Campaign: Facets

[tshiggins]

(...continued)

The group went back to the motel to freshen up and change. Frank, who had legitimate access to national databases that listed BOLOs and warrants, but who did not want the system to flag an inquiry with his user ID, helped Arthur hack into the system and pull a mug shot for Bart Krieger and any readily available information. He then took a quick trip to an office supply store, came back and changed into the sort of cheap sports jacket worn by detectives just about anywhere in the United States.

By the time he was ready, Doc Bascher and Henrietta had changed into “Lady’s Lunch at the DoubleTree” attire, while Sunmi had donned a fresh pair of jeans, a silly tourist T-shirt and a pair of cheap sunglasses, and stashed a collapsible selfie-stick in her backpack.

Beatrice stuck to her leathers, and said Grunt was fine just the way he was, goggles and all.

For his part, A.J. called up and reserved a room at the DoubleTree, and then made sure his golf clubs were in the back of his SUV. The DoubleTree has three golf courses around it, he explained, and he hadn’t played them in years.

With that, the group headed south on I-25, and reached the hotel by about 1 p.m.

Once they arrived, A.J. unloaded his luggage and had it carried up to his room. Once there, he accessed one of the cables to a video camera, and tried to use it to hack into the hotel security system. However, he couldn’t manage it, so Frank went to Plan B.

Frank went to the Front Desk and asked to speak to security, and after some back-and-forth with the guard on duty, he finally got to speak with the head of the hotel security, a man he quickly identified as a former police officer.

The Utah State Trooper confided to the security guard that he was a member of a special task force investigating the expansion of drug trafficking in the Four Corners area, and had received information that a suspect had met with a possible backer in the hotel that morning. Frank pulled the mug shot of Bart Krieger out of the manila folder he’d bought 90 minutes previously (which also had printouts of outstanding parking tickets and “person of interest” advisories), and showed it to the security man. Appalled that illegal activity could take place in the LoneTree hotel in Colorado Springs (of all places), the chief of security agreed to provide assistance.

Meanwhile, Beatrice had left Grunt in his sidecar to guard her motorcycle, while she went inside to the bar. The bartender blinked upon seeing her, and asked if there were a biker convention in town. Without missing a beat, Beatrice said there was a rally close by, and that she was supposed to have met a couple of biker buddies, in the Lobby Bar, but they may have missed each other.

The bartender acknowledged that he’d seen a couple of bikers earlier that day, dressed a bit more roughly with her, and that they’d come in for breakfast. As Beatrice tried to get more information about them, she realized he was rather deftly diverting the conversation away from details about the visitors.

Arthur, listening via Beatrice’s cell phone, deduced that the two men had come in, met with a woman who was not Beatrice and not a biker, and the bartender wanted to avoid telling her about that rather than risk a scene. With that, Beatrice shifted to more idle chit-chat while she enjoyed an excellent club sandwich, and Arthur pinged the information to Frank.

Once in the hotel’s Security Office, Frank and the security chief zipped through the CCTV surveillance tapes and, with the information from A.J., zeroed in on the Lobby Bar fairly quickly. Frank quickly identified Bart Krieger and, with a bit of hopping around recordings, the security chief was able to get a decent picture of the face of the lady who met the biker in the Lobby Bar.

Frank took some notes on the back of the printouts in the manila folder, and loaded the photo on a thumb drive, and asked if it were possible that the valet had noted the make and model of the car in which she’d arrived. The security chief took him down to the valet stand, and talked to the kid on duty, who advised him that the valet who worked mornings had already left for the day.

Meanwhile, Henrietta and Doc Bascher had arrived in the hotel’s Atrium Café, where they found a comfortable table and started to hob-nob with the female members of the wait staff. Seperately, Sunmi wandered in and got her own table, and started to chat up the young gentlemen waiters.

The women quickly learned that the staff distinctly remembered the visit from the bikers, earlier in the day, since that sort didn’t come into the DoubleTree very often – much less to meet with a lady of means. Henrietta and Doc Bascher reacted with shock at such behavior, breathlessly asked for details.

They learned that the woman had displayed the classy behavior normally associated with established wealth, which made her association that much more potentially scandalous and, since none of the wait staff recognized her, concluded that she must have come in from out of town. Sunmi kept the young men distracted by shifting into “cute Asian tourist” mode, and asking them to take pictures of her in the lovely restaurant.

At about that time, at Frank’s urging, the security chief called the morning valet at home and asked him to come back down, on an urgent police matter. The young man showed up within 20 minutes. He saw the photo printed out by the security chief and said he recognized the lady, because she’d arrived in a nice Lexus with license plates that had a Denver prefix, but which was not a rental tag.

The valet quickly found the vehicle information, including the license plate number (the valets at the DoubleTree Hotel in Colorado Springs park a lot of Lexuses…), and Frank took a photo. The Utah trooper thanked the valet and the retired cop for all their help, and then met A.J, to whom he passed the thumb drive and a forwarded photo of the vehicle information.

Arthur took the information back up to his room, pulled up the photo from the thumb drive and then accessed the Academy Club member site he’d hacked, previously. He and Randy flipped through the member photos and chat boards, and quickly identified the woman as Darla St. Cloud, the secretary of the brutally-competitive Academy Club bridge players’ league.

At about that time, the ladies finished their lunch and went upstairs to Arthur’s room, where Henrietta joined the former aerospace engineer and the extreme athlete in some serious research into social media. After reading a lot more about competitive semi-pro bridge playing (as bloodthirsty a sport as anything Randy had ever seen…), they got a line on Darla St. Cloud.

They learned that she apparently hailed from Texas, originally, and worked in banking. She’d appeared out of nowhere in competitive bridge about three-and-a-half years previously, and started to do quite well in some of the “recreational” tournaments around the desert southwest.

About 18 months ago, she’d taken a job as an accounts manager with the Wells Fargo bank in downtown Denver (located right around the corner from the Academy Club) and soon thereafter made the acquaintance of one Lacey Vaile (nee Dugan), the wife of Marcus Vaile, the chairman of the board and a scion of one of the founding families.

In checking her background, they learned that Lacey had been an avid bridge player for many years, but had never been more than a step or two above mediocre. However, her stature began to improve substantially about 18 months ago, when she met Darla St. Cloud and the two started partnering.

About a year ago, Lacey had sponsored Darla to join the Academy Club, and less than three months later Darla was accepted. As A.J. flipped through the member site, he noted that Darla had apparently become quite the popular social butterfly, and had managed to get to know nearly everybody in the club. She’d proven popular enough to get elected as secretary of the bridge league only a few months ago, and everyone seemed pleased with her efforts.

The new information triggered a new flurry of theorizing, and the group concluded that Darla may have been sent in as a mole by the Academy Club’s mysterious enemies, to infiltrate the organization. The nature of the questions listed for “Olivia McShane” to answer seemed to indicate that, despite the fact that those enemies were most likely responsible for the death of Oliver McShane, they either didn’t have the books, didn’t have all the books, or simply couldn’t access the information.

At that point, Randy lived up to his nickname and kicked out a random thought: What if the Negro janitor originally suspected of the theft of the books really did steal them, and wasn’t just a convenient patsy for the crime who’d been quietly disappeared by one or the other of the magical factions?

(continued...)