Chapter 23 #4
She found herself in what might be called a library in a hochlen residence, but what she thought the house’s owners probably referred to as study or office.
The shelves on two walls were full of old books, one wall was almost entirely taken up with a splendid bay window and heavy curtains, and the last wall was bare, with paler patches here and there showing where paintings might once have hung.
There was an imposing wooden desk and equally large leather chair set to one side of the bay window.
The desk surface was bare, but covered in what looked like dust and smudges from fingerprints.
Hallie remembered Peredur’s comment about housekeeping and found she was glad she didn’t have time to go through the whole property.
“Any idea who owns the property?” she asked Girard, who’d come into the room with her. She thought it had been discussed during the morning planning session but found she couldn’t immediately remember.
“No one at the moment. The previous owner died, and apparently didn’t leave a will or any heirs, so the house has been sitting empty for a while with all the furniture intact,” Girard said.
Hallie looked up at him, frowning slightly. “So, of all the houses in midtown, Findo just happened to pick one where no one would be expected home for a while? How did he manage that, I wonder?”
“There will be records somewhere, I suspect, but you’d need to know what you were looking for,” Girard said, his own frustration clear. “I’ll add this to Jasper and Dudon’s task list.”
“Good luck to them,” Hallie said, heading behind the desk as Girard left the room.
She made a quick search through the drawers, not so much because she thought Findo would have been careless and left something helpful there, but more to see what was there and whether she could tell if anything was missing.
She didn’t think that Findo was careless or stupid.
But she also didn’t think he would have expected his hideaway to be found, or found so quickly.
She would never have found this house, she was quite sure.
She would have looked for Findo in low city, where he had previously been based and where his connections were.
Or where she had thought his connections were.
The desk turned out to be almost empty apart from a collection of strange pens in the top drawer. She pulled them out, uncapping one and frowning at it.
“Where did you find a blacklight pen?” Girard asked, coming back into the room.
“In the desk. Is that what this is?” Hallie handed one of the pens to him. “Blacklight?”
“That’s not the proper technical term, but it’s the common name,” Girard said. “It’s like secret ink. You need a specific light colour to show up the writing.”
“Is that so?” Hallie bent down to look at the bulb in the desk lamp, which seemed perfectly ordinary to her eyes, and then up at the ceiling light. There was a metal spiral with perhaps half a dozen bulbs on it. “Like those?”
Girard followed her gaze and nodded, crossing the room to the light switch.
Hallie gasped as the plain wall, with all the gaps from where paintings had hung, lit up with what looked like a building diagram and a series of notes and symbols.
She barely heard Girard’s shout which brought the director, Commander Rojas and Frollo running into the room, too busy studying the map.
Frollo dragged the curtains shut, making the lines on the wall stand out even more, and she saw both the director and Girard taking out their phones and photographing the wall.
“We need the forensic team in here, Brennus in particular, to see if they can tell us what that building is,” the director said, voice grim. Brennus meant Brennus Bowen, one of the forensic technicians who seemed to be the most knowledgeable about computers.
“What made you look in here?” Rojas asked, turning to Hallie.
“The witness, Quella, mentioned that she’d seen the curtains in this room and the one upstairs get closed.
Upstairs is probably the bedroom. If Findo spent enough time in here that he was closing the curtains, I wanted to see if he’d left anything helpful.
I didn’t expect this,” Hallie said candidly.
“This looks like a tactical map,” Frollo commented, standing beside his commander. “Weak points, entrances and exits, and a couple of spots marked for concealment.”
“Agreed. I’d like some more time to study this,” the commander said. “But we are out of time. The Conclave building needs another sweep before we let anyone in.”
“Yes, sir,” Frollo said.
“The local police are on their way and I’ve called Isoud. The forensic team will be here as soon as they can and feed anything back to us,” the director said. He was staring at the wall, brows drawn together. “I could leave Jasper and Dudon here, but I need them for the top floors.”
“Yes,” the commander agreed. “Never thought I’d see the day when we thought we didn’t have enough people.”
“That is so true,” Peredur said with a faint sigh. He turned to Hallie. “Good catch. But we need to head off now.”
“Sir,” Hallie acknowledged. She gave the map on the wall one last, long look before she headed out into the daylight with Girard.
As they walked along the street back to the van, a pair of police vans and a couple of battered looking vehicles she assumed must be driven by the detectives Peredur had mentioned drove into the street.
Jasper must have moved the van to allow the cars through.
A half-dozen police officers dressed in their tactical dark blue gear, with body armour, helmets and weapons, poured out of each of the vans and headed towards the house.
One of them - Hallie presumed the officer in charge - paused to exchange a few words with Rojas and the director before following the rest of the police team.
As the police officers took up posts around the house, the tac team followed Frollo and Rojas down the street, piling into their own vans. As quickly as they had arrived, the tac team and investigators were leaving, heading back up the hill to high city and the Conclave.