The Rainy Day Killer (17 page)

2
8

Sunday, May 1
9: mid- morning

The Urban Eye Project was located in a strip mall on O
sgoode Road in Bering Heights, in a unit out of which the city had previously operated a family-planning clinic until cutbacks two years ago had closed it down. Since Urban Eye’s funding went mostly into hardware and human resources, the rent for the unit was low enough that it fit into the project’s budget. Unfortunately, it was situated in a rough neighborhood with a lot of muggings, burglaries, and car theft. The joke was that the first of the forty cameras had been installed on the roof of the strip mall when the project moved in, and the crime rate within a four-block radius had already decreased by 60 percent.

The other good news for the civilian staff of Urban Eye was that the mall also featured a twenty-four-hour pizza joint and a Thai restaurant that served the best chicken Pad Thai in the city. As Horvath got out of the car, he looked longingly at the front window of the restaurant, which was closed.

“Ah, man, I love Thai. I wonder if they’re open for lunch on Sundays.”

Karen locked the Taurus and led the way down to the unit with the City of Glendale logo painted on the glass door. She wasn’t in a very talkative mood. Three days before, she’d been close to the son
of a bitch. Although she was never one to beat herself up over what might have been, she dearly wished it had played out differently. Maybe if she’d turned left instead of right when she’d left the dress shop, the kid she’d looked at this morning would still be alive.

A sign hanging on the door was turned around so that the CLOSED side was facing out, but Karen
opened the unlocked door and walked into a reception area with a counter, a clock on the wall, a flag on a gold-colored plastic pole in the corner, tube chairs along the wall, and a potted rubber tree that had died some time during the past year.

A man with
gray hair and a red cardigan sweater stepped through the doorway behind the counter and looked at them.

“Stainer, Homicide,” Karen said,
showing her badge. “This is Horvath.”

“Bill Judge, glad to meet you.” Judge shook her hand, shook Horvath’s hand, then motioned them down to the end of the counter, where he lifted the flap and opened the cattle door for them. He led them down a short corr
idor. Karen looked at four doors, two on each side, that were labeled with strips of masking tape on which had been printed in black felt pen: SERVER RM. 1; SERVER RM. 2; UTIL; WASHRM (COED). At the end of the corridor they entered a large room filled with workstations cluttered with desktop computers, laptops, and other assorted hardware. Marks on the floor suggested where temporary room dividers had been removed to create a single, open work space. Along the far wall was an impressive bank of widescreen monitors showing various shots of city streets, the airport’s arrivals and departures entrances, a dockyard, and other locations.

Judge introduced them to a pudgy young man wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and scuffed white sneakers.

“This is Scott Bump. He was the monitor on duty this morning. He’ll show you the feed from City Plaza.”

Horvath looked around. “How many people work here?”

“We have two monitors on each shift, plus a supervisor. Our total staff is nine monitors and four supervisors, plus two part-time IT guys. All the supervisors are ex-cops, like me. The monitors are trained civilians who work eight-hour shifts on a seven-on and three-off rotational schedule. The night shift ended at seven this morning, but I asked Scott to stay on to walk you through it.”

“Tomorrow’s my day off,” Bump said, “so it’s okay.”

“Glad to hear it.” Karen looked at Judge. “What about the supervisor?”

“That would be me,” Judge said. “The day shift supervisor called in sick, so I’m pulling a double. We also serve as analysts, since we’re former sworn officers. The monitors are trained in stuff like narcotics, crime reporting, and that, but they tend to be techies who already have experience in CCTV operation. We need the help with bug fixes and technical problem-solving, since we’ve still got a year to go on the pilot and just keeping the feeds running is a big challenge.”

Behind them, the washroom door opened and a skinny young man in a gray hoodie and jeans took a seat in front of the bank of monitors. “That’s Danny. Day shift.”

Eyes on the monitors, Danny raised a hand and
rotated it back and forth.

“Where’s the other day-shift monitor?” Horvath asked.

“In the server room. Daily maintenance.”

Horvath frowned at the back of Danny’s head. “Nobody
was watching the monitors just now?”

“The thing you have to understand,” Judge said apologet
ically, “is that they can’t all be watched, all the time. In Baltimore they’ve got more than five hundred cameras, and there’s no way you can have eyeballs on every screen every minute of every day, so they use a monitoring plan that we’ve copied for our pilot. That’s where analysts like me come in. We sit down with crime stats from GPD Intelligence, target high-risk times and days for each camera, and deploy monitoring resources accordingly.”

“Show us what you got,” Karen said.

Bump led them over to a desk with a large monitor and keyboard. “This is our review workstation,” he said, sitting down and pulling over the keyboard. “It’s a dumb terminal, don’t worry.”

“What?”

“He means it’s only for viewing footage,” Judge explained. “There’s no computer attached to it with a hard drive or a port for a USB drive or other means to save the data. We wouldn’t be able to maintain chain-of-custody control of our evidence if someone could save it on a thumb drive and walk out the door with it. Server Room Two is specifically set up for the purpose of burning footage for evidence, and it’s kept locked at all times, with restricted access only.”

“Here’s what you want to see,” Bump said, pointing to the monitor.

Karen leaned forward. She was looking at a wide-angle shot of the plaza behind city hall that provided a good look at traffic moving along Market Street in the distance. “It’s in color,” she said.

“
Well, yeah,” Bump said. “The cameras are color, all-weather jobs with low-light and PTZ capability. They record twenty-four-seven at thirty FPS, although, as you can see, the monitors we watch display live at fifteen FPS. Some of the cameras are wireless, but this one’s fiber, since city hall’s on the dedicated fiber optic municipal backbone.”

