Fighting Chance(53)
“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.
10:30
Russell Donahue
Catherine Arnold
John Richard Magnini
10:31
Janice Loftus
Martin Seligman
Marlynne Cole
Co’Dann Jackson
10:32
Stuart Creel
Lorraine Czelowski
Mark Granby
Susan Chen
Sharon Chen
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?”