Shoot (16 page)

“That’s true, amigo. I wonder why? Don’t correct them yet, until we find out.”

“What about the sixth room—the one that was empty? Who was supposed to be there? Do we have a dead congresswoman somewhere?”

“Let’s find out.”

In a few minutes, Izzy had the sixth room number and we went there. It was blocked off and a shaken Karl Bundt was on his cellphone.

“No, escort her back up,” Bundt was saying. “Heavy security. Now.”

Bundt glared at me with hatred and didn’t answer when I asked him whose room this was. Izzy asked the same question.

“Senator Katharine Carroll of Minnesota. She’s on the way up under guard,” Karl said.

“Was she in her room last night?” Izzy pressed.

“We’ll find out in a minute,” Karl snipped.

We all waited until we heard an elevator opening and an attractive middle-aged blonde in a red power suit strode around the corner, surrounded by nervous security suits. She had a hunting rifle in a camouflage pattern that complemented her outfit, slung over her shoulder. I noticed there was no magazine in the weapon. Next to the senator was a thin, pretty young girl with the same hair and face, about fourteen years old—obviously her daughter.

Karl moved forward but Izzy and Phil stepped in front of him. He looked furious.

“Senator Carroll? I’m Detective Lieutenant Izzy Negron of NYPD’s Major Case Squad. We have a few questions for you, please.”

“Of course, Lieutenant,” she said, entering her suite. “You’re investigating these terrible murders?”

“Yes, ma’am. Were you in this room last night?”

“Yes, I was here with my daughter Allyson. She arrived late yesterday evening, a bit of a surprise. She’s writing a report for school.”

“So, your daughter was unexpected?” I asked.

“Yes,” the senator said.

“Senator, did you have the smoke alarm shut off in your rooms last night?”

“The smoke alarm?” she asked, nervously. “No. Why would I do that? I don’t smoke. Isn’t that illegal?”

I took a deep breath through my nose. There was no smell of gunpowder. Other faint odors lingered in the air— cigarette smoke. On the ceiling, there was no flashing green light on the smoke detector. It was still off.

“Did anyone knock on your door last night?” asked Izzy. “Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

“No. No one. Nothing. It was very quiet, wasn’t it, Allyson?”

“Yup,” Allyson agreed.

The senator expressed her sadness over the slayings and said she had no idea why anyone would want to harm her. She had not received any recent threats.

“Of course, we all get threats in our line of country but I don’t recall anything unusual. Is there anything else? I have more meetings and I have to change. I have to rethink my speech, in light of this tragedy. These are difficult times,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Izzy said.

“She’s lying,” I told Izzy in the hallway, as soon as the door had shut behind us.

“I know,” he said.

We stood in the corridor.

“Now what?” Tiffany asked. I looked at Izzy and Phil.

“The security video,” said Izzy, looking meaningfully at our guardian EPS agent, whose name was Thatcher.

The agent got on his radio to call his boss.

“I want to look at Chesterfield’s room again,” I said, as we waited. “Are the Crime Scene guys done there yet?”

“Yeah,” said Phil. “They’re going up to start on the fifteenth floor rooms.”

Thatcher spoke on his radio again, and then turned to Izzy. “They’re almost ready with the surveillance video. You need to go to the security office near the lobby.”

“Video first, rooms after,” Izzy said to me.

Tiffany and I followed Izzy, Phil and Karl Bundt to the elevator. Downstairs we crossed the lobby, surrounded by flashing lights and screaming reporters. A crowd of my colleagues were penned behind NYPD barriers. I spotted Ginny Mac and Sparky in the crush of press. We ignored the unintelligible questions and crammed into the security office. There was standing room only and a wall of big video screens above a long counter with computers and phones, manned by several uniformed security guards. Live feed flashed backwards and forwards on the screens above them.

“Can we do this?” a very cranky Karl Bundt snapped. He tapped the shoulder of one of the seated security guys at the control panel, and three large screens, each showing four different camera playback views, began rolling. We watched armed delegates, security personnel, and hotel workers walk up and down hallways and enter and leave rooms.

“On the left screen, we have the views outside Speaker Chesterfield’s room,” Bundt explained. “The middle screen has the cameras outside Senator Blanchette and Congressman Hatfield’s rooms. The one on the right has the other two rooms, of course, victims four and five, Congressman—”

“What time is this?” Izzy interrupted.

