Page 110 of Maddy's Justice

“Two things,” Carvelli said. “What if someone is looking at the camera when you do this?”

“A chance we’ll have to take.”

“Great. How is all five feet nothing little you gonna reach up to place the photo in front of the camera?” Carvelli asked.

Ava looked at Carvelli and said, “Big strong man, want to go for a little walk with me?”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

A few minutes later, Ava and Carvelli were back. Mission accomplished.

“She’s heavier than she looks,” Carvelli complained.

“No, she isn’t,” Maddy said. “You’ve just had too many birthdays for that kind of thing.”

“Are we good?” Conrad asked. “Do you really think that TV trick will work? Your photo will fool them?”

“Not for long,” Ava said. “But, at this time of night maybe they aren’t too sharp, too vigilante. We can’t be all night.”

“What about the camera right outside our door?” Maddy asked. There was a camera bulb in the ceiling inches to the right of their door.

“Pointing the other way,” Ava said.

“You ready to go?” Carvelli asked Conrad.

“We’re probably gonna have to, I don’t know, figure out how to hide it. If they have the same drop-down ceiling, we’ll be okay,” Conrad replied.

“You sure of the measurements?” Carvelli asked Maddy.

“As sure as I can be.”

“How much cable do you have?” Carvelli asked Conrad.

“Forty feet should be enough. We’ll go up underneath the room through the walls. I’ll use a wall outlet to run the cable through, so I’ll drill only one hole in the floor of the mystery room. Then, since there’s an outlet on our wall, the one adjacent to the one next door, we’ll go under the carpet use that outlet to run the cable back into here.”

“What?” Carvelli asked a bit confused.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” Conrad said.

“Should work,” Ava said. She was starting to admire Conrad’s skill.

It took almost an hour, but it was done. The hard part was running a flexible drill cable up through the wall to drill a hole in the wall of the mystery office next to Labelle’s. Again, Conrad got lucky and made a tiny hole behind a chair in a small office in the room’s corner. Except, they did not know this until they were back in their space watching the monitor.

“Damn now what?” Carvelli said. “We can’t see much or hear even less.”

“And we can’t go back in there tonight and try it again,” Ava said. “We took more time than we should have.”

“Wait a minute,” Maddy said to get everyone’s attention. “Labelle gets a call, leaves his office and then is back in a few minutes. What if he goes in there, talks to whoever’s in that office, then goes back?”

“It could be the office of whoever is in charge of whatever is going on,” Carvelli said.

“What goes on in that office may not have anything to do with Labelle,” Conrad said.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Maddy replied.

James Labelle heard a knock on his exterior office door and looked up from his computer. Having no appointments scheduled, he clicked one of the computers on his desk to engage the exterior camera. Recognizing the building’s head of security, Labelle pressed the exterior intercom and pleasantly said, “Come in, Tom.”

A moment later, a serious looking man in a security guard suit entered.

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