Few reasons, not none. It wasn’t a denial. I shot a look at Jodi, who nodded. She was playing bad cop. “The grindy was swimming in the back fountain,” I said. “Blood on his clothes, but well washed off. A couple of our guys yanked him out and have him in custody.”
“I’ll send CSI to bag his clothes.” She looked around at the hallway, shaking her head. “This whole place is a maze of areas we need to contain. We don’t have enough men.”
“Well, let’s see if the security footage lets us narrow it down some,” I said.
The large security-conference room was an assault on my senses. The room was filled with people. The bronze light fixture and track lights I hadn’t noticed before were lit up like torches. The oval table was cluttered with papers, laptops, cell phones, and electronic devices. The air was heavy with smells and noise: a stink of sweat, stress pheromones, the acrid reek of anger, the tang of old tobacco and coffee, the greasy scent from a plate of food that had been picked over and left on the table; a cacophony of voices, phones ringing, electronic beeps, miscellaneous clatter, and coffee was gurgling in the back of the room. The huge monitor hanging from the ceiling was lit up, showing twenty camera angles. It was chaotic and Beast sent me a sleepy vision of rats running across the ground in panic before she closed herself off from me again. I was relieved that she was at least watching. Beast often noted things I missed.
A thin, mid-sixties woman—who had geek written all over her—and Angel looked up as we entered. Angel swiveled his chair and gave me a small nod, as if glad to see me. “Miz Yellowrock, the CSI lady tech and I have narrowed the pertinent camera angles down.”
He looked at the woman and she shrugged. “I’m no lady. Sonny.”
He snorted softly. “You got to stop calling me that, Gramma.” They both chuckled and Angel pointed to the right side of the big monitor. “This one shows the hallway outside Mr. Pellissier’s office, these show the ballroom from three angles, this revolving sequence shows the victim exiting the ballroom and making her way to the office, these two show the wolves exiting unmonitored rooms as their counterparts jumped through the ceiling in the ballroom, the rest show the grounds, the room Yoda with fangs was in, and several shots of him in various areas of the compound. He only appears for a moment or two at a time, easy to miss.” He looked at me. “No excuses, ma’am, just the facts.”
I had a feeling the gramma had helped restore his equanimity. They were an unlikely team, the young, black, ex-marine communications/ET tech and the middle-aged, white CSI tech, but their partnership seemed to be working.
He returned his attention to the screen. “The views showing the hallways that connect the ballroom to the office are over to the left. We’re dealing with two hours of digital feed from over seventy cameras, so there’s a lot still to go through and a lot more that might be found, but so far these are the pertinent ones, bookmarked for easy retrieval.
“I also took the liberty of going through the camera footage of the walls and the back courtyard trying to narrow down the time the wolves came over, if they came that way,” Angel said. He tapped a camera. “A chef gathering herbs looks up, right here, as if he heard something overhead. Four thirty-two this afternoon. Then, at five seventeen, a guard hears something and looks up. It might give you a timeline for interrogation.”
“Police don’t interrogate. We question,” Jodi murmured, but there wasn’t any heat behind the disputation. Angel’s Tit cocked a brow in disbelief.
We watched silently, the little group gathered behind Angel’s chair, and we proved one thing. Unless she had been moving at warp speed and had done a time jump, Katie didn’t kill Safia. We had a time stamp of the little assistant entering Leo’s office at twelve forty-seven. It might not stand up in court, being only the flare of her dress from her left hip down and one raffia sandaled left foot as she entered the office, but she moved like Safia.
Nearly an hour later, just before she appeared in the ballroom, Katie raced through the front door, unseen by the guards, and all but flew up the hallway and into the office, moving fast. Even with the feed slowed down, she was a blur, but it was her, no doubt. The dried blood was a dead giveaway, even from behind. Exactly twenty-six seconds later she exited. There was fresh blood on her face, but according to the coroner, Safia had been dead nearly an hour by then. So ... maybe Katie had some leftovers?
I wanted to smile at my whimsy, but my face was frozen with exhaustion. Beast was bored with the investigation. She was sleeping somewhere inside me and the lack of her conscious awareness was enervating.
We went through the footage several times at various speeds. Found two things. The most important one was—an intruder had been in the ballroom.
The unidentified person was hard to see, and his position was unlikely at best. The toe of a boot was visible in one of the ballroom’s ceiling-mounted cameras. A booted person had literally hung around in the arched ceilings, unseen, for hours before the party started, and then, when the wolves made their dramatic appearance, had disappeared. No unidentified person had appeared in any other footage, not so far.