“I had them start all playbacks twelve hours before we found the first body,” Bundt replied.

We?

I shook my head but said nothing. Izzy snorted in derision. “Are you fucking kidding me? You think we’re going to spend hours watching this shit while the killers leave town? Start with the discovery of the body and rewind from there.”

“We will fast forward, of course,” Bundt said, flustered. “I thought we would—”

“You will do what I just told you to do or you will get your ass out of this room,” Izzy fired back. “You, security guy. What’s your name?”

“Indogo,” he answered.

“Okay, Indogo, the first body was found about eight this morning. Punch in oh-eight-hundred and hit play on all of these now. Please.”

The security guard didn’t even look at Bundt. The screens wiped, went to black, and new images of the same halls appeared.

“Eight o’clock,” Indogo announced. “Running forward.”

Nothing happened. A man and a woman walked down the hall and up the hall outside Chesterfield’s room; the coming and going illusion caused by cameras at opposite ends of the hall. Everyone leaned forward, tense. The couple vanished from the screens. A hotel employee, pushing a breakfast tray, appeared and then vanished on the right screen. More people passed on the middle screen. No one opened any doors. Then Tiffany appeared on the left screen. She knocked on Chesterfield’s door and waited. Her mouth was moving but there was no sound. She produced a room card, inserted it in the door slot and opened the door. She vanished inside. Nothing happened.

“Hold them all, Indogo,” Izzy ordered. “That’s you, right, Miss Mauser?”

“Yes,” she sniffed. “That’s when I… found him.”

“Okay.” Izzy paused. “Wait. You found him alone? I thought you were with Shepherd?”

“Umm… I was… that is, he came… shortly after that.”

Izzy looked at me but let it go.

“All right. Indogo, please rewind at regular speed please.”

Everything started moving backwards. No one went in or out of any of the target hotel rooms. It got boring. After twenty minutes, Izzy ordered fast rewind. Nothing began happening backwards again—but faster. I located the time counter in the lower left of each frame to keep track. It was in military time: hours, minutes, seconds and hundreds of seconds. 07:49:43:12… 07:30:22:59… 07:00:00:00… 06:45:21:04… 06:12:10:05… 06:00:00:00…

“You have to watch carefully on fast rewind,” Indogo warned. “Keep your eyes on the doors. You might miss something.”

We didn’t miss it.

All three screens exploded into snow. Backwards snow.

“What the hell is that?” Izzy demanded.

“I don’t know,” Indogo said. “Pressing play.”

The snow didn’t look much different at normal speed, just slower.

“Something is wrong,” Indogo said. “I have never seen this before.”

“How much of this is there?” Izzy asked.

Indogo did a very fast rewind and jotted numbers down on a pad. Then he used a separate keyboard to access some kind of software with logs and lists and menus. He said angry words in a language I didn’t know. I assumed they were curses.

“Nine hours,” he concluded. “And not just on these cameras. On all cameras.”

“Someone erased the data?” Bundt asked.

“No. Not erased. The cameras never recorded. They were shut off at nine p.m. last night. In real-time, from the outside. Only came back on again at six this morning. We’ve been hacked.”

This time it was an exasperated Izzy who cursed, in Spanish. “
Cuanto mas remueves la mierda, peor huele
,” he sighed.

Tiffany, apparently a Spanish speaker, nodded in agreement. I looked to her for a translation.

“The more you tromp on a turd, the wider it gets.”

The convention started while we were in the security office. We realized it when Indogo restored the live camera feeds, including the ones in the huge convention auditorium. The armed delegates were pledging allegiance to the flag. Or at least
some
of them pledged allegiance to Old Glory. Almost one out of four delegates pointedly did not take part.

“Boy, that really pisses me off,” Phil said. “If they don’t believe those words, what the hell are they doing
in
the government?”

“Makes you wonder,” Izzy agreed.

“They don’t like the fact that it says ‘and to the Republic, for which it stands.’ Also they object to the word ‘indivisible,’” Tiffany said. “Some of them are secessionists.”

“Not to mention the part about ‘Liberty and Justice for
all
,’” I added.

“This is just the opening,” Tiffany said. “First the pledge, then a prayer by the chaplain, and after that the Sergeant at Arms will make a motion to adjourn to committee until later.”

