“Oh, my God,” Ken Bairn said.
Larry Farmer looked a little wild. “But that doesn’t happen, does it?” he demanded. “You don’t get two completely unrelated murders like that in practically the same place at practically the same time. Maybe you get them in Philadelphia, where there’s crime all over the place, but there’s practically no crime at all in Pineville Station. And there really isn’t any murder.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Buck Monaghan said patiently.
“We’re not talking about domestic violence cases,” Ken Bairn said. “We’re not talking about some idiot getting liquored up or those fools in the trailer park trying to make crystal meth. We’re talking about two completely separate people committing murder on the same day, or at least in the same twenty-four hours, and in Waldorf Pines of all places. Why Waldorf Pines?”
“Sue Connolly would say those are just the people who’d commit them,” Buck Monaghan said. “Ask Delores out there. She’d say the same thing.”
“Don’t be a complete idiot,” Ken Bairn said.
“There’s one more thing,” Gregor said. He hated to interrupt them. As it was, they all turned in his direction at once, and stared. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure the murders were committed by somebody or more than one somebody from Waldorf Pines?”
“What do you mean?” Buck asked.
“Well,” Gregor said. “You keep telling me this Waldorf Pines is a gated community. Gated communities are gated. They have guards. They have fences. They almost always have video surveillance cameras. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of you mentioned those. Lots of video surveillance cameras in lots of places. I’ve got to assume somebody on the police force looked at the footage from those cameras for the times in question. And yet none of you has mentioned a single thing about those cameras, or a single thing about the video footage. So—”
“Oh, God,” Larry Farmer said.
“We did look at the footage from the morning the bodies were found,” Buck Monaghan said. “There was nothing on it that we didn’t already know. There was Arthur Heydreich driving around and entering the pool house. There was Arthur Heydreich in the foyer.”
“Was there footage of Michael Platte’s body in the pool?” Gregor asked.
“There are no direct video surveillance cameras in the pool room itself,” Buck Monaghan said. “You should ask Horace Wingard to make sure I’m remembering this right, but I think the deal was that there had been cameras in there, but the wet kept ruining them. Cheap equipment, I suppose.”
“What about the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked.
“No, there isn’t one in there, either,” Buck Monaghan said. “There are cameras in the men’s locker room, but the women complained, and Wingard apparently thought they had a point.”
“But there are cameras in the foyer,” Gregor said. “So there should be footage of Arthur Heydreich going into the locker rooms if he went.”
“Well, there’s footage of him stumbling around in that direction in the foyer,” Larry Farmer said. “But there weren’t any lights on in that building anywhere. So—”
“This is awful,” Ken Bairn said. “They’re going to crucify us. Didn’t we do any of the investigating we should have been doing? Didn’t we use any common sense at all?”
“Don’t talk to me about using common sense,” Larry Farmer said, suddenly incensed. “You’re the one who wanted the case closed in fifteen minutes so that Waldorf Pines would see we were doing our jobs. I wasn’t the one who was in that kind of hurry. I’d have—”
“You’d have dithered around for a week and gotten nowhere,” Ken Bairn said. “You wouldn’t even have thought of getting Gregor Demarkian here if I hadn’t suggested it. What you think you’re doing in that job is beyond me. Hell, you don’t even want a job. You want—”
“Excuse me,” Gregor said. “There is one more thing.”
“Thank God,” Buck Monaghan said.
“The rest of the security tape,” Gregor said. “You looked at the rest of that? Was there anything on it? Anything at all.”
“You mean aside from the time between ten forty-five and twelve thirty the night before when the system went on the fritz?” Buck said. “Nope. Not a thing.”
“The system went on the fritz?” Gregor asked.
“It was shut off,” Buck Monaghan said. “Or somebody shut it off. Just turned it off. Then turned it back on again. We think. From ten forty-five to twelve thirty on the night the murders were committed.”