“You’re making it very hard for me to believe,” I said, “that you didn’t just remove him.”
Dion paled.
“I don’t do things like that,” Yol snapped. “Do you know how much a murder investigation can cost a company?”
I really wished I could trust him. To an extent, I needed to. Otherwise, I could very easily end this mission as a corpse myself. “Just follow the instructions in my email,” I told him, then hung up.
I ignored Dion and began typing an email while the feed from the security camera continued to play on the other side of my laptop screen. Audrey stood up behind my seat and looked over my shoulder, watching me type.
“You shouldn’t be out of your seat belt,” Ivy said.
“If we wreck, I’m sure Steve-O will imagine some delightfully gruesome scars for me,” Audrey said, then pointed at what I was typing. “Rumors to be spread? About Exeltec? This will make them even more desperate.”
“I’m counting on it,” I said.
“Which will put an even bigger target on our heads!” Audrey said. “What in the world are you planning?”
I didn’t answer her, instead finishing up the instructions and shooting off the email to Yol. “Dion,” I said, still half watching the video on the laptop. “Is your family religious?”
“My mom is,” he said from the front seat. “I’m an atheist.” He said it stubbornly, as if this were something he’d had to defend in the past.
“Panos?”
“Atheist,” Dion said. “Mom refused to accept it, of course.”
“Who’s your family priest?”
“Father Frangos,” he said. “Why?”
“Because I think someone impersonated him last night when visiting your brother’s remains. Either that, or Father Frangos is involved in the theft of the corpse.”
Dion snorted. “He’s, like, ninety years old. He’s so pious, when my mother told him I was taking after my brother, he fasted for thirty-six hours to pray for me. Thirty-six hours. I think the idea of intentionally breaking one of the commandments would kill him on the spot.”
The kid seemed to have gotten over his fear of me. Good.
“Ask him what he thought of his brother,” Ivy said from the back seat.
“Seems he liked the guy,” J.C. said with a grunt.
“Really?” Ivy said to him. “You deduced that all on your own, did you? Steve, I’d like to hear an opinion of Panos that didn’t come through Yol’s channels. Get the kid talking, if you please.”
“Your brother,” I said to Dion. “You seem to really dislike the company he was working for.”
“It used to be all right,” Dion said. “Before it went and got all corporate. That’s when the lies started, the extortion. It became about money.”
“Unlike other jobs,” Audrey said, “which are never, ever about money.”
“Your brother continued working there,” I said to Dion, ignoring Audrey’s commentary. “So he couldn’t have been too torn up about the changes at I3. I expect he wanted in on a little of that cash.”
Dion twisted around in his seat and fixed me with a glare that could have fried an egg. “Panos cared nothing for the money. He only stayed at that place because of their resources.”
“So . . . he needed I3’s equipment,” I said. “And, by extension, their money.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t about the money. My brother was going to do great things. Cure diseases. He did things that even the others, traitors though they were, didn’t know about. He—” Dion cut off, then turned around immediately in his seat, and refused to respond to further prodding.
I looked at Ivy.
“Serious hero worship going on there,” she said, “I suspect that if you prodded, you’d find Dion was planning to study biology and follow in his brother’s footsteps. The philosophy, the mannerisms . . . We can learn a lot about Panos by watching his brother.”
“So,” J.C. said, “you’re telling me Panos was an annoying little sh—”
“Anyway,” Ivy interrupted, “if it’s true that Panos was working on projects even Garvas and the others didn’t know about, that could be the true secret Yol is trying to recover.”
I nodded.
“Stephen,” Tobias said, pointing at the laptop screen. “You’ll want to watch this.”
I leaned over, then rewound the footage. Tobias, Audrey, and J.C. huddled around, all ignoring Ivy’s pointed complaints that none of us were bothering with seat belts. On the small screen, now playing at normal speed, I watched someone leave the bathroom in the medical complex.
The cleaning lady. She pulled a large trash can on wheels, and approached the doorway into the coroner’s offices, then opened the door and went in.
“Does nobody in this world care about security anymore?” J.C. said, pointing at the screen. “Look at the security guard! He’s didn’t even glance at her.”
I froze the frame. The camera was positioned in such a way that we couldn’t get a good look at the figure, even when I rewound and froze it again.
“Somewhat small in stature,” Tobias said. “Dark haired, female. I can’t pick out anything else. The rest of you?”
J.C. and Audrey shook their heads. I froze the frame on the security guard. It was a different man from the one we’d met, a smaller fellow, who was sitting in the station and reading a paperback novel. I rewound to try to find where the cleaning lady entered the building, but she must have come in the back. I did catch the security guard pushing a button, perhaps to open the back door for someone who had buzzed for the lock to open.
Fast-forwarding, we watched the cleaning lady leave the coroner’s offices and go into each room along the hall. Whoever it was, she knew not to break pattern. She cleaned the other offices quickly, then disappeared down the hallway, towing her large trash can.
“That trash can could most certainly hide a body,” J.C. said. “I thought the guard said nobody went into those rooms!”
“Cleaning staff is usually considered ‘nobody,’” Tobias observed. “And the door into the morgue itself would be locked. Liza said even the security guard wouldn’t be able to get in, so presumably the cleaning staff doesn’t go into that room, at least not without supervision.”
“Does that drive have footage from other nights?” Audrey asked.