Page 103 of King’s Ransom

With a tinted window at its back.

Through the little window—the rear side of the two-way mirror—I had a clear view of the master bedroom.

A compact cell-phone tripod stood on the recess’s shelf, but with no phone in it right now.

I’d been right.

Aristo King had been filming his sexual escapades.

And on his phone, too, which helped.

As I mentioned earlier, when a woman is set up, it’s usually by another woman in her man’s life.

When the Tech Detect eventually cracked the clone he had of King’s phone, we’d see who Aristo King had been bringing up to his Manhattan pad.

(It also made sense that Aristo King covered the secret recess with a simple framed painting by his son. He wouldn’t want to be lifting and replacing a priceless Picasso every time he set up his phone to record sex.)

I straightened the fingerpainting again and caught up with the others as they found Yasmina’s laptop in the adjoining kitchen.

When we returned to the elevator vestibule, I asked both cops: ‘Is the building superintendent around?’

The first cop made a call and a few minutes later, the elevator pinged and out of it stepped a slender young man with blond hair who was dressed in the same kind of white coveralls that ‘Lenny’ had been wearing on December 21st. Embroidered on his left chest was the name, ‘Tommy’.

‘You’re the super?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, Tommy Biggs. I’m the night super. How can I help you?’

‘We were hoping to speak with the other superintendent, the one with the moustache and glasses. His name was Lenny.’

‘You mean Lenny Grossman? Yeah, Lenny normally works the day shift. But he’s been out sick since all that stuff happened on the 21st. Freddy’s been doing the day shift since then. Can I help you?’

I’d wanted to ask Lenny about the time on December 21st when he’d gone missing, but that would have to wait.

Luckily, I had another thing to inquire about.

‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘We’re on Mrs King’s legal team. The security camera footage from the underground garage. I imagine the FBI got all that, right?’

‘They did, yeah,’ Tommy said. ‘Got everything from the last six weeks.’

‘If they obtained that footage, then we have to get it, too, for Mrs King’s defence,’ Georgy said, handing the man a request-for-­evidence document. (It’s like a subpoena. I’d asked Georgy earlier if we could get footage from all the CCTV cameras in the building, but he’d said that that would be more difficult since they weren’t public areas like the garage.)

The young superintendent nodded. ‘Sure. No problem. All that’s kept on the computer in our office down on 50. Wanna come down?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

Within minutes we were in a small windowless office on the blow-through level that was the 50th floor.

It was a dark room with a bank of closed-circuit TV monitors, racks of tools, three servers and a computer on a desk.

Tommy slid into his chair, started typing on the computer, and brought up a folder marked cctv records: garage.

‘What dates do you want again?’ he asked.

‘If the government got the last six weeks, let’s do the same, please,’ I said. ‘November 9 to December 21.’

Tommy turned to face me. ‘You sure? You’re talking forty-two days, twenty-four hours per day. That’s like . . .’

‘1,008 hours, yes,’ I said.