Horace and the chief were already in Ekaterina’s office. Ekaterina had set up a semicircle of chairs facing her desk and credenza. She had shoved aside her small Christmas tree—festooned with a selection of antique, hand-painted Russian Christmas ornaments—to make room for a collection of nearly a dozen monitors. Except for the largest one, each showed the coverage from nine of the Inn’s security cameras, stacked in a three-by-three grid pattern, with a little label to indicate which camera that picture belonged to and what area it covered—#03: LOADING DOCK or #07: MAIN PARKING LOT or #14: SIDE DOOR #3. The largest monitor showed a video feed of the lobby.
“Looks like a bunch of tic-tac-toe games,” Horace commented.
“More like the set for Hollywood Squares before the players arrive,” the chief said. “Pictures are pretty small.”
“Our system stores the full-sized picture for each of the cameras,” Ekaterina explained. “So Sammy and George can see them as large as they like.”
“Or at least as large as their monitor permits,” Horace said. “Kevin has set up a feed to the station,” he explained, looking at me. “Sammy and George are back there reviewing all the footage from the last twenty-four hours.”
“And here, we can switch to a closeup of what’s on any camera at any time.” Ekaterina demonstrated, making a few swift keystrokes on her computer. The large monitor switched from the lobby to a view of the loading dock, where a slender young man in chef’s whites sat on the edge of the concrete apron with his back to us, gazing moodily into the distance through the plume of smoke drifting up from his cigarette.
“We even have some ability to change the camera focus.” Ekaterina rattled the keys some more. The picture slowly zoomed in until it was focused on the chef’s left ear. More keystrokes and it pulled back again. It must have made a slight noise—the chef turned his head and stared up at the camera. Then the camera panned left until he was almost out of the picture … right again so we only saw half of him. The chef took another deep drag on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, and then gave a rather perfunctory and slightly sardonic wave at the camera with his free hand.
“We do not make any particular effort to hide the security cameras,” Ekaterina said. “The staff are accustomed to having them around, and their visible presence seems to be reassuring to the guests while acting as a deterrent to thieves and other would-be intruders.”
“And you have all the entrances covered?” the chief asked.
“Yes,” she said. “All the entrances, and also the entire parking lot. Many of our guests drive expensive vehicles that would otherwise be tempting targets for larceny.”
Nice to know the ancient Twinmobile was well protected while I was here.
“How long do you keep the tapes?” the chief asked.
“Tapes? We do not use tapes!” Was there just a slight note of reproach in her voice? “That would be so very twentieth century. Kevin has set us up with a large amount of online storage. We retain the data automatically for a year, and if we have any reason to suspect a security breach, we have the ability to flag that day’s data so it will be stored indefinitely. Or until we decide to release it.”
“Impressive,” the chief said. “Isn’t all that rather expensive to operate?”
“It pays for itself over time,” Ekaterina said. “Only six weeks ago, for example, a guest complained that his Lamborghini had been stolen from our valet parking. Fortunately our camera system captured the real story, and we were able to prove that the guest himself entered the valet parking garage with stealth and used a spare key to remove the vehicle. It does not take very many occurrences of that kind to make our security system pay for itself.”
“You should have reported that,” the chief said, with a frown.
“The incident would not have enhanced the Inn’s reputation.” Ekaterina’s tone was prim but decisive. “We would have called you in if he had not been cooperative. But he signed a full confession, and he is unlikely to offend in Caerphilly County again, since we have banned him permanently from the Inn. As we had with Mr. Niedernstatter.”
Her tone implied that the banning was by far the direst punishment either miscreant could possibly incur, and the Gadfly’s demise only a sad but minor footnote to the story.
“And we did call upon Deputy Shiffley to make sure he did not linger in Caerphilly,” she added.
“Ah,” the chief said. “I do recall Vern mentioning that he escorted a misbehaving guest off the Inn grounds and over the county line.” He nodded with satisfaction. I’d heard him say, more than once, that if most of the other local businesses were run the way Ekaterina managed the Inn, his job would be much less demanding.
I studied his face, trying to get a clue about how the case was going, but his expression was neutral. Guarded. Not surprising with Ekaterina nearby, since she was a civilian. Technically, so was I, but he sometimes forgot that. And was he really expecting the boys’ project to help with his case, or was he just humoring Josh, Jamie, and his beloved grandson Adam? I couldn’t tell.
