“I need a setup. Electronic surveillance. One room, nobody can know the camera is there.”
“How big’s the room?”
“Like a bedroom. Maybe fifteen by fifteen.”
“Ah, man, Harry, don’t go down that road. You start that sort of snooping and you’ll lose sight of yourself. Come work for me. I can find some —”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s actually an offshoot of a homicide I’m working. The guy’s in a wheelchair. He sits and watches TV all day. I just want to be able to make sure he’s okay, you know? There’s something going on with the wife. At least I think so.”
“You mean like abuse?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Something.”
“Does the guy know you’re going to do this?”
“No.”
“But you’ve got access to the room?”
“Pretty much. Think you can help me out?”
“Well, we got cameras. But you have to understand most of our work is industrial application. Heavy-duty stuff. Sounds to me like all you need is a nanny cam, something that you can just pick up at Radio Shack.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t want to be too obvious about it. The guy was a cop.”
Biggar nodded, digested it quickly and stood up.
“Well, come on back to the tech room and take a look at what we’ve got. Andre’s back there and he can fix you up.”
He led me back into the hallway and toward the back of the building. We entered the tech room, which was about the size of a double garage and was crowded with workbenches and shelves of all manner of electronics equipment. There were three men gathered around one of the workbenches. They were looking at the screen of a small television. A grainy black-and-white surveillance tape was playing. I recognized one of the men, the largest, as Andre Biggar, Burnett’s son. I had never met him but I knew it was him by his size and resemblance to Burnett. Right down to the shaved scalp.
Introductions were made and Andre explained that he was reviewing a tape showing a burglary of a client’s warehouse. His father explained what I was looking for and the son led me to another workbench, where he could display and review equipment. He showed me cameras housed in a vase, a lamp, a picture frame and finally a clock. Thinking about how Lawton Cross had complained about not being able to see the time on his television, I stopped Andre right there.
“This will do. How does it work?”
It was a round clock about ten inches across.
“This is a classroom clock. You want to put this on the wall of a bedroom? It will stick out like tits on a —”
“Andre,” his father said.
“It’s not being used as a bedroom,” I said. “It’s like a TV room. And the subject told me he can’t see the time on the corner of the screen on CNN. So this will make sense when I bring it in.”
Andre nodded.
“Okay. You want sound? Color?”
“Sound, yes. Color would be good but not necessary.”
“All right. Are you going to transmit, or you want to go self-contained?”
I looked at him blankly and he knew I didn’t understand.
“I build these two ways. One is you have a camera in the clock and you transmit picture and sound to a receiver that records it on video. You would have to find a secure place for the recorder within about a hundred feet to be sure. Are you going to be outside the house in a van or something?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Okay, the second option is to go digital and put everything in the camera and record internally to a digital tape or memory card. The drawback is capacity. With a digital tape you get about two hours real time, then you have to change it out. With a card you get even less.”
“That won’t work. I was only planning to check on it every few days.”
I started thinking of how I would be able to hide the receiver inside the house. Maybe the garage. I could pretend I was going to the garage to throw something away and I could hide the receiver somewhere Danny Cross wouldn’t see it.
“Well, we can slow the recording down if we need to.”
“How?”
“A number of different ways. First off we put the camera on a clock. Turn it off, say, midnight to eight. We can also stagger the FPS and lengthen —”
“FPS?”
“The recorded frames per second. It makes the image jump, though.”