Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (18 page)

“So, we’ve got about an hour and ten minutes where we don’t know what was happening to her.”

“We know she was being murdered, Mr. Demarkian,” Tony said. “I get the reasonable doubt thing, but we definitely know she was being murdered.”

“We know she was being murdered,” Gregor said, “but you know as well as I do that we can’t pinpoint time of death even as close to an hour and ten minutes. The best we can do here is say she was killed between ten thirty and eleven forty, because at one end of that time she was seen alive, and at the other end of that time she was found dead. Do you know who was in the building at ten thirty?”

Tony looked indignant. “
Dozens
of people were in the building at ten thirty. It’s a courthouse. And it’s a courthouse for juveniles, so there are social workers and child psychologists and I don’t know who else all over the place.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Let me put it another way. There were security cameras?”

“Some,” Ray said. “Not as many as you’d think. There are a lot of privacy issues with juveniles. So there’s a security camera right at the door, that tells you who goes in and out. And there’s one in the foyer right at the start of everything. And then there’s one in each of the corridors to the right and the left. There’s also one at the end of the corridor to the right, because that’s where the restrooms are.”

“People think they can do all kinds of fancy stuff in the restrooms,” Tony said.

“And?”

“We have pictures of about forty people who came in through the front door that morning and who then went down the corridor to the bathrooms,” Ray said. “The way the cameras are positioned, you can’t actually tell who goes into one of the bathrooms and who just keeps going into the next corridor, and unfortunately—”

“The camera in the next corridor had been tampered with,” Tony said.

“We do have some blurry stuff from that camera,” Ray said. “We think a total of seven people went down that corridor. Not including Judge Handling. She didn’t use that corridor, as far as we can tell. There’s a door behind the judge’s bench in every courtroom and it leads directly into the corridor where the chambers are.”

“And you could see, clearly, that Father Tibor Kasparian used that corridor?” Gregor asked.

“Hell, Mr. Demarkian. Everybody used that corridor,” Ray said. “Father Kasparian. The Maldovanian kid’s brother. That woman who started screaming and brought the police down on the scene.”

“Janice Loftus,” Tony said.

“Yeah, Dr. Janice Loftus,” Ray said. “There’s a good two dozen people we don’t know who they are yet. There are other people we know who they are but we don’t think they matter. Attorneys. Law enforcement and court staff.”

“But you are sure that Father Tibor Kasparian was one of these people,” Gregor said.

“Sure,” Ray said. “He’s one of the ones we’ve got twice. The first time was at ten forty-two. The second time was at eleven fifteen.”

“What about coming back?” Gregor asked. “If the camera caught people going to the bathroom, wouldn’t it catch them leaving?”

“Leaving can be harder to figure out,” Ray said. “The camera’s pointing the wrong way. You get people’s backs. Sometimes you can recognize them, but sometimes you can’t. If they’re dressed in a sort of nondescript way, and there are a lot of people milling around, it can be hard to pick out particular people and be sure of it.”

“We’ve got Father Kasparian pegged going down the corridor the first time,” Tony said. “Then we’ve got him going down it again the second time. But we can’t find him coming back up after the first time. That’s going to be a windfall to discovery, if Kasparian ever gets his act together.”

“Unless he pleads out,” Ray said.

“He’s not going to plead out,” Tony said. “He’s already said he isn’t going to plead out. He doesn’t want to plead at all.”

“Still,” Ray said. “I bet it’s coming.”

“This is what I want you to do for me,” Gregor said. “I want you to list everybody who appears on that camera starting at ten thirty and going all the way to eleven forty. Every single person. Even if you can’t identify them. Then I want you to get me—can you send me the video from the camera? That’s possible, isn’t it?”

Tony and Ray gave Gregor a look that said, plain as day, it was possible, but neither of them had the least idea of how to do it.

2

They went back upstairs to the Homicide Division proper, and found George Edelson waiting patiently on a chair in the corner. On second thought, Gregor decided that Edelson was not being so patient as he seemed. His fingers were drumming against his knees. His feet were pumping up and down on the balls, making his knees look like pistons.

“Well?” he said when Gregor came in behind Tony and Ray.

Tony explained in just enough words to convey the nature of the operation, but not quite enough to make it clear. Then he went over to a cubicle and sat down. “This is mine,” he said. Then he logged in to his computer.

The cubicle was stacked with files, on the sides of the desk and on the floor. There was a small old-fashioned filing cabinet in one corner. The top of the CPU was also covered with files. The monitor, being a flat screen, couldn’t hold them.

“The best way I can figure how to do this,” Tony said, “is to forward the video to your phone. I can do that with videos on my phone. I don’t see why I couldn’t do that from this computer. It occurs to me, though, that there’s something else you might want to see.”

“What’s that?” Gregor asked.

“We’ve been putting together a minute-by-minute schedule of everybody who came in and out of that corridor, to the extent that we know who they are,” Tony said. “We haven’t gotten very far yet, and it’s taking frigging forever—”

“We were talking about it right before you two showed up,” Ray said. “We thought we’d get some people to help us with it.”

“Over here,” Ray said, pointing to the next cubicle.

There was a picture next to the computer monitor of Ray with a young woman and two young boys. Gregor presumed they were his family.

Ray logged on to his computer and then brought up a file.

Even with a truly spectacular level of computer illiteracy, Gregor could tell when something was taking forever to load, and the document Ray was trying to bring up was taking forever. Ray seemed to be no more patient about it than anybody else.

“We turned it into a PDF file,” he said. “I hate PDF files.”

“You didn’t put it up as a PDF file,” Tony said. “You put it up as a docx file. Got it. Now I just need to send it.”

