Chapter 19
HAWK
The back room of the Sunoco was a shadowed space filled with stacks of boxes and racks of extra inventory.
We followed Griggs through a maze of inventory — cookies and band-aids, Tylenol and Doritos, canned ravioli and boxes of instant rice — to a small office with a metal desk, a sagging chair and a desktop computer that looked as old as I was.
“Um… I don’t know if the footage will still be there,” Griggs said, sitting in the chair. “It overwrites after a while, but I don’t know how long.”
“Pull it up,” I said, standing behind him.
I watched as he logged into the computer and tabbed to the security footage. “The 12th?”
“From about ten in the morning until two in the afternoon,” I said.
His hand shook as he maneuvered the computer’s mouse, and a moment later a grainy black-and-white image of the gas station’s exterior appeared on the screen.
A digital date and time stamp in the bottom right-hand corner showed the current date and time, the camera feed displaying real-time images of the empty pumps, the G-Wagon still the only car in the lot.
“I haven’t ever had to look at old footage.” Griggs moved the cursor randomly around the page.
“Move,” I said.
He stood. “Just… please don’t fuck anything up. And hurry. If my boss finds out I locked up I’m going to get fired.”
I sat in the chair and maneuvered the mouse to the computer’s folders, found the one containing old security footage, and opened it up. I hadn’t been in digital forensics at the bureau, but we’d all had enough training to know our way around a basic computer system.
Once the folder was open, finding the footage from the 12th was easy: all the files were labeled by date. I looked for the 12th, double-clicked, and an image of the gas station’s exterior appeared like magic.
The footage started at 12:01 a.m., and I forwarded through the overnight hours and into the morning, watching as cars pulled up to the pumps, drivers getting out of cars and getting back in, the images displaying in a blur of color and movement, the time stamp flying forward at warp speed.
I stopped forwarding when I hit 7 a.m. just in case whoever had been driving the SUV had started staking out the road earlier in the morning.
I still didn’t know how they’d known she was on her way up the mountain.
Still didn’t know whether they’d parked on the side of the road, hoping she’d pass by, or if they had some way of knowing she was going to Daisy’s.
And what if she’d never driven up the mountain? Would the psycho who’d tried to kill her have stopped her some other way, maybe on the wooded road leading to Daisy’s house?
And what then? Would he have kidnapped her, killed her himself?
The questions — the danger, the fact that the guy was still out there — had been enough to make me lose sleep, tossing and turning in bed, torn between wanting to murder someone — anyone — and wanting to walk down the hall to Cassie’s room, get in her bed, fuck her until we both forgot what someone had done to her.
Now it felt good to have something to do, and I forwarded through the footage of that morning more slowly, watching the clock tick from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m to 9 a.m, looking for a black SUV stopping for gas.
I found what I was looking for at 10:23 a.m.
“Wait!” Vigo said when I accidentally forwarded too far, the SUV pulling away from the pump after getting gas.
Behind him, Griggs paced the small office, his hands in his hair, probably wondering how he was going to explain this to his boss.
“I know,” I muttered.
I rewound the footage, watching as the car backed up to the pump, then backed up even farther, disappearing from view.
I hit play again, this time at normal speed.
A white Honda pulled up to the pump closest to the road. A young woman got out of the car to pump gas, her head visible over the roof of the sedan. When she was done, she left the car where it was and headed into the convenience store.
Another car pulled into the station, this one a silver mid-sized SUV. This time I had a clear view — the pump was on the side exposed to the camera — of an older man in hiking clothes. He got out to pump gas while a middle-aged woman sat in the passenger seat on her phone.
And then, the black SUV appeared, rolling into view at the pump closest to the store, no license plate on the front.
“Isn’t that illegal here?” Vigo asked. “Not to have a front plate?”
“Yep.” I didn’t trust myself to say more.
“That has to be them,” Jagger said.
I didn’t have to look at him or Vigo to know that their gazes were trained on the footage like mine.
The SUV came to a stop and I caught movement through one of the windows, then waited to catch a glimpse of the driver.
Vigo and I came to a realization at the same time.
“Fuck,” he said. “The car’s blocking our view.
He was right: the SUV was tall enough to obscure whoever was pumping gas behind it.
I waited, letting the video play, hoping whoever it was would go into the store.
The young woman came back into view as she exited the store. She crossed the pavement and got into the white Honda, then pulled away.
The older guy got into the silver car and a pulled away a couple of seconds later, quickly disappearing from view.
Come on, I thought, watching the black SUV, willing the driver — or anyone else who might be in the car — to go into the store where the camera would get a clear view of their face.
A minute later, the black SUV pulled away from the pump. I expanded the image and focused on the license plate, but something was smeared across the numbers.
“They fucking smeared mud on the plate,” Jagger said.
I backed it up and tried again but he was right: the plate number wasn’t visible, and I watched as the SUV drove through the parking lot and disappeared from view.
On its way to Old Mountain Road.
On its way to Cassie.
“Fuck!” The desktop monitor shook as I shoved the desk.
“He got gas,” Vigo said.
“Obviously.” I was seeing red, consumed by rage and frustration.
“He got gas,” Jagger repeated slowly.
And then I knew what they were getting at.
I turned to Griggs, standing near the door to the office like he was hoping for a clean getaway. “Are the transaction records stored on this desktop?”
“What transaction records?” His gaze shifted away from me like a kid who’d gotten caught hiding the cookies he’d just stolen out of the cookie jar.
I stood, clenching my fists. Beating the shit out of him would go a long way toward making me feel better. “You really don’t want to fuck with us right now. Or ever.”
He opened his mouth as if to say something else, then sighed, like he’d thought better of it. “Yeah, they’re on the computer’s POS terminal.”
I sat back down and started opening files until I found the POS terminal. After that it was just a matter of navigating to the 12th and copy-pasting the transaction data from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
“Printer?” I asked without looking up.
“In the corner.”
I hit print and Vigo crossed the room to pull the pages off the printer.
“Can you leave now?” Griggs asked, still nervous. “I need to get back out front.”
“No problem,” Vigo said, draping an arm around Griggs’ shoulders as we filed out of the office.
He was obviously uncomfortable with Vigo’s buddy-buddy routine — his back was stiff as a board as we made our way through the storeroom to the front — but he didn’t try to shake Vigo off.
We spilled into the brightly-lit store and Griggs headed for the glass doors, unlocked them, and flipped the sign to open.
Vigo plucked a bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos off the floor, a casualty of his baseball bat, then reached into his wallet for a twenty dollar bill.
“What’s this for?” Griggs said when Vigo handed it to him.
Vigo tucked his bat under his arm and cracked the bag open.
“The Doritos. Duh.”