Name Withheld by J. A. Jance Page B

these will be quite that good."
    As I continued down the hallway I ripped open the envelope and shook out the contents. A typed memo fell into my hand along with the three tapes.
To: Detective J. P. Beaumont
From: Deanna Compton
     
Enclosed please find copies of the tapes you requested. I have cued them all to what I believe are the pertinent spots so you won't have to go scrolling through the whole thing.
If I can be of any further assistance, please be sure to let me know.
Deanna Compton,
for Bill Whitten
    For a moment, I considered calling Designer Genes International and letting Bill Whitten know what was going on, that Don Wolf's wife was most likely dead right along with her husband. But I decided against it. Just because Audrey Cummings didn't think Bill Whitten was capable of shooting someone didn't mean I had to agree. As far as I was concerned, Whitten was still a suspect.
    With the tapes and note still in hand, I bypassed my own office in favor of one of the small conference rooms at the end of the hall. There, I plugged the first tape into the slot of the VCR. I had a one-in-three chance of picking the right tape first time up to bat, and I won big.
    True to her word, Deanna Compton had cued the tape to the right place. When the tape came on the screen, Latty and Don Wolf were standing in the elevator. Wolf was standing next to the controls, and Latty was pressed into the far corner, with as much distance between the two of them as was humanly possible in that confined space.
    I watched the whole sequence. The whole time they were in the elevator they maintained an absolute silence. "One down, two to go," I said, pulling the useless tape out of the VCR and inserting another.
    The second tape was the one with the rape on it. There was no need to watch that one again. I ejected it, and inserted the third. This time, the screen held two separate, side-by-side images. Both cameras were mounted from much the same position over the front entryway door of D.G.I., but they were aimed in opposite directions. One looked out on the driveway and the busy street beyond. The other focused on the front door of the building. The readout in the corner of the screen said: DECEMBER 28, 12:06:32 A.M. That meant this was from Thursday morning, less than ten minutes after Don Wolf's assault on the girl named Latty.
    Seconds later, the elevator door opened. Latty and Don Wolf came across the lighted lobby toward the door. Wolf was still dressed in his shirt sleeves; Latty still clutched his oversized jacket around her ruined clothing.
    As they came toward the lobby door, a sudden movement from the other part of the screen caught my eye. Glancing there, I expected to see the arrival of a cab. Instead, the driveway area where the cab would naturally have stopped was empty. Puzzled about the unidentified movement, I flipped the remote control to rewind.
    Because I don't watch television all that much, I'm not nearly as handy with what Heather calls clickers as Ron's two girls are. Naturally, I overshot the mark and came to a stop with the readout showing DECEMBER 27, 11:45:50 P.M. I had rewound beyond the place where I wanted to stop by almost twenty-five minutes.
    "Damn!" I muttered aloud. "Too far."
    I was about to fast-forward the tape when a car slid into the camera's viewfinder and stopped in front of the building. The headlights went off, but no one got out. From everything Bill Whitten had said, I had assumed Don Wolf and Latty had been alone in the building, but here, only a few minutes before the two of them had appeared on the screen in Don Wolf's office, someone else had made a midnight call on the headquarters of Designer Genes International.
    Because the screen was separated into two simultaneous images, the picture on the department's twenty-one-inch viewing screen was very small. I leaned closer, trying to ascertain what I was seeing. And when I did, I could barely believe my eyes.
    The car was an older-model Crown Victoria,