“This is very unsatisfactory,” Ekaterina said. “While our security system has been able to provide the chief with some information, so far all of it is information he has been able to determine from other sources.”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful,” I said. “Remember, when he catches the killer, he’ll need to take the case to court, where a defense attorney will try to poke holes in it. So having confirmation from your security system of the evidence he’s gathered elsewhere could be invaluable.”
“That is reassuring to hear,” she said. “I wonder if he has found a skilled lip reader.”
“Is he looking for one?” I asked.
“I would if I were him,” she said.
“Why?”
Instead of answering, she sat down in front of her keyboard again and, after a few flying keystrokes, pointed to the large monitor. It showed footage from the camera that covered anyone arriving at the Inn’s front entrance. The time stamp in the lower right corner indicated that it had been taken at 12:27 P.M. yesterday. As I watched, someone stormed into the picture. He had a carry-on bag over his shoulder and was dragging a large suitcase behind him. He turned around, evidently looking back at the door, and I recognized him as Norton.
“This is when he was kicked out?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Now watch closely.”
Norton’s mouth began moving. From the look of it, he was shouting. He let go of his suitcase, which toppled over behind him, and raised his middle finger in the familiar rude gesture.
“What a jerk,” I muttered.
“Might it not be useful to learn what he is saying?” she asked.
I nodded, although I rather doubted anything he said would provide a hot clue. More likely, it would demonstrate how boringly blue and repetitive his vocabulary was. Still, you never knew.
Behind him, a car pulled up under the porte-cochere—a beat-up gray Toyota Corolla. I could see a hotel staffer hopping out of the driver’s seat.
Norton finished his invective with what I gathered was a final mighty bellow. Then he turned and pulled out his cell phone. The timing of the gesture suggested that he was using his phone to avoid meeting the gaze of the staffer—who might be hoping, in vain, for a tip.
“You see?” Ekaterina said. “If we could find someone who reads lips—”
“Robyn Smith does, I think,” I said. “Or call the Caerphilly Assisted Living. I bet they’ve got a few residents who can.”
“Excellent,” she said. “I will—”
“Wait,” I said. “Can you back up and play that last little bit again?”
“Of course.” The picture on the screen paused. “From when he walked outside?”
“No,” I said. “Just from when he pulled out his phone.”
She looked puzzled, but she obliged, and we both peered intently at the screen.
“Bingo!” I said.
“Evidently you see something I do not,” she said.
“Your security camera caught him typing the passcode to unlock his phone,” I said. “I can’t quite tell what it is from this distance—”
“But you’re thinking that Kevin could enlarge that part of the picture and discover it.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “Can you send him a clip of that part, or tell him where to find it?”
“Of course,” she said. “And then we can discuss the upgrades that will be needed to the system.”
“No long discussion needed, if you ask me,” I said. “Just tell him what the problem is, and he’ll fix it as soon as possible.” Which might not be until after the conference was over and the murder solved—or at least until the chief had run out of cyber evidence for Kevin to analyze. But I didn’t think Ekaterina was in the mood to hear this. In her mind, her beloved Inn was in dire peril, and she would expect Kevin to treat this as the emergency she considered it.
Ekaterina nodded absently and turned back to her keyboard.
I left her to it, but as soon as I was back in the lobby, I pulled out my phone and began texting Kevin, both to let him know about my useful discovery and to warn him that Ekaterina was on the warpath about what she saw as flaws in the security system. I had just hit SEND when—
“There you are.”
I looked up to see Aida standing in front of me, coffee in hand.
“Good presentation,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “What did I say that was so off?”
“Off?” I was puzzled. “I don’t recall thinking you said anything that was off. I thought it was great, and so did Cordelia.”
“You were frowning at something,” she said. “If I said something that you didn’t think went over well, let me know so I can fix it next time I do something like this. It was when I was talking about how we all need to qualify in firearms every year. I know you’re not a big fan of guns, but it’s a professional requirement that—”
“Good grief,” I said. “I wasn’t frowning at what you were saying, not about guns or anything else. I was multitasking. Kevin had just sent me a bunch of links about some of the people who might have it in for the Gadfly. Links to the facts about their cases, and then the demented things he was saying about them. You probably happened to look at me when I was reading about the seventeen alibi witnesses whose testimony didn’t save Ezekiel from being convicted.”