My phone rang.
“Mom?” It was Jamie. “Are you guys ready?”
“Whenever you are,” I put the phone on speaker. “So are you going to tell us where you’re making your first escape attempt?”
“No!” he said. “That would make it too easy. Just say, ‘ready, set, go!’ And then we’ll start.”
“Ready when you are,” the chief said.
“Remember,” Ekaterina said, pointing to the larger monitor, “if you want to get a closer look at something, just tell me which camera and I’ll show it there.”
“Good,” the chief said.
Horace merely nodded.
“Ready, set, go!” I said into the phone. And then I muted it so Jamie couldn’t hear anything we said while watching for the Great Escape.
For several minutes nothing happened. The four of us sat there, our eyes shifting from screen to screen. Occasionally movement would catch our eyes. A uniformed hotel employee retrieving a car from the valet parking garage. An energetic terrier emerging from a side door, dragging a man in a bulky down coat over to the hotel’s canine exercise yard. The larger of the Cobalt Cab Company’s two taxis arriving at the front door and disgorging a brace of well-dressed women.
“Camera twelve,” Horace said pointing at the screen in question.
But Ekaterina had already spotted it and pulled up the picture from camera #12 on the larger screen. We could see a section of the flagstone path that led to the three cottages that provided the Inn’s most luxurious quarters: the Jefferson, Washington, and Madison Cottages, which were scaled down replicas of Monticello, Mount Vernon, and Montpelier, respectively. The path was lined with evergreen bushes that were either dwarf varieties or had been cowed into remaining small by frequent vigorous pruning.
“Thought I saw some movement in the shrubbery,” Horace said.
We all stared at the monitor. A full minute went by. Maybe two. It felt like a couple of hours.
“I could zoom the camera in,” Ekaterina murmured.
“No.” The chief, too, kept is voice low, as if whoever might be rustling the shrubbery on camera #12 could hear us. “That would not be a fair test.”
“There it is again.” I pointed. “Right near the bottom of the screen.”
The shrubbery moved, then stilled—but now we could make out bits of clothing through the leaves. A pair of dark jeans, a khaki camouflage jacket, and a patch of black with a Nike Swoosh logo on it.
My finger hovered over my phone’s mute button.
“Shall I tell Jamie we can spot whoever’s doing that?” I asked. “Or do you want to watch a little longer?”
“Just another few seconds,” the chief said. “I think—yes. It’s Adam. Go ahead and tell them.”
I unmuted my phone.
“Tell Adam we’ve spotted him,” I said to Jamie. “He’s wriggling through the shrubbery outside one of the cottages.”
“Darn,” he said, and then he shouted to the others. “No dice, guys!”
On camera, Josh appeared in the frame, and held aside some of the holly branches so Adam could crawl out from behind the bushes.
“An impressive first attempt,” Ekaterina said. “He almost succeeded in evading detection.”
I made sure Jamie relayed her compliments to Adam. Josh made a gesture clearly intended to say “Curses! Foiled again!” Jamie and Adam were laughing gleefully and waving at the camera.
“He’s scratched his face,” the chief said. “I hope it’s not too bad, or Minerva will skin me alive for letting him do this.”
“Okay, we’re heading for test site number two,” Jamie said on the phone. “I’ll call you back when we get there.”
“We wouldn’t have spotted him if we hadn’t been watching closely,” Horace said. “That area by the cottages looks like a possible point of vulnerability.”
“Perhaps we need more cameras,” Ekaterina said. “I can ask Kevin to take another look at the system.”
“I think if we look closely, we’ll be able to spot anyone who slips in or out of the hotel that way,” the chief said. “Unless the boys find a bigger hole in the system, it will do fine for our purposes today.”
Ekaterina nodded, but I suspected Kevin would still be hearing from her.
My phone rang again.
“Ready for test run number two?” Jamie asked.
“You may fire when ready, Gridley,” I said.
“Who’s Gridley?” he asked.
“Look it up later,” I said. “Start your test.” And I muted my phone again.
