Chapter 4 - THE TABLET THAT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO MATTER.
Frank Miles arrived Tuesday morning carrying a laptop, a tool bag and the expression of a man who already wished he had declined the job.
Clara was not home.
That was intentional.
Glen had waited until she left for a lunch appointment in Greenwich before calling Frank back.
Ariel sat at the breakfast table drawing.
She had been told she didn’t need to stay.
She stayed.
Frank placed Clara’s tablet beside his laptop.
“First thing,” he said, “I’m not breaking into anything.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I need that clear.”
“It is.”
“I can inspect local configuration, device certificates, cached network data and whatever the account already exposes. I’m not bypassing passwords.”
“Fine.”
Frank looked toward Ariel.
“You okay with her hearing this?”
Ariel answered before Glen could.
“It’s about me.”
Frank looked at Glen.
Glen nodded.
“Okay.”
Frank connected the tablet to a small network adapter.
Ariel stopped drawing.
“What’s that?”
“It lets the computer ask the tablet boring questions.”
“Do tablets answer?”
“Usually with even more boring answers.”
Ariel almost smiled.
It was the first time Glen had seen that expression since the pool party.
Frank worked for twenty minutes.
The warehouse camera remained offline.
Finally a list of devices appeared.
POOL-NORTH.
DRIVEWAY.
FRONT ENTRY.
GARAGE-1.
BACK HALL.
Then:
WH-OLD-3.
Frank pointed.
“That’s your mystery camera.”
“Where is it physically?”
“This won’t tell me.”
“Can you tell when it was added?”
“Maybe.”
He opened another panel.
His eyebrows rose.
“What?”
Frank didn’t answer immediately.
“What?”
“Device enrollment date was February eighteenth.”
Glen stared at him.
“This year?”
“Yes.”
“The warehouse burned ten years ago.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t put a camera on the property now.”
“I know.”
Ariel looked between them.
“So somebody did?”
Frank nodded.
“Somebody added a camera called WH-OLD-3 to this account.”
“Who?”
“That part matters.”
Frank clicked again.
A small window opened.
ADMIN PROFILE: CLARA.
Glen sat very still.
Ariel looked at him.
“Clara put it there?”
Frank corrected her gently.
“The camera was added while Clara’s administrator profile was being used.”
“That’s different?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because knowing something and proving it are different things.”
Ariel frowned.
“That’s annoying.”
Frank smiled.
“Very.”
Glen barely heard them.
“Could somebody else use her profile?”
“If they had access.”
“Would they need her password?”
“Possibly not. If the device was already logged in, someone physically holding it could make changes.”
“So this proves—”
“That her administrator profile added the camera.”
“And not that Clara personally did.”
“Correct.”
Ariel raised her hand.
Frank looked at her.
“What?”
“She told me there was no warehouse.”
Frank leaned back.
“That’s a different question.”
“It’s still a lie.”
Glen looked at his daughter.
Seven years old.
No legal vocabulary.
No technical vocabulary.
Still managing to cut directly through everybody’s careful adult wording.
Frank continued inspecting.
“The camera certificate is interesting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s temporary.”
“How temporary?”
“Battery unit. Portable. Probably weather-sealed. This isn’t some old security camera surviving a decade in a fire.”
“So somebody placed it there recently.”
“Almost certainly.”
Ariel whispered, “Clara.”
Frank lifted a finger.
“Maybe.”
Ariel rolled her eyes.
Glen almost laughed despite himself.
Frank kept going.
“Another thing. Yesterday’s video probably was not live.”
Glen nodded.
“I read about caching.”
“More than caching. This system can keep replaying the last motion event after connection loss.”
“While saying live?”
“If somebody configured the gateway badly.”
“So the Glen on screen could have been from four nights earlier.”
“Yes.”
Ariel turned toward her father.
“You were there four nights earlier.”
Glen’s mouth went dry.
Frank looked at him.
“You were?”
Glen realized he had said too much without saying anything.
“I wore that shirt four nights earlier.”
“That’s not what she said.”
Ariel stared at him.
Glen stood and walked to the sink.
He ran water he didn’t need.
Frank watched him.
“Mr. Mercer.”
“Glen.”
“Glen, were you at that warehouse?”
Ariel’s eyes stayed on her father’s back.
“No,” Glen said.
The lie came too quickly.
He knew it.
Ariel knew it.
Frank probably knew it.
Nobody spoke.
Glen shut the faucet.
He turned around.
“I don’t think so.”
Ariel’s face changed.
“You don’t think?”
“I’m trying to remember.”
“You remember everything.”
“That’s not true.”
“You remembered which shirt.”
Glen had no answer.
Frank closed one window and opened another.
“We’ve got local thumbnail cache.”
Several tiny images appeared.
Most showed empty rooms and blackened beams.
One showed Glen.
His profile was unmistakable.
Another showed the woman.
Hair like Clara’s.
A third showed both of them near what appeared to be a steel door.
Ariel stood.
“That’s her.”
The woman’s face was partially obscured.
Frank zoomed.
Pixels broke apart.
“It resembles her,” he said.
“It is her.”
“We can’t prove that from this.”
Ariel looked furious.
“Why does everybody keep saying that?”
Glen answered quietly.
“Because if we get it wrong, it matters.”
“What if you get me wrong?”
The room became still.
Frank looked down at his laptop.
Glen looked at Ariel.
She wasn’t crying.
That made it worse.
“Ariel—”
“I said it was Clara yesterday and she said I imagined it.”
“I know.”
“You said maybe.”
“I know.”
“You looked at her first.”
“I know.”
Ariel pushed away from the table.
She went upstairs.
Frank waited until her footsteps disappeared.
Then he said, “You’ve got a bigger problem than a camera.”
Glen sat down.
“I know.”
“No, I mean technically too.”
Frank pointed at the tablet.
“The camera was added February eighteenth.”
“So?”
“Look at the tablet’s device history.”
Glen leaned closer.
WH-OLD-3 had been manually accessed dozens of times.
February.
March.
April.
May.
June.
July.
The dates continued.
“You said this camera first appeared last winter.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you ask Clara?”
“I did.”
Glen looked at him.
Frank rubbed his chin.
“What did she say?”
“That it was a temporary property camera and none of my business.”
“Property?”
“I assumed one of her family properties.”
Glen looked at the screen.
“You assumed?”
“She owns a big house. She has cameras. People with big houses say weird things like ‘one of our properties.’ I fix Wi-Fi for a living. I don’t investigate marriages.”
Fair.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you ever see the warehouse footage?”
“Once.”
“Was anybody in it?”
Frank shook his head.
“Just ruins.”
“When?”
“March.”
Glen scrolled.
There was one more section.
USER ACTIVITY.
Frank hesitated before opening it.
“What?”
“Administrator access.”
“Open it.”
Frank did.
A series of dates appeared beside Clara’s profile.
Then another profile.
GLEN-M.
Glen stared.
“I’ve never used this app.”
Frank looked at him.
“Somebody has used your profile.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You have a login.”
“I didn’t know I had one.”
Ariel’s footsteps stopped on the stairs.
She had been listening.
Glen turned.
“Ariel.”
She came down slowly.
“Did Clara use Daddy’s name?”
Frank glanced at Glen.
“We don’t know.”
Ariel walked to the table.
She pointed at the screen.
One entry had a small icon beside it.
VIDEO EXPORT.
DATE: SUNDAY, 11:48 P.M.
The night before the pool party.
ACCOUNT: GLEN-M.
May you like
Glen read it twice.
Somebody had exported warehouse footage using his profile while he was asleep upstairs.