“Well, if that’s—wait. Seventeen alibi witnesses? Good lord. They really did a number on that poor man, didn’t they?”
“They did indeed,” I said. “Look, if you happen to talk to him, see if you can figure out what he needs.”
“What he needs? Are we talking about Christmas present fodder, or big, important life stuff, like a job and a place to live and a big fat settlement from whatever town or county sent him up river for fifty years.”
“Either,” I said. “Both. He hasn’t had a very merry Christmas for a few decades, and he needs help now, not in a few years, which could be how long it takes Festus to wring a settlement out of the county.”
“At this festive season of the year,” Aida intoned, beginning my oft-quoted favorite passage from Michael’s annual one-man reading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I joined in, and we finished the quotation in unison.
“It is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute.”
We both laughed, and then Aida’s face sobered.
“And he is pretty poor and destitute,” she said. “Put Ezekiel’s case on your list of things we go back and fix when Kevin and your boys invent that time machine. Meanwhile, yes, I’ll keep my ears open. Doesn’t he have any relatives to help him?”
“According to him, the respectable ones won’t help and the wayward ones aren’t around any longer,” I said. “So evidently not.”
“Poor soul,” she said, and headed back toward the conference area.
I checked my program. Apparently the chief had asked the Keepers to come for their interview right after the session they were doing about their high-school friend’s case. A pity I’d missed that, but I could probably find some time to talk to one or both of them about it later—and if I couldn’t, Festus or Kevin could fill me in. The next session should be good—Stanley Denton, Caerphilly’s leading (and only) private investigator would be talking about investigative tools. A fascinating subject, and Stanley was always a good speaker.
But my mind kept circling back to those links Kevin had sent me. I wanted to check out the ones I hadn’t yet had time to look at. And I didn’t want to demoralize Stanley by scowling in the middle of his presentation, as I had during Aida’s.
So instead of returning to the conference rooms, I found a seat in a corner of the lobby, near the fireplace and the main Christmas tree, and pulled my laptop out of my tote bag.
I’d been in the middle of reading what the Gadfly had to say about Amber’s case when I’d put my phone away to watch Aida and the boys do their self-defense demonstration. I opened up my phone … and couldn’t find the links Kevin had sent me. Had I somehow managed to delete them from the page where he’d been collecting them? Or was I going to the wrong page? Figuring that out was above my pay grade.
I fired off an email to Kevin, apologizing for bothering him and asking if he could resend the links.
But I realized that he might be a little busy at the moment, so instead of waiting until he responded, I did a few searches on my own.
I started with Amber Smith’s name in combination with various words like “Virginia Beach,” “murder,” and “trial.”
About the only new thing I learned from the resulting newspaper articles and web pages was that the local papers had really hated Amber. Article after article described her as a trophy wife from the wrong side of the tracks. Neighbors described her as “bitchy” and “standoffish.” Several country club members said that she was loud and didn’t fit in. “She was trash,” one woman said. “She wore nothing but tight, skimpy clothes and big, gaudy jewelry.”
I’d have wanted to stand off from that one, too. And the bit about her clothes and jewelry—that didn’t sound like the Amber I’d met. Today she was again wearing jeans—well fitting, but not outrageously tight—a baggy sweater, and small plain silver hoop earrings. Had Amber changed? Or was the woman making it up?
Or—sad thought—maybe while her husband was alive, Amber had dressed to please him. The tight, skimpy clothes could have been his taste. And now that he was gone she had reverted to her own better taste.
I glanced up from my phone and saw the Keepers, Janet and Ginny, strolling through the lobby. The chief must not have kept either of them all that long.
Ginny looked pleased and enthusiastic about something, with a beaming smile and a spring in her step. Janet seemed less cheerful. In fact, she looked as if only good manners were keeping her from rolling her eyes in disbelief.
“What’s so exciting?” I asked when they drew near.
