The Amazon Detective Agency: a Murder Novel by Patrick Oster

Author:Patrick Oster [Oster, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Padraig Press
Published: 2018-04-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

SpyI

I explained the RWA situation to Tesla and how Chuck Smythe had tried to trace him with limited success. She said she’d give it a shot while we waited to see if the Smythes could smoke RWA out for beers. She wasn’t encouraging. But she did say she had another tack we could take if her forensic work didn’t pan out.

“The way I see it, whoever the killer is — Cummins, RWA or someone else — he or she somehow had to give or slip that bottle of poisoned scotch to the justice, either at the court building or his house. Or the killer used some cutout person to do it.”

“Which means?”

“We need to see who came and went in from both places in the weeks before Oglethorpe died. Not just the week we looked at because we have no proof in that timeframe that Constance Cummins or any of the other visitors had that bottle in hand, including the two guys I still haven’t identified with facial recognition. And we don’t know if someone who might be RWA went into Oglethorpe’s house in the days before he died.”

“So what do we do?”

“Check out other cameras. For example, we need to see where Justice Oglethorpe went on those two Wednesdays when the Neighborhood Watch cameras on his block show him driving away in the evening and out of camera range. One question is: did he do the same on some previous Wednesday — or some other day?”

“And what would that tell us?”

“Maybe that he went to a party or some friend’s house and got a gift bottle of scotch and brought it home.”

“How do we figure that out?”

“I know someone who might be able help.”

*****

SpyI Inc. was in a strip mall in Arlington not far from my house. Tesla said the owner, a guy named Rick Kelly, might have a visual record of who had gone to or from Justice Oglethorpe’s house and where he or she went after that.

He had a fleet of planes flying over the D.C. area around the clock, clicking away and digitally saving what his cameras saw. She’d met him in a bar, and he’d tried to impress her with what he called his “time machine for cops.”

“In a bar?” I asked. “You mean your kind of bar.”

“Yeah. He didn’t get it till after we’d talked for a while and he saw all the women kissing each other. He’d just stumbled in because he saw a lot of hot babes heading in.”

We laughed.

“But you’re friends now?”

“Yeah. Sort of. He’s trying to make me consider being bi, but mostly we just do tech talk, which is how I found out about how much his system sees.”

Rick was tall and lanky with one of those millennial hairdos that has the sides shaved and the top long and gelled so it sticks up in the front.

Rick’s company, it turns out, had test operations in about a dozen cities, trying to persuade the cops to pay for his product as a way to fight crime efficiently in an era of trimmed police budgets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.