Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(85)
Otto nodded slowly, thinking it through.
“Remember the first day we came and met Diego, and he took us for a quick tour around Unit Seven?”
He nodded.
“There was a small room on the right side of the building that houses their security tapes. Diego said they don’t monitor them, but they’re digitally archived. I worked with a similar setup last year when the Family Value installed their system.”
“I remember.” He frowned. “You planning on viewing the tapes after we’re done here?”
“I’m going now. Skip just said employees with good personnel records are allowed keys to the various buildings. I want to get to those tapes before someone else does.”
“Diego know you’re planning on viewing the tapes?” Otto asked.
“He’s busy.”
“Skip know?” he asked.
“He’s busy too.”
“And what if one of those two killed Santiago?”
“All the more reason for me to check this out now. Cover for me?”
Otto sighed and pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. He flipped it open. “It’s on with the volume turned up. You call if anything looks out of place. Let me know when you get the video pulled up.”
Josie walked quickly across the parking lot and through the gate into the production area. She walked around the track until she reached the building labeled as Unit Seven, keeping an eye open for Diego and Skip, but she saw no one. The action was currently taking place outside the plant, not inside the buildings, and she felt fairly secure. While the chance was remote, she wanted to at least scan the tapes in case evacuation became inevitable. If Skip or Diego questioned her, which she had no doubt they eventually would, that would be her excuse for operating without their knowledge.
Josie used the master key that Diego had provided her earlier that day, and she let herself into Unit Seven. She quickly scanned the building and determined it was empty, and then proceeded to the security office.
*
The room was cool, but not like the arctic temperature in Skip’s office. It was a small space filled with electronic equipment and one computer with a flat, wide-screen monitor. The desk and shelves were organized and clean, but she noticed the faint corroded battery smell that Dillon had commented on when they were digging around the plant.
Josie flipped the overhead light switch on and closed the door behind her. She booted up the computer and the system loaded, but a login screen appeared. She looked around the desktop for a login-password combination, hoping to find something taped to the desk, a card left out in the open. She rifled through three desk drawers and was surprised there wasn’t a paper somewhere that contained the logins. She had found most people, even businesses, were often careless with security issues. She scanned the shelves above her and found a dozen software manuals and computer books. The computer login screen said STATEN SECURITY SYSTEMS, V.4.3. She found the manual with that title, opened the front cover, and hand-printed in pencil on the first page was login: BeaconP1 and password: password1A. She entered the two terms into the system and was in within twenty seconds.
Once inside the program it was a fairly simple search. She entered dates into the appropriate fields, entered the time range she wanted to view, and then had to choose from thirty-five different locations that were notated with a number from one to thirty-five. Going back to the manual she found a pocket in the back of the book stuffed with someone’s notes. A sheet of paper with the words Cheat Sheet written across the top listed the specific location next to the numbers. She found Pilot Lab next to number twenty-nine and within a minute she was watching a clear black-and-white video of the empty lab in the pilot unit. Over the next several minutes she practiced using the various controls to scan at differing speeds, and to pause and stop.
In real time the tape showed a static shot of the laboratory that Santiago and Brent had been working in. Skip had indicated it was the only lab in the plant. The room was approximately six hundred square feet and was brightly lit and filled with metal lab furniture. Lab equipment and paraphernalia were stacked all around the room, which appeared to be less orderly than other areas she had seen in the plant. From the rotating security camera, Josie could see everything but the far corner of the room, opposite the entrance door.
After scanning both Thursday and Friday nights, she was able to determine a set schedule that the security guard used to walk the building. He arrived within ten minutes of his three-hour rotation both nights. Josie was pinning her hopes on Saturday. If Santiago knew the schedule as well, he could have slipped in unnoticed. And so could his murderer.
TWENTY-THREE
Otto looked over the shoulder of one of the workers who was checking the satellite picture on his cell phone and whistled at the band of green that signaled rain across West Texas and northern Mexico; it looked as if the rain would continue for at least another hour or two, and from the looks of the radar there would be increased flooding all across West Texas.
While the rest of the men were piling into the pickup truck, Otto and Mitch each climbed on an ATV that Diego had provided. Otto felt as if twenty years had fallen off his back. Maybe even thirty. He wished Delores could see him riding through the desert on a four-wheeler, flinging mud like a kid again.
Mitch took a wide path around the plant and the pickup followed with Otto in the rear. Otto noticed places on the hillside where the ground was cracking in ten-and twenty-foot horizontal stretches, as if big slabs of earth were ready to separate. It was a frightening sight and sobered him quickly. He wondered what the trencher would do to the already unstable ground. They might cause their own mudslide trying to avert another one.