“Okay, this is going to sound ridiculous,” Ginny said, with a giggle.
“It is ridiculous,” Janet muttered.
“You know you feel the same way.” Ginny frowned at her friend before bursting out in giggles.
“Not quite the same way,” Janet insisted.
“The same way about what?” I asked.
“We’re suspects!” Ginny exclaimed. “Isn’t it exciting?”
“Exciting’s not the word,” Janet said. “Interesting, perhaps.”
“Interesting!” Ginny repeated. “She’s excited, I can tell. She’s just pretending to be blasé.”
“And I can’t help but wonder if she uses ‘interesting’ the way my mother does,” I said. “It’s her go-to adjective when she can’t find anything nice to say. She just murmurs ‘interesting.’”
“A sensible woman,” Janet said. “Because I agree that it’s interesting, after all the work we’ve been doing, learning about how the criminal justice system works, to be more directly involved in a case. But I’m not exactly excited about it.”
“You’ll see,” Ginny said. “Once you get over the initial shock of it, you’ll start to enjoy it.”
“You sound like my father,” I said. “He’s such a mystery buff that he’s never happier than when he gets to be a suspect, or at least has to prove his own alibi. I gather neither of you has one?”
“Well, yes and no,” Janet said. “We were together all evening, which under most circumstances would constitute a perfectly solid alibi. But even we have to admit that we both disliked Norton.”
“Really, really, really disliked him,” Ginny said.
“So Chief Burke has to consider the possibility that we joined forces to rid ourselves of him.” Janet pursed her lips as if the thought were distasteful.
“It’s only sensible,” Ginny said. “I’d be the first to admit that if Janet needed to bump off anyone, I’d absolutely help her. And hide the body, too.”
Janet winced slightly.
“And Janet—well, she’d definitely get me a really good lawyer,” Ginny went on.
They exchanged smiles, and I deduced that this was an old joke with them.
“So we’re rather hoping your chief finds whoever actually killed Norton pretty quickly,” Janet said. “Because we might have a hard time proving that we both spent the evening strolling through Caerphilly.”
“And buying cups of hot chocolate and gingerbread cookies,” Ginny added with a blissful smile. “And window shopping, and listening to the carolers, and taking pictures of the tree, and—”
“Sounds as if you hit all the high points,” I said. “Many of those shops have security cameras, and the chief can check the footage. And think how many of the tourists are walking around with cameras or cell phones in their hands. The chief could send out a call for pictures taken last night.”
“That sounds more like something our defense attorney would do after we’re charged with murder,” Janet said.
“You don’t know the chief,” I replied. “He’s amazingly thorough.”
“Doesn’t really matter how thorough he is,” she said. “He can’t track us every minute of the time we were wandering around downtown Caerphilly.”
“He doesn’t have to,” I said. “He just has to track you as being in downtown Caerphilly at a time that makes it impossible for you to travel to or from the murder scene at the critical moments.”
“That’s so.” Janet looked pleasantly surprised at the thought. “Assuming the circumstances allow him to pin down the time of the crime with reasonable accuracy.”
“You see?” Ginny said. “It will turn out all right. I just feel bad that we got separated from poor Ellen. We’d have been back a lot sooner, but we spent at least an hour going around asking people if they’d seen her.”
“That’s good,” I said. “People might remember you doing that. More alibi fodder.”
“But if we’d managed not to lose her, she could have been our alibi,” Ginny said.
“And maybe the chief would believe her,” Janet said. “But what if he decided she shared our motive for wanting to do away with Norton? I’m sure even if we had her to bolster our alibi, the trolls would say we were probably in cahoots.”
“I’m sure the trolls are already convinced the whole lot of us ganged up on Norton and did away with him en masse, like a remake of Murder on the Orient Express,” Ginny said.
I decided not to mention that I’d had the same thought.
“Or that’s what they’ll say when they learn about it,” Janet said. “Depressing thought. Let’s hope the news hasn’t hit the true-crime community yet. Well, let’s go see what’s happening with our fellow suspects.”
“And what’s happening outside!” Ginny exclaimed. “Look! It’s snowing!”