Chapter 15
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Anderson hated leaving Pamela alone once again, particularly now that added dangers were involved.
Yet he stepped outside and checked to see if any security cameras were visible on any of the neighboring homes.
He had to find footage that revealed where Timothy had gone and how he had traveled to the house.
So this additional information had to be somewhere.
Plus, Tim needed a ride to get here, and he surely wasn’t using Talia and Tim’s only vehicle, the one here at the house.
Anderson had been using that one himself.
Maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Maybe he should have left it here for Tim to try and take, but that wasn’t really a good answer either, not with the triplets to care for.
When he got to the end of the block, he saw a camera from one of the houses looking up in his direction from the road, and it was likely his best opportunity to figure out what was happening with Tim, such as how he got here and left, plus if anybody was with him.
Anderson walked up to the door, and, before he could knock, it opened, and an old man came out, as if ready to do some gardening. He stopped and frowned at Anderson. He quickly introduced himself and explained that he was wondering about the security camera on the front of this neighbor’s house.
Anderson shared what had happened to his sister and that somebody had tried to get into her house today.
The old man’s gaze widened as he stared down the road at Talia’s house. “The lady with the triplets?”
Anderson nodded. “Yes, that’s my sister, Talia. We’re rather desperately trying to find out what happened.”
“Good God,” the neighbor muttered. “Come in. Come in. Of course you can look at the footage. I don’t really know how to work the confounded thing, but, as far as I know, it’s operational. However, it writes over itself every two days. So better look now.”
Two days was too late for the original assault but not for Tim visiting the house …
That was all Anderson could really hope for.
The old man showed him the system, a laptop on a tabletop in a bedroom used for storage, it seemed.
Anderson wasn’t sure how to approach the thing.
It had to be as ancient of a laptop as one could have and still have it be functioning, but he wouldn’t kick a gift horse in the mouth.
He quickly sat down in front of it, brought it up, and checked the cameras for today’s activities.
“There it is,” Anderson noted, as he pointed at the vehicle filmed just an hour or so ago.
“Huh, I saw that vehicle here the other day,” the old man shared. “It sat outside for a long while.” Then he frowned and shook his head. “No, it wasn’t quite that vehicle.”
Anderson looked at it and nodded. “I may have seen it too. I saw one, but I didn’t put that together as being the same.” He pulled out his own phone and ran through the snapshots on his phone that he had sent off to Levi and others. It was blurry, but, when he held it up to the old man, he nodded.
“Yeah, that’s it, the same one.”
“Too bad we can’t really see much of anything,” Anderson muttered. “I couldn’t get a picture of him because I was driving, but at least now we know what he’s driving.”
“Now you can go pick him up,” the old guy stated. “Ain’t nobody should be doing things to a woman, especially one who’s looking after three babies. Those babies need her.”
“You’re not kidding,” Anderson agreed. “The triplets are doing okay at the moment though, so that’s the good news.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he muttered, “but you need to stop this. I was in the military too,” he shared. “No way we would let some shit happen, not to somebody who belonged to one of us.”
And that comment just reinforced how important looking after one another was in this world, at least if you were lucky to have others in your life. “If you happen to see this guy—” Anderson pulled up the photo of Tim and showed it to the neighbor.
“Oh, don’t worry,” said the old veteran, shaking his head. “You give me your number, and I’ll tag you,” he offered. “We’ve got to make sure she stays safe.”
“Thank you. It’s been a pretty rough few days.”
“Especially if you’re looking after the triplets,” he noted, with a cackle.
“I have been, yes, and I brought in one of my team members to help.”
The guy scrunched up his face and asked, “Are you talking about a military team?”
“Yeah, I am,” Anderson admitted, with a chuckle. “You should have seen his face when he got here, then found out about the situation and the help I needed,” he shared, still laughing at it.
“Yeah, but he didn’t run away, and that just goes to show you what a trusted friend you have, what a true brother-in-arms he is,” the neighbor declared.
“Isn’t that the truth,” Anderson muttered.
“You take care now,” the older guy said, as Anderson stepped back out onto the street. “You watch out because, whatever this is, it isn’t over.”
“I know, and I’ve been trying to come up with a plausible reason as to why Tim would be trying to get back into the house.”