Gregor went back to Tony’s booth. What showed on the screen was a single still picture, blurry and indistinct, of a lot of people in a corridor.

“Anybody we know?” Gregor asked. There wasn’t anyone on the screen he could recognize.

“There isn’t anybody on this frame,” Tony said. “But if you look through the entire tape, you’ll find a few. You’ll find Father Kasparian, twice. There’s the brother of the kid that was on trial. And there’s the lawyers, the prosecutors, and what’s his name, the one who wanted to be the lawyer for Father Kasparian—”

“Russ Donahue,” Gregor said.

“Right,” Tony said. “We’re going to have to go and try to identify everybody we can, but just looked at the frame. There are dozens of them. And they’re moving every minute. We did get a couple of interesting outliers, though.”

“Got it,” Ray said.

Gregor went back to Ray’s cubicle. On the screen was an enormous list of numbers printed in a column, and next to them, every once in a while, were names.

Gregor sat back. “What is this thing?” he asked. “You’re looking at the tapes and listing everybody you see minute by minute?”

“That’s the idea,” Ray said.

“You’re right, it is going to take forever,” Gregor said. “And does it make any sense? Granted it’s thorough, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Tibor’s already been arraigned. You’re in the business of supplying evidence to the prosecutor’s office. Why would you—?”

“Got it,” Tony said. “The video should be on your phone.” He slid backwards in his chair until he got to Ray’s cubicle. “We started off fooling around with it,” he said, “and if we’d come up completely blank, we’d have quit. But it’s like I said. We found some interesting outliers.”

“Right off the bat,” Ray said. “In the first couple of minutes.”

“So what are you trying to tell me?” Gregor asked. “You’ve changed your minds? You’re not sure Tibor murdered Martha Handling?”

“Whoo boy,” George Edelson said.

“We’re as sure as we can be that Tibor Kasparian murdered Martha Handling,” Tony said, “but we aren’t the kinds of sons of bitches people make us out to be. We want to be thorough. We want to be right. And, like I said, we did come up with a couple of outliers.”

“And we aren’t close to having everybody identified yet,” Ray said. “There are an awful lot of people going down that hallway and disappearing for minutes at a time, longer than that, even disappearing forever. Without the backup from the other cameras, we just can’t be sure. So here we are.”

“And where are we?” Gregor asked.

Ray tapped the screen. “There’s Janice Loftus, for one thing,” he said.

“And who’s Janice Loftus?” Gregor asked.

“She’s a professor at Philadelphia Community College,” Tony said. “She’s also the person who started screaming bloody murder that brought everybody in to find the body.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Why is she an outlier? Wouldn’t you expect to see her picture on the security tape? She had to get to Martha Handling’s office to find Tibor and the body.”

“Yes, she did,” Tony said. “But look at the time. Ten thirty-one. She didn’t find the body and start screaming until eleven twenty-two. That’s nearly an hour. What was she doing for an hour?”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Interesting.”

“More interesting than you know yet,” Ray said. “There’s a connection. There are a couple of connections. Loftus is a member of this group called Philadelphia Justice that tries to get cases reconsidered they think were wrongly decided. Sort of a local version of the Innocence Project.”

“Those aren’t bad ideas,” Gregor said. “People do get wrongly convicted.”

“To hear them tell it,” Ray said, “people get wrongly convicted because people like me are racist crapholes who do it on purpose.”

“And you think she may have murdered Martha Handling for handing out long sentences to juveniles because—” Gregor stopped. “I don’t think that makes any sense when you’re trying to use it for a motive for Tibor.”

“There’s something else,” Ray said. “We didn’t know it until this morning, or we’d have held her longer yesterday. It turns out there’s another connection, and this one is a lot more interesting.”

“And what’s that?” Gregor asked.

“Janice Loftus and Martha Handling were roommates back in 1979, when they were freshmen at Bryn Mawr College,” Ray said. “So we Googled it just to see what we could get. And we didn’t get much, but we did get the information that the two of them were fighting all the time and then ended up being split up for the second semester.”

“It still sounds very thin,” Gregor said.

“Right, it is,” Tony said, “but it’s a connection. But the other one’s better. Look at ten thirty-two. Mark Granby.”

“Oh, God help us,” George Edelson said. “Here we go.”

“Who’s Mark Granby?” Gregor asked.

“Mark Granby is the local representative of a company called Administration Solutions of America,” Ray said. “It’s the company that now runs most of the prisons in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including the juvenile prisons.”

“Remember how we were talking about the rumors about Martha Handling taking bribes?” George Edelson said. “These are the people she was rumored to be taking bribes from. The general idea was that she took money and gave longer sentences so that the cells would be full and Admin Solutions would get more money. The Commonwealth pays them per prisoner per day served. More prisoners with more days served, more money.”

“I did understand that,” Gregor said. “And I can tell you what I thought of that from the beginning.”

“The thing about Mark Granby is that there’s no reason for him to be there. Absolutely none.”

“And there was reason for Janice Loftus to be there?” Gregor asked.

“Yes,” Ray said. “Janice Loftus drove Petrak Maldovanian to his brother’s hearing. Janice Loftus is Petrak Maldovanian’s professor of something or other—”

“American Government,” Tony said.

“American Government,” Ray repeated. “Petrak Maldovanian was just getting out of that class and he was worried about making the hearing on time, so Loftus gave him a lift over to the courthouse. Maybe that was some kind of a setup and she was just looking for an excuse to get to Martha Handling, but at least it’s a reason. As far as we know, there’s no reason for Granby to be there at all.”

“Have you talked to him yet?”

“We were trying to work up an excuse,” Tony said, “but we think it would be better if you talked to him. Assuming you can get him to talk to you. But technically, we’re done with this.”