Daddy PI: Book 1 of the Daddy PI Casefiles Frost, J (acx book reading txt) 📖

Giggling, Emily starts up her computer and opens a program.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a timeline program I wrote.”

“You wrote?”

She nods. “I took a class on Unix coding through Open University.” She bites her lip. “I told you, I’m really scattered.”

I chuckle and stroke her soft curls. “I like your scatter, sweetie.”

She shows me how it works. It’s timelining for dummies: you type in the time, date and event, and the program organizes them.

“It’s a relational database,” she explains, which doesn’t mean anything to me. “Once the information’s entered, you can sort it any way you want. If you assign categories to the entries, you can group and shuffle them that way, too.”

“Very cool, little girl.”

Reviewing the CCTV footage is much less cool. We figure out how to load the clips into my laptop’s media player, and how to fast-forward, but we can’t go too fast, or we risk missing something. Fast-forwarding at a speed that lets us see each face means four to five hours of watching in real time.

To divert from the corridor tedium, Emily takes a pack of thin, pastel-colored paper out of the desk and shows me another of her many hobbies: origami. With quick flicks of her fingers, as easily and dexterously as she wielded chopsticks that night in L.A., she folds a crane.

My hands, toughened by years of working ropes and smacking bottoms, aren’t up to the delicate task and the misshapen twist of paper I put next to Emily’s makes us both laugh.

Our laughter trails off at movement on the screen; Emily taps the controls and slows the playback to normal speed. A man in his mid-fifties, casual in a white shirt, khakis, and sandals, with a day’s growth of stubble and the start of a comb-over, emerges from Cabin D-21.

“That’s Bill Black,” I tell Emily, familiar with his appearance from the passenger ID picture the Pink Pearl people sent me.

She logs the date and time off the counter at the corner of the video. Friday, nineteen-ten. For someone who supposedly had a debilitating headache, Black looks pretty chipper as he saunters down the hall. “Black leaves cabin?”

“Sure.”

That’s as good a description as any. I freeze the frame. Pink Pearl’s CCTV system isn’t bad. It’s in color, which is better than a lot of the systems I’ve worked with. The resolution is decent. I can see the shine of Black’s scalp underneath his comb-over, the taut fabric at his waistline where his shirt and belt are fighting a losing battle against the bulge. I can also see a bulge in his pants pocket. Not his dick or a wallet or a phone. This looks like a squat cylinder.

“Take a look at his pocket.” I tap the screen.

Emily peers at it, then starts fiddling with my laptop and, a moment later, the image enlarges, centered on Black’s pants. The resolution deteriorates as the image grows, but the contours of what’s in his pocket are pretty clear.

“Pager?” Emily asks, tipping her head to the side.

“Prescription bottle, I think.”

“Oh, I see it now. Is that what you were talking about with Dr. Lehmann? Do you think they’re smuggling the pills on board that way?”

“Definite possibility. When I interviewed the room cleaner, he remembered seeing some in Black’s bathroom, and we know Black wasn’t on any medication except painkillers. Easy to hide a recreational drug in a pill bottle, particularly if the color would have made it stand out from the other tablets.”

“Pink friend.” Emily nods.

“Uh-huh. Let’s see if we can catch him returning.”

He does, a little over two hours later, twenty minutes after Jan Millek has come and gone. Black’s shirt is untucked, so we can’t see what’s in his pocket, and he’s carrying his sandals. Emily makes a low noise as we watch him move slowly, and a little unsteadily, up the corridor to his cabin door.

“Is that how I look when I’m plugged?” she asks, watching the screen. “That’s how I feel like I’m walking.”

I watch Black for another second before I answer her. Bow-legged. He definitely has, or has had, something up his ass. “You’re much sexier when you’re plugged, baby doll,” I tell her. I couldn’t say she’s much more graceful, because, God knows, that would not be the truth. But it is very cute, and more than a bit of a turn-on, to watch her toddle around as she struggles with a plug. “Log that as ‘Black returns alone, unsteady.’ ”

She types it in and I begin fast-forwarding again. At 10:10, a man in a cream thong appears, carrying a tray. Black opens the door at his knock, dressed in a bathrobe and holding a tumbler of clear liquid and ice. Black takes the tray with its two covered dishes and disappears back into his cabin.

“He got the munchies,” I say to Emily. “Log that as, room service delivery, Black drinking. Can you make notes with the entries?”

“Sure.” She taps away. “What do you want the note to say?”

“Action item one: cross-ref room service bill. Action item two: ask M.L. if brick stimulates appetite.”

“Got it.”

I hit the fast forward again and we watch as passengers and staff come and go past D-21, but the door doesn’t open again until 8:40 the next morning, when Black emerges in a Hawaiian shirt so bright it makes my eyes bleed, with a towel slung over his shoulder.

Emily starts typing. “Is he going to the pool?” she asks.

Possibly. Or maybe to a really colorful beach scene.

“Put a note with that. ‘Action item three: cross-ref spa bill.’ ”

“Okay, Daddy. Should I put anything about his shirt?”

I chuckle. “No, crazy baby. His fashion sense isn’t relevant to the investigation.”

She giggles. “It’s a very ugly shirt.”

That it is. An hour and half later, he returns without it.

“Where’d the ugly shirt go, Daddy?” Emily asks, peering at the screen.

He’s wearing the towel wrapped around his waist and a pair of flip-flops but nothing else. His barrel chest and meaty legs are on display. All the skin he’s showing