“
In English,” Karen said, her bad mood leaking out.

“PTZ means pan, tilt, and zoom
,” Bump said. “The cameras can do all three. FPS is frame rate, how many frames per second you see. Films are normally shot at twenty-four FPS, for example.” He pointed at the bank of monitors. “Fifteen’s a little jerky, like a Charlie Chaplin movie.”

“Great,” Karen said. “Shut up and let me watch.”

Numerals at the bottom-right corner of the screen indicated a time of 05:54:08 hours. Traffic was very sparse. A passenger car moved from left to right across the top of the screen in the near lane of Market Street. At 05:54:39 a delivery truck moved from right to left in the far lane.

At 05:54:51, headlights slowed at the top left corner. They watched a dark-colored passenger van mount the curb and slowly cross the plaza to the fountain. Red brake lights flared as the van pulled up next to the fountain, then went out again as the driver shifted into Park.

“Zoom in,” Karen said.

“I can’t,” Bump said.

“I thought you said you could.”

“Yeah, in real time, but we’re watching a recording.”

“We can stop the playback if you want, Detective,” Judge said, “and Scott can crop and enlarge the image on the screen, but you might want to watch it through without stopping the first time, then we can isolate certain frames when you go through it again.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

A man walked around the end of the van from the passenger side. He wore coveralls and a baseball cap. He opened the back doors of the van and reached in. After a moment, he pulled out a board and set one end down on the paving stones, then pulled out a second board and set it down parallel to the first.

“A ramp,” Horvath said.

The man disappeared into the back of the van.

Karen glanced at the time display: 05:57:04. Three minute
s before six o’clock in the morning. Nine minutes before Urban Eye called it in. Time enough for a patrol car to get there if it had been called in at this moment in time, instead of nine minutes later.

“It’s getting light,” Horvath said.

“Sunrise was at five fifty-four this morning,” Judge replied.

A
hand truck rolled slowly down the make-shift ramp out of the back of the van, pushed by the man in overalls. A large, black body bag was strapped to it. At the bottom, he turned for the first time to face the camera as he rolled his burden up to the fountain.

“Fuck,” Karen said.

“Keeping his head down,” Horvath agreed, “so the bill of the cap hides his face. Must’ve known the camera was there. Smart bastard.”

They watched him remove the bungee cords
holding the body bag in place. He lowered the bag to the ground behind the retaining wall, out of sight. After a moment, he moved around and bent down again. He moved up and down several times.

“What’s he doing?” Horvath asked.

“Taking the body out of the bag,” Karen said.

At 05:58:12, the nude body became visible as the man m
aneuvered it into a seated position on the edge of the retaining wall of the fountain.

Lights passed from right to left across the top of the screen. The man paused, looking over his shoulder.

“A car,” Horvath said.

“They couldn’t see him,” Karen said, pointing. “The van blocked their view.”

“Unless they looked back at the last minute, here,” Horvath said, pointing at the top left corner of the image.

The man was now lowering the body backward into the water in the outer basin of the fountain. He shifted position several times, adjusting his balance, a
nd slowly eased the head and shoulders down below the surface. He was careful to keep his face down, so that the camera would not record it.

“No rigor,” Horvath observed.

Karen grunted.

The man stood for a moment, admiring his work, then at 06:00:19 stooped to gather up the body bag
. He wheeled the hand truck back into the van, pulled up the board ramps, and closed the back doors from inside the van. At 06:01:06 the back lights flickered as the man shifted gears into Drive. The van rolled slowly away from the fountain on a diagonal course across the plaza. As it disappeared out of the frame at the top right corner, the image jerked, zoomed, and panned right, as though pursuing the van. But it was too late—the van was gone. The view panned back and zoomed in on the body in the fountain.

The time was 06:01:58. Four minutes before Urban Eye called it in.

“Stop it there,” Karen said.

Bump reached for the keyboard and froze the playback.

Karen turned on Judge. “So walk me through this,” she said, her voice tight. “This guy drives up off the street onto the plaza at five minutes before six, drives up to the fountain, unloads a body and positions it, and nobody here notices what’s going on until six minutes after it starts. Have I got that right? Scotty Bumpkin here was picking his nose or taking a whizz or whatever the fuck and didn’t clue into what was happening for
six
minutes?
Six minutes
? Then the best he can do,” she pointed at the screen, “is ogle the fucking body?”

“Jesus,” Bump said, putting his hands on
top of his head.

“Now hold on,
Detective Stainer,” Judge said, “that’s out of line. I already told you, it’s not possible to have eyeballs on everything, every second. We’re lucky to have what we have.”

“We’re not
lucky
,” Karen retorted, “because he obviously picked this dump site so he could get on camera. He knew it was there.” She turned on Bump. “What the fuck were you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Bump said
, “I really am. I told Mr. Judge I’ll quit if he wants me to. I’m so sorry I didn’t see it until it was too late.”

“What the fuck were you doing?”

“Pouring a cup of coffee. I’m really sorry.”

“A cup of
coffee
?”

“He was almost through his shift,” Judge said defensively. “It’s exhausting work, watching these things for eight hours straight. You have to understand, city hall isn’t a high-risk zone after four
a.m
. Even if he’d been planted in front of the monitors, his attention would’ve been focused elsewhere. At least we’ve recorded the incident and, like I said, we can crop and enhance to give you every bit of detail we possibly can.”

“
Another thing,” Karen went on, “it takes you guys another four minutes to call it in? What’s up with that? It took the district only four minutes to reach the scene, but it took you the same amount of time to realize you had something you needed to call in?”