“You don’t think he’s after his babies?”
He stared at the old man and raised one eyebrow. “If it were me, I never would have left them in the first place.”
The old man’s eyes widened, and he nodded. “That’s a very good point. Neither would I,” he stated. “And, if he’s after them, it isn’t out of love and concern for them, so it’s got to be something else. And that’s dangerous as hell. You need to watch that.”
“I know,” Anderson confirmed, staring off in the distance.
“And you’re right. It is scary as hell because, if a father wasn’t looking after his babies and seeing to his wife from the get-go, but is now hiding out to boot, the reason he would risk coming back has got to be something pretty important, at least to him. ”
“Yeah, this is sounding worse all the time,” the veteran said. “You watch your back, son.”
Walking back toward his sister’s house, Anderson quickly texted a snippet of this video he’d gotten to the detective and to Levi. Before he’d even made it back to the house, Levi called.
“That’s a good piece of evidence right there,” he began.
“It is a good piece. I got it from a neighbor’s security camera,” he told him. “Unfortunately it confirms all too clearly exactly what we’re up against. Also the neighbor doesn’t have any video from the day of the assault. It’s been overwritten already.”
“Of course it has.”
“I’ve still got something to work on,” he noted. “We have a vehicle.”
“Yes, and you’re right. It looks to be the same one you saw before, but we couldn’t see clear enough with your photo.”
“And now we know that Tim has wheels—not anything he had here with my sister—that is also interesting.”
“I’ll do a check on the vehicle and see what we can get,” Levi offered. “Maybe it belongs to somebody else, which could lead us somewhere.”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that, wondered if he was having an affair or something, and this vehicle maybe belongs to the lady in question.”
“That would suck, but it’s certainly nothing we haven’t heard before,” Levi noted.
“I know, and I’m trying to keep my anger somewhat contained, especially after seeing firsthand how much work Talia’s been doing just providing basic care for these babies, you know? Whatever Tim was into, it just makes me so damn angry.”
“Of course it does. She’s your sister. You love her and want what’s best for her,” Levi replied, his tone calm, contained, and, as always, … deadly quiet. “Nobody ever gets as defensive as when finding out that somebody you love has been hurt, quite likely by somebody she trusted.”
“It had to be somebody she trusted. She wouldn’t let some stranger in, not with her children here,” he stated firmly. “I still believe it may have been Tim.”
“And that could be, but we can’t negate the idea that he’s doing all this because of something else.”
“Right. I hope that’s exactly what he’s doing. I just don’t know how to get a hold of him so I can talk to him and can find out what the hell is going on.”
“He’s likely to take one look at you and run. You’ll be an even bigger boogeyman in his world than he had before. And now that he knows somebody is there looking after the babies and that the alarm has been set off, since he tried to get into the house, he has to be even more careful.”
“Or he’ll just get more desperate, and careful won’t even enter into it.”
“And that is possible too,” Levi said thoughtfully. “That would imply a level of desperation that we need to take into account.”
“Yeah,” Anderson agreed, “because the man I knew, … I hate to say it, but I found Tim to be a little on the spineless side.”
“So, not somebody you would expect to beat up your sister.”
“No,” he stated. “Not unless he snapped, and I guess that happens. I just … don’t know what it takes for a wimpy man to snap to that level. Based on what I was told about her injuries, it likely wasn’t just one kick but many, and … I struggle with that,” he murmured.
“Of course you do,” Levi agreed. “Let me work on this vehicle, and we’ll get back to you. Leland will still be another day or so.”
“Good to hear. Burton is pulling security duty at the hospital. Thanks for getting that approved.”
“Yeah, it’s not that the cops are against us—or the hospital administrators either.
It’s just simply these guys don’t know what we have for skills, aren’t interested in opening up about what they see as their protective area, aren’t willing to share information.
They don’t want to look bad. They don’t want to lose their jobs, and, as much as they’re doing the best that they can, often they just don’t have the resources that we do. ”
“How is it that you have better resources than the police?”
Levi snorted. “That was one of the first things we had to get established because, if we didn’t, people would just go to them. We have the skills, we have the resources, and, unlike many, we know what we’re doing,” he declared, a smile in his tone.