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THE CAMERAS

“ W e’ve got two different stations that had views on the incident…” Morgan touched his ear, and the image flickered on the desk monitor, the one embedded in the brushed-steel desk. He gave me another surreptitious stare, then his eyes focused past me.

“That one,” he nodded.

Wicker, Black, Nick, and I all turned around to face where he indicated.

It was the longest of the monitors, the one directly across from Dr. Wicker’s desk.

The view I remembered when we first walked in, of lush, enchanted forest, and deep blue sky, was still there, but instead of the snow-white unicorn, a heavily-muscled, golden-haired, virtual man stood in the foreground. He wore shining golden armor, and a black-feathered eagle perched on his gloved arm. The eagle had just flapped his wings and left the glove when the whole scene vanished.

The screen went briefly black.

When it reformed, the new view shocked me with its solid immediacy. I hadn’t realized just how fake the other view looked until I saw something real in its place.

It looked like an industrial dock.

From the black-tinted windows and glass on either side of the wide-angle lens, I guessed the cameras must be perched on one of the buildings above us.

Delivery trucks stood parked and silent within view, along with forklifts, a row of industrial-sized garbage dumpsters, and what looked like white golf carts. Everything was shut off for the night; I saw no one walking around. A ridged, rusted, loading bay door stood just to the right of a much taller metal staircase, and appeared to be locked.

It had to be the service-entrance to the building, likely in the back.

“Can we go to the murder site?” Nick asked. “In person. Can we go check this area out, after we’re done here?”

Morgan turned to look at him with those raptor-like eyes.

“No,” he said.

Nick waited a beat, probably for him to go on, then grunted.

“Why the fuck not?” he asked.

“The door was open when Mr. Lucian was shot,” Morgan explained, voice flat. “It’s a high-security area of the facility. We can’t allow you to see the inside, even for this. All of the physical evidence was cleared away this morning, anyway.”

My jaw loosened in shock, and maybe from the sheer audacity of his answer. I stared at Morgan, then Nick, who also looked caught between dark humor, disbelief, and utter contempt.

“What…” I said finally. “…the fuck is the matter with you?”

Nick snorted a laugh.

Morgan didn’t flinch. He jerked his jaw back towards the screen.

“You’ll see enough from this,” he said. “There was nothing interesting in the blood spray, and the only fingerprints we found were Mr. Lucian’s. The bullet, as you might imagine, hit with a sharply downward trajectory. It entered the top of his skull, then got lodged in bone below the base of his skull, on one of the upper vertebrae. We can provide that from the autopsy.”

Black, Nick and I exchanged looks that weren’t subtle in any way.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick muttered. “Morons.”

Again, Morgan didn’t seem fazed.

I was beginning to think he wasn’t quite right.

In the head, that is.

Rucker’s head of security stared at me for a few seconds too long, then back at Black.

“Watch,” he said simply.

He touched his headset again.

The video came to life.

A few seconds went by where nothing moved apart from the wind. Whoever worked in that area during business hours had clearly left for the evening.

Tree leaves and branches whispered and rubbed back and forth. Gulls winged by and a few stopped to perch on tall, metal, streetlight poles. I heard the ocean in the distance, too, but mostly the sound was covered by the wind. A low set of headlights looped leisurely through the parking lot on the other side of the cement wall. Inside, two uniformed men could just be seen in the orange glow of the street lamps.

One carried a flashlight as they patrolled the parking lot in what looked like one of the golf carts, only theirs had a rotating blue light on top.

The door at the back of the building opened.

A figure appeared, backlit from the hallway behind him.

I saw Lucian Rucker there, and it surprised me that I recognized him.

He was less visible than I expected he would be, backlit from the hallway, but I clearly recognized his profile. His hair whipped visibly in the wind. A dim light flicked on over the staircase door as soon as the panel swung open enough to trip the sensor.

The result was an orange and gold glow over his face.

It made him look older, strangely more human, and less like the heavily made-up, celebrity billionaire I remembered from most of the media spots I’d seen. He pushed open the door with what might have been a faint smile on his face.

A ring sparkled on one finger. The wind continued to beat the hair around his face, but he didn’t seem to mind. A smug, satisfied look grew on his features as he gazed out over the dark parking lot, one foot outside the door––

Something visibly slammed into him.

It was shocking, brutal.

It threw him back hard.

His whole body slammed, skull-first, into the door jamb behind him. The shot blew out a large part of the side and back of his head. Morgan was right; the blood sprayed for yards down the inside of the hallway. It coated the door frame and most of the door itself.

The sheer violence of the death shocked me.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with gunshot wounds, but it still shocked me, maybe because of who it was, or maybe because of the calm normality I’d witnessed, just before it happened.

One bullet had done that.

The metal projectile slammed into him mercilessly; it threw his body into a backwards-tilted line, then pinned him there briefly. Once the force of the bullet and the shot ran all the way through him, his muscles, bones, and tendons lost all resistance. His knees crumpled, and his spine and abdomen didn’t fight back.

He fell like a sack of meat.

It was oddly anti-climatic.

