Page 69 of Chasing Creed

“But she worked last night until closing. Are you still looking at yesterday?”

“Yeah. I was searching for anyone suspicious looking. You know, hanging around. Maybe looking out of place. The flyers the note was written on are stacked over here by the door.” He pointed at the screen.

“Can you move forward to about ten last night? That’s when Rachel got off work. There’s no parking behind the café. I already checked. Maybe she was parked on the street.”

Pakula tapped the keyboard. He was quick, already familiar with how to get the video to bring up dates and times.

Pakula had been looking at video from earlier in the afternoon when the two of them got into his SUV and found the note. Now, he tap-tapped, moving the video. As he fast-forwarded, the street went from sunlight to twilight to dark. Vehicles disappeared from parking spaces. He slowed it down around the eight o’clock mark.

“She drives a dark gray Ford Fusion,” Maggie told him, realizing color or model might not matter. The streetlights left most of the area dark. “When I was checking for an alley, I walked around a couple of blocks just to make sure her car wasn’t still here somewhere.”

“Their cameras are decent. Hold on, I can zoom in a little.”

“Over there,” she pointed to the far-left side of the screen. A lone four-door sedan was parked in the last slot. “She just bought the car. No plates. See the white sign in the back window?”

“In-Transit. Good catch.”

He left the camera angle on the car and pulled the video back to seven o’clock. Then he let it run at 2x, stopping it whenever he noticed a shadow or movement. Every once in a while, there were headlights reflected in the shop window in front of the sedan. But the brief flash ended as the vehicles turned at an adjacent intersection.

“Stop!” Maggie told him. “Back up a little. Right before the last headlights show up. The shop the car’s parked in front of. I saw something in the window’s reflection.”

The frames clicked backward. Pakula restarted the video in regular speed. The headlights streaked across the window.

“There! Back it up again. Can you slow it down?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Right before the headlights, I think I can see a figure ducking down on the other side of the car.”

With the angle they had, only the passenger side was visible. But the driver’s side showed up in the store window’s reflection.

Pakula ran it and reran it three times. The fourth time he freeze-framed it just before the shadow ducked.

“I think you’re on to something. No way we’re going to get an image from this.”

“Someone may have been waiting for her at the car.” Maggie jotted down the timestamp. “Let’s go ahead. Let’s see what happens when Rachel comes.”

He resumed the video, forty-five minutes of boring. Only a couple more headlights. No other movement. Nothing more in the window’s reflection. At ten-fifteen, the woman Maggie recognized as Rachel came up the sidewalk, pointing a key fob then walking around the front of the vehicle to the driver’s side. Pakula tapped the video into slow-motion before Rachel opened the car door.

“Anything?”

“It’s impossible to see if anyone is hiding alongside it.”

They watched Rachel open the door. The interior lights came on.

Pakula paused the video. “Do you see anyone inside?”

“No. Could we have missed a person getting inside?”

“Considering we can see diddly-squat on that side and in the dark, yes, we could have missed someone. She used the key fob, so at least she had it locked.”

“Which means nothing to someone who knows how to get inside.”

Pakula clicked the video on. Rachel slid in. Closed the door. The interior went black. They both stared at the screen, watching and waiting. Without exterior lights, the inside was dark and completely in shadow.

The sedan’s headlights came on, the reflection bright in the shop window. Finally, they could see Rachel’s head above the seat rest. There was no other movement inside the car. Then the taillights came on. The vehicle backed out of the parking spot. No jerks. No head bobs. No sudden braking. No incident that would telegraph an intruder. There was only Rachel’s silhouetted profile looking straight ahead as the sedan drove off and out of their view.

“Are there any other cameras?”