Yablonski glared at him. He did not like to let his precious Starlight camera out of his personal control. On the other hand he had no intention of spending the night on some dangerous narcotics stakeout. He stood up, brought out his keys and went to a bank of lockers that covered one wall of the office.
“I’m gonna be a sucker,” he said, “let you take this thing out and get it smashed. You know how much this thing cost the City of New York?”
“Nothin.”
“About a hundred grand. Hardly nothing.”
“It’s CIA surplus circa Vietnam. You know damn well we got it for nothing.”
“Well, I’m not sure we’d get another if we lost or busted this one.” He removed a metal case from the locker and placed it gently on his desk. “You used this before?”
“You know I have.”
“Well I’m gonna go through the drill anyway!” He opened the case and pulled out a boxy object made of gray, burnished metal. It was about the size and shape of a two-pound can of coffee with binocular eyepieces on one end and a large, gleaming fisheye of a lens on the other. The body of the thing was entirely featureless, except for a barely visible indentation obviously intended for a thumb.
“You open the control panel like this,” Yablonski said, pressing on the indentation. A three-inch square of surface metal slid back to reveal a panel containing two black knobs and a small slit. “You slide in the film.” He pushed a small black rectangle into the opening. “That gives you two hundred shots. That’s the bottom number in the readout you’ll see in the lower right quadrant of the frame when you look through the camera. Above that’s the ambient light reading. You set the top knob so that it reads the same value. Here—” He held the camera out. Dick took it, put it up to his eyes. The image was blurred but the three numbers were clear. “Read off from the bottom up.”
“The bottom number says two hundred. The middle one sixty-six, the top point-oh-six.”
“Meaning you’ve got two hundred shots left, the ambient light level is sixty-six and you are pointing the camera at an object point-oh-six meters away. Now gimme.” He took it back. “You set the top knob at sixty-six and the bottom one at point-oh-six. Now look.”
“What the hell is it?”
“The top corner of the locker, dummy. It’s magnified so much you can’t tell what you’re seeing that close. Point the camera out the window.” Dick swung the camera around. The top two readings flickered and changed as he moved it, then the limbs of a tree down near street level leaped into view. He could see where ice adhered to the twigs and where the sun had made it drop away. Yablonski guided his hand to the thumb indentation. “Pull back on it.” There was a click. The little door had closed on the side of the camera and a red light had gone on above the three green numbers of the readout. “You get a light?”
“Right.”
“Ready to shoot. Push forward.” The camera made five shots in quick succession. The film indicator now read 195.
“It always shoots in increments of five. Now press inward on the indentation.” The scene pulled back and revealed the sidewalk below. “You go down to fifty millimeters. Fifty to five hundred, that’s the lens. If you push forward and down at the same time the camera will take a series of shots while the lens is moving. No problem. Just remember to always close the control housing before you try to shoot.” Dick took the camera from his eyes. Yablonski was pointing at the control housing. “That activates the camera. And if you change position always check focus. In operation it doesn’t matter too much, but remember that the camera is at its sharpest focus when the object you are shooting is exactly as far away as that little indicator in there says. You want it to change, you’ve got to adjust it with the knob.”
“That’s all? I remembered everything.”
“Well, aren’t we wonderful. Just don’t bring it back to me in a shoebox, for Chrissake. And get the fucker back here before noon tomorrow or I’ll be on your ass.”
“Oh, yes sir, Mr. Commissioner, just like you say.”
“Come on, Dick, take it easy. How much film you want?”
“Another couple of boxes. That stuffs really compact. You sure there are two hundred shots?”
“Of course. You think the camera would lie?”
Dick put the machine back in its case and hefted it. He left Yablonski staring after him.
As soon as he was gone, Yablonski was on the phone. “Captain Lesser,” he said crisply, “you told me you wanted a call if Dick Neff came around here for anything. Well, he did. He checked out the Starlight camera.”
Chapter 8
« ^ »
The search teams kept coming back empty-handed. It looked as if the park wasn’t going to yield any worthwhile clues. A bench covered with a slick of red ice— human blood. Some tattered remnants that might have been the victim’s clothes. That was all. No body, no ID, no witnesses. And so far, no report of a missing person. The cops were waiting for orders to move them out. The precinct wasn’t going to spend much more time on this, it was just another one of those mysteries that the city tossed up. Obviously somebody had died here, but in the absence of anything except blood there wasn’t much that could be done to find the killer.
“Maybe it’ll tell us something,” the Medical Examiner said as a patrolman handed him a clear plastic bag full of tattered cloth.
Becky Neff said nothing. More vague evidence. Even Wilson’s experience last night was nothing but hearsay. Hell, maybe he got panicked by some dogs. The trouble was, you weren’t going to get headquarters to take a chance on the theory. The man who sanctioned an investigation of werewolves in this city was headed for early retirement if that investigation didn’t prove itself.
“Do you believe me?” Wilson said into the silence in the car.
“Yeah,” Becky replied, surprised at the question.
“Not you, dummy. The genius. I want to know if he believes me.”
“If it wasn’t delirium tremens, I’d say you saw what you saw.”
“Thanks.” Since relating his story Wilson had fallen into a silence. Becky didn’t know whether he was thinking something out or simply sinking into depression. If possible he seemed to be getting more morose.
When Wilson turned to stare again out of the car window, Evans raised his eyebrows. “Listen,” he said to Wilson’s back, “if it makes any difference I really do believe you. I just wish to God I could do more for you than that.”
“Every little bit helps,” Becky said acidly.
“I’m sure. It must be hell.”
“Yeah,” Wilson said, “it’s that.”
Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. A couple of park cops jumped on scooters; guys from the 20th Precinct piled into squad cars. Becky flipped on the radio to catch the activity. “—thirteen, repeat, thirteen to Bethesda Fountain.”
“Jesus—” Becky started the car and followed the others into the park. They slurried in the new snow, heading for the emergency. A signal-13 was the most serious call a policeman could put out: it meant that an officer was in distress. It would cause immediate response from all nearby units—and often some from farther away. It was the call that cops hated most to hear and wanted most to answer.
The area around Bethesda Fountain was once elegant. Once, during summer, there was an open-air restaurant where you could drink wine and watch the fountain. Then the sixties had come, and drugs, and Bethesda Fountain had become an open-air drug bazaar. The restaurant had closed. The fountain had become choked with filth. Graffiti had appeared. Murders had taken place. Now the once-bustling spot was the same in summer as in winter: empty, abandoned, destroyed. And crumpled on the esplanade overlooking the fountain was a blue uniform, its occupant bent over almost with his forehead touching the snow. The scooter cops were the first to get to him. “Shot,” one of them shouted. An ambulance could already be heard screaming over from Roosevelt Hospital.