It was oddly satisfying.

The recording ran maybe a minute and a half longer, but nothing really changed.

“Did you see that?” Black asked Nick.

Nick gave him a hard look and a brief nod.

Black glanced at Morgan. “Re-wind it.”

“How far?”

“Right before the shot.”

Morgan did as he was told.

Once again, Rucker stood there, satisfied, smug, smiling––definitely alive. The wind buffeted his hair, and I saw it rattle and vibrate the light over the door.

I couldn’t help noticing Rucker’s smile in more detail that time as he opened the door.

It looked more like a cold smirk to me now, and something in it struck me as cruel. Like he was remembering how it felt to stomp a puppy’s tail, or yank someone’s hair, or shove an old lady into traffic. His gaze turned inward, focused on something far away, but whatever he’d been thinking about, it had pleased him, and not in a very nice way.

Maybe it was even a touch of anticipation I saw in his unfocused eyes.

Then the shot rang out… and Black spoke.

“There! Stop it!”

Morgan paused the recording.

Black walked up to the wall-length monitor

He traced his long fingers over the right-hand corner of the screen.

I hadn’t seen it during the first run-through, but when Black followed the path with his fingers, I pulled the wispy outlines out of the shifting light of the rest of the frame. I’d been so focused on Rucker, on the damage the bullet did to his face and skull, I’d completely missed what Black had seen.

It was a curl of smoke.

“The shooter knew exactly where the cameras were,” Black said. “He was sitting right under them. He likely set up his shot there for that exact reason.”

Morgan re-wound it again, and played it forward at regular speed.

That time, all of us saw it.

The shot rang out. Rucker slammed into the door jamb. And smoke curled up quietly on the edge of the frame right before Lucian collapsed. I didn’t see a gun, or a flash from the muzzle, but Black was right. The killer had perched just behind the camera.

The muzzle of the rifle had been just out of range of the wide-angle lens.

“Where is that?” Black asked, turning to Morgan.

Morgan frowned. He tilted his head, as if thinking.

Then, exhaling a breath, he seemed to make up his mind.

“Come with me,” he said.

T he camera was situated on a balcony railing on a different wing of the building.

The angle was relatively high, but the telephoto had been pulled in on the camera aimed at that particular door. Seven other cameras pointed at different parts of the back part of the building and parking lots, and covered four other entrances and exits.

All of us, meaning the security chief, Morgan, plus Black, Nick, and I, leaned over the stone balcony. Wicker had returned to his lab once it was clear he was no longer needed.

The balcony itself was huge, and had been decorated to resemble a small park, with trees in planters, stone benches with cushions, small stone tables, a wall fountain of a god’s head that looked vaguely familiar, outdoor heaters with umbrellas, stone sculptures, palms, flowers. The balcony’s architecture fit the same style, with ridged columns under a flat, stone edge.

Even the cameras had been coated in stone-like casings so they wouldn’t be noticeable from the other side.

“You said your people dusted for fingerprints on the door leading out here, and all of the furniture?” Black asked Morgan.

The tall, wraith-like security chief nodded. “Yes. It’s down in the lab. They were going to run it against all employees.”

“What about the balcony itself?” Nick asked. “And the cameras?”

“Presumably, yes.”

I fought to hold in a scoff.

From Black’s expression, he felt the same, maybe more so. I was still looking at Black’s face when Nick crouched down, peering at the columns just under the cameras.

I saw his nose wrinkle, though it was subtle.

He peered at the columns themselves, examining each one, then glided back to his full height, still holding the umbrella in one hand. Luckily, Morgan hadn’t asked about it, or about the gloves. Or the hat. Or the sunglasses.

“Anything?” Black asked Nick.

“No,” Nick said.

Something about the way he said it made me think that wasn’t the whole story.

He sounded frustrated, though.

He turned to Morgan. “You cleaned this area, too?” he grunted. “Was that before or after you called the lab rats up here to dust for prints?”

I blinked. Black did, too.

Both of us turned to stare at the tall security chief.

Morgan didn’t frown, or look uncomfortable. Like before, his expression didn’t seem to change at all. He cocked his head slightly at Nick, a mild curiosity in his voice.

“Why would you ask that?”

“Bleach,” Nick said. “I can smell it. A lot of it.”

Again, Morgan didn’t seem fazed, much less apologetic.

“The cleaning team here is thorough,” he said, his voice just as indifferent. “They must have been through here this morning.”

“Does that mean before you took the prints?” Black growled.

“I don’t know. I can ask.”

Nick gave Black a sideways look, but to Morgan, he only nodded.

“Right,” he muttered.

He took a step back, and but I felt the menace in the way he shifted his weight, gliding with that eerie vampire grace of his, almost like his feet floated on a small pocket of air. It was funny how the new Nick could move away from someone and it still felt like a threat.

Black glanced at me, then around at the balcony floor.

Anything, doc? he murmured in my mind.

After the barest pause where my eyes scanned over the tile floor, the white balcony, the pseudo-Greek fountains, the stone benches, I shook my head slowly.

Whatever might have been here, it was gone.