetter, but the hotel would have confirmed that the account was valid when the woman checked in just as it would with any guest. Then, when she checked out, it would have sent her charges to the same account for payment, and American Express must have accepted those charges.
That meant the account was real. It belonged to somebody, somebody who paid the bills using a check or a direct bank debit that would be traceable. It wasn’t much maybe, but it was a thread tied to things that were both concrete and tangible. Pull on that thread and it might just unravel the whole question of who August’s mystery messenger really was.
“I owe you one, Robert.”
“You sure do, man. If I ever get busted for anything in Singapore, I’m going to start screaming your name as soon as they cuff me.”
Tay didn’t have the heart to tell Jackson he didn’t think that was a particularly good idea. Most likely it would get him sent away for life.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In order to trace the American Express account and who was paying it, you needed resources to which Tay no longer had access. John August, Tay was certain, did have access to resources like that. In fact, he probably had access to resources Tay couldn’t even imagine. That meant all he had to do was get copies of the pictures, passport, American Express card, and registration form to August and he was done. He would be out of it. He could go home.
Upstairs in his hotel room, Tay retrieved the telephone August had given him from his bag. He opened the contacts directory and, sure enough, there was only one number in it just as August had said there was.
The number was labeled September. Cute. Really cute.
“John? It’s Sam.”
“You’ve found her already?”
“I think so, yes.”
“So, what have you got?”
“I’ve got her on video at the Hilton several times, but she was very cagey. She never shows her face clearly so there’s nothing you can run through any kind of a facial recognition database.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“Don’t get ahead of me here. One of the front desk clerks remembered her and the hotel’s security director made copies of the woman’s check-in records for me.”
“You identified yourself to the hotel’s security director and told him who you were looking for?”
“John, I’m not completely stupid. He thinks I’m a Singapore cop trying to find someone without involving the Thai police. Now do you want to hear what I’ve got, or don’t you?”
August said nothing, and after a moment Tay continued.
“I have a copy of the passport she presented to the hotel. It says she’s a Canadian in her mid-forties whose name is Susan Brandstetter.”
“That’s almost certainly a fake.”
“Of course, but it’s a very, very good fake. She didn’t buy it in Cambodia. What does that tell you?”
August didn’t respond.
“I’ve also got her registration card, her bill, and, best of all, a copy of the American Express card the hotel used for billing when she checked out. That means it’s got to be a real account and connect to somebody, but I don’t have access to the resources I need to run it any longer. I assume you do.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
Tay waited for August to fill in the details, but he didn’t.
“Okay, John,” Tay eventually said with a shrug in his voice, “what do you want me to do now?”
“Do you have copies of the hotel’s video feeds?”
“I printed stills from the parts where you can see her most clearly, but I didn’t ask for copies of the full feeds. They’re really not of any value.”
“Okay, then. Put the stills you have together with the passport copy and the other stuff into an envelope. I’ll send someone to pick it up.”
“That sounds to me like a lot of trouble for nothing. I could just photograph the pages with the camera in this phone and—"
“Forget it. I don’t want anything digital. We’re doing this old school. Pieces of paper never duplicate themselves and fly halfway around the world without you knowing it.”
“Fine with me if you really think that’s necessary. My room number is—"
“Forget that, too. I’ll have somebody there in fifteen minutes. Go downstairs to the mall. On the third floor, on the end facing the ocean, you’ll find a Carl’s Jr. I want you to—”
“I’ll find a what?”
“A Carl’s Jr. You mean you don’t know what that is?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“It’s a fast food place, Sam. They sell burgers, milkshakes, fries, that sort of thing. You eat burgers and fries, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
/> August sighed. “I should have fucking guessed.”
“Don’t worry, John, I do know what burgers and fries look like. I’m sure I can find the place, but why can’t you just send your messenger to my room? Don’t you think you might be getting a little carried away with all this spy shit?”
“No, Sam, I don’t think I’m getting carried away with all this spy shit. Now get an envelope, put all that stuff inside, and take it downstairs to Carl’s Jr. Maybe order yourself a chocolate milkshake. Hell, man, live a little! I’ll have somebody there in fifteen minutes.”
“And then that’s it? After that I can go home?”
“Probably, but wait until tomorrow, huh? Just in case. Hell, all the single men on the planet and half the married ones would love nothing better than a night in Pattaya on their own and here you are trying to get back to boring old Singapore as quickly as you can. Go out tonight, Sam. Have a good time for once in your life, man!”
“If it’s all the same to you—”
“Let me look at the stuff you found, make some calls, and then we’ll talk about what to do next.”
“Listen to me, John. I’ve found the woman for you. I think it would be better if you took it from here. This is out of my league.”
“Just think of it like any other criminal investigation.”
“It’s not like any other criminal investigation.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s out of my league.”
August chuckled.
“Keep this phone with you. We’ll talk soon about where we go from here.”
Then August hung up.
Carl’s Jr. was exactly where August had said it was, of course, on the third floor of the mall facing the Gulf of Thailand. It occupied a little glassed-in finger that poked out from the front of the mall toward the beach and even had an open-air terrace that wrapped all the way around the restaurant and provided a spectacular one hundred eighty degree view of Pattaya Beach and the ocean beyond.
Tay went to the counter and ordered a Coke, but while he was waiting for it he realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he had to admit the fries smelled pretty enticing. He changed his order to something called a Big Carl and an order of fries, and then he added a chocolate milkshake, too. He was a little bit embarrassed by how American all that was, but who was going to see him?”