A minister appeared at the podium, saying a prayer “for the victims of evil in our midst,” and asking for heavenly guidance for their deliberations.

“This will be over in a minute,” Tiffany began, “and we will have meetings because I have no idea what the hell is going to…”

Tiffany froze. The padre was gone and Senator Katharine Carroll, slim, dignified, with fire in her eyes, her now-loaded rifle hanging at her side, was at the podium.

“Wait,” Tiffany said. “That’s not right. What is she doing up there? She’s not scheduled to speak until… Can we have audio please?”

Indogo flipped a switch.

“…Speaker Chesterfield and the others were, indeed, cut down by an evil in our midst—foreign or domestic,” Carroll declared darkly. “I have been told I was also targeted by the killers. I cannot yet tell you whether they are traitors among us or enemy combatants. Either way, can we allow the assassin in the night to hijack our sacred American democracy?”

“NO!” the crowd thundered, on its feet.

“Do you have the courage to battle this cowardly enemy and restore freedom to our country?”

“YES!” they cried.

“I am not afraid,” Carroll said, parking the butt of her rifle akimbo on her hip. “Will you fight with me?” She reached out her hand to the throng, as if to take theirs.

“YES!”

“Will we honor these men—who fell in the cause of Liberty, our God-given cause?”

“YES!”

“Percy Chesterfield had a dream that he could reunite this broken land and restore respect and confidence to a tarnished White House,” she told the crowd. “I share his dream, as I know you do. That dream must not fail, cannot fail—if our great nation is to prosper. But first, we must honor the memories of our martyrs. My fellow delegates, as a gesture of support and a memorial for these great men, I move that this convention—by acclamation—vote Speaker Percy Chesterfield as our honorary interim nominee for president of the United States, until this convention chooses another candidate.”

“What the fuck?” Izzy laughed.

“She can’t do this!” Tiffany shrieked.

“She’s doing it,” I pointed out.

“Second the motion!” someone shouted from the floor, followed by many others.

“All in favor?” the senator shouted.

There was a massive showing of hands and sign-waving.

“Opposed?” she shouted over the din. A vocal minority were shouted down. “Motion carried!” Carroll concluded, producing a wooden gavel. “God bless you and God bless the United States of America! This convention stands in recess until two o’clock this afternoon.”

She banged the gavel on the podium dramatically and threw both hands into the air, hoisting her weapon high. The crowd went berserk, clapping, stomping and yelling. “God Bless America” blasted out from hidden speakers.

“What just happened?” Izzy asked. “They’re putting a dead guy up for president?”

“Only temporarily,” I pointed out. “I think the senator has someone still living in mind for the spot. All presidential candidates say ‘God bless you and God bless America.’”

“The senator who is lying to us—the only one who wasn’t blown away last night—just hijacked the convention,” Phil said. “Interesting. She’s got my vote.”

“I can’t believe this,” Tiffany groaned. “She had no right. How did she do this?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I told her. “She must have seen her chance and rushed to the podium right after we left her room. This just went out over the TV networks live, right?”

“Oh, my God, yes,” she agreed.

“I think it’s safe to say Senator Carroll is now officially running for president and isn’t waiting for an invitation,” I said. “At two o’clock, my guess is she will be nominated.”

“That was… like a keynote speech,” Tiffany said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was incredible, but how could she be so cold?”

“Not cold,” I told her. “Cool. If she was a guy, we’d be saying she’s got guts, balls—a hell of a leader.”

“No,” Tiffany said. “I meant cold about the Speaker— trying to take his place so soon after his death. They were close. Are you questioning my feminism, Shepherd?”

“No,” I answered. “The questions are why she didn’t get popped along with the others, why she’s lying to us and whether that rousing speech we just saw was improvised or written in advance.”

“Well,” Izzy said, “she’s either a hell of a politician or a hell of a psychopath. Maybe both.”

Tiffany rushed out of the security office to meet with her “Chesterfield for America” team in her room. That would not be a happy get-together. Their presidential candidate was dead, they were jobless, and one of his pals was elbowing onto his place on the ballot. On the video screens, the convention floor was chaotic, a lot of yelling and screaming. Several fistfights broke out over control of the podium and microphone. People began pointing their weapons at each other but no shots were heard. Democracy in action.