Chapter 47
Ridge
“There!” I pause the footage.
Flint leans in.
I zoom in on the dark vehicle that has just slid into frame from the left.
“It’s a Mercedes.” I take a screenshot. “It’s the right color, the right make, the right model. That’s Patel’s wife’s car.”
“It could be,” Flint says, nodding.
I let the footage roll a few more seconds. The car turns at the intersection, and, for one beautiful moment, the rear plate catches the streetlight at the perfect angle.
There it is.
I take another screenshot.
“That’s Avani Patel’s car. I was hunting the wrong vehicle this whole time.”
Flint lets out a low whistle.
“And it’s turning onto Robyn’s street,” I tell him. He’s sitting to my right, one elbow on the desk, the other hand wrapped around a cup of coffee that must be cold by now.
I rewind. I play it again and freeze it on the windshield.
I squint, but it’s a black blur.
“You can’t see who’s driving,” Flint says.
“No, you can’t.”
I switch cameras to the one at the corner of the dry cleaner. Then to the one at the end of the block by the apartment building.
I work my way through every single one.
I spend the next half hour going through every angle on every camera I have access to, frame by frame, slowing down when the Mercedes passes, zooming until the image starts to blur. It’s just too dark.
“Crap.” I push the breath out through my teeth.
“So we have Patel’s shoe print at her building,” I say, “It’s right at the bottom of those emergency stairs. We have proof his wife’s vehicle was on Robyn’s street, about fifteen minutes before the attempted break-in.” I tick them off on my fingers as I say them.
“It isn’t enough to get a warrant to search his house,” Flint says. “It isn’t enough, period.”
“I know.” I rub the back of my neck.
“The shoe print means nothing on its own. A defense attorney would tear it apart in five minutes. It could be anyone’s print.”
“It’s not.” The growl is in my voice before I can stop it.
“I know that,” Flint says. “I know it’s him.
You know it’s him. But knowing isn’t proving.
You don’t have his DNA on anything. You don’t have a single fingerprint.
Even if you could put him at the back of her apartment building on the night of the break-in, that still doesn’t prove he was the one who planted the evidence at the hospital.
There’s nothing of his on any of the items. We have footage of him entering her office, as well as that storeroom, but he has reasonable work explanations for being in both places. We have nothing.”
He’s telling me what I already know.
“Do I have enough to bring him in?” I ask. “Just to rattle him. Maybe I can get him to talk.”
Flint thinks about it for a long beat.
“Probably. You could justify it. But he’d lawyer up the second he sat down.
You wouldn’t get a word out of him that mattered.
And then he knows you’re onto him. He gets rid of everything he hasn’t already disposed of.
Every shred. And you lose any chance of catching him with anything on his person or in his house. ”
“Shit.” I push the word out.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
We sit with that for a moment. The cursor on the screen blinks at me from the freeze-frame of the Mercedes mid-turn. The plate is right there. Clear as day.
“Okay.” I tap the desk with my finger. “I need to dig more. Now that I know it’s him, I need to go through everything again. I need to pick it all apart. I need to find something…anything.”
“Agreed,” Flint says.
“Right.” I push to my feet. “Let’s get to work.”
Flint stands too. He drains the last of the cold coffee and grimaces.
“Where do we start?”
“From the beginning,” I tell him.