Ekaterina, Horace, the chief, and I all leaned forward and stared at the monitors again. Nothing much happened for a couple of minutes. A bellhop drove up in a sleek black minivan. As he hopped out, a man in a business suit strode out of the front door, handed him a folded tip, and drove off. A housekeeper with a knit cap on her head and a puffy jacket over her uniform emerged from the Jefferson Cottage, pushed her cart down the flagstone path to the Washington Cottage, and let herself in. On the loading dock, the chef stubbed out his cigarette and checked his watch. He pulled out a pack of Gauloises cigarettes and lit another one. Then he glanced up. Was he glancing at the camera out of guilt, because he was overstaying his break?
No. He wasn’t quite looking at the camera. He seemed to be looking a little to the right of it.
“Can you show camera number three on the large screen?” I asked. “That’s the loading dock, right?”
The figure of the cigarette-smoking chef appeared on the large screen. He was definitely leaning back slightly so he could stare at something overhead. And frowning slightly, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing but knew he didn’t exactly like it.
“Are you doing something with the camera again?” Horace asked. “Something that would attract his attention?”
“No,” Ekaterina said.
“Then what’s he looking at?” the chief mused.
“The loading dock is an obvious area of great vulnerability,” she said. “So we have more than one security camera in that location. Let’s see if we can get a better view.”
She glanced along the row of monitors, then typed something in her computer. Another view of the loading dock appeared on the large monitor, this one from near ground level and near the open roll-up door. Now we could see the chef, half turned so he could stare up and behind him at where Josh appeared to be crawling along the ceiling of the dock area.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. “What is he doing?”
“Do not be alarmed,” Ekaterina said. “There is a sort of metal grid attached to the ceiling, to assist in loading and unloading large or bulky objects, like refrigerators and mattresses. He appears to be anchoring himself to that.”
Yes, he was. He was using climbing gear—probably the gear Rob and Delaney had acquired for the rock-climbing trip they’d taken last year to the Southwest. He was wearing a climbing harness, and there appeared to be ropes and pitons anchoring him to the metal grid. I still didn’t like it.
“Is that a camera you normally monitor?” I asked.
“Of course,” Ekaterina said. “We pay a great deal of attention to the loading dock. I suspect they failed to detect the presence of the second camera because it is down near the floor, instead of up by the ceiling, like most of the cameras.”
“Then we’ve legitimately detected their second attempt,” the chief said. “You can tell him to come down from there.”
“Let me take a few deep breaths first,” I said. “So I can tell him very calmly.”
I unmuted my phone and took one last deep breath.
“You can tell Josh to stop crawling over the ceiling of the loading dock like a human fly,” I said. “But don’t startle him.”
“Darn!” Jamie exclaimed.
I flinched at how loud he was.
“You can knock it off,” Jamie called out. “They spotted us somehow.”
The chef said something while looking up at Josh. It was too soft for Jamie’s phone to catch it, and if these security cameras had audio it wasn’t turned on. But the chef also pointed toward the camera with his free hand.
“A little far-fetched to think that any of the conference attendees came equipped with climbing gear,” the chief said.
“I think if someone were desperate he could probably make that climb with his bare hands,” Horace said. “Or maybe with a rope. It’d be pretty nerve-racking, but doable.”
“But we would still have detected him, thanks to the second camera,” Ekaterina said. “And most of the time the loading dock door is closed after dark.”
We watched a little anxiously—at least on my part—while Josh made his way back to the side wall of the loading dock area, where a metal ladder ran up, no doubt to give hotel staff a way to use the ceiling grid for the freight-handling purposes it served. I breathed a sigh of relief when Josh was back on the floor of the loading dock.
“Okay, that was a bust,” Jamie said over the phone. “But we’ve got a third exit route. Third time’s the charm, right?”
“It always is in fairy tales,” I said. “Please tell me route number three isn’t as scary as this one.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s much easier. I’ll call you back when we’re there.”
I hung up and took another few deep breaths.
“Relax,” Horace said. “He’ll be fine.”
“And it appears as if Josh was taking all the proper safety precautions,” Ekaterina said.
“And they’re not toddlers, and they’re pretty reliable and responsible for their age, and I can’t keep them wrapped up in cotton wool for the rest of their lives,” I said. “I know. And I didn’t freak out on the phone, did I? So just let me freak a little now, while I won’t embarrass them.”
“I know how you feel,” the chief said. “If I’d known they’d do anything risky—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Jamie says the next one is much easier. And he’s a lot more risk averse than Josh. And—”
My phone rang again. This time it was Josh on the line.