Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
Axel hacked into the municipal camera network and had the feeds open across four monitors. He searched outward from Reese’s apartment building. The Corolla appeared on Main Street before dawn, then again at the eastbound highway ramp.
The ramp connected to the state highway.
Several miles outside town, a county traffic counter had a low-resolution camera mounted on the same pole, and the county equipment still used the manufacturer’s default password.
Axel was into the feed in under a minute.
The Corolla passed the camera and continued east. After that, the highway didn’t have cameras for forty miles.
Axel entered the plate number and partial VIN into every system that recorded vehicle locations, the state plate readers, toll cameras, insurance databases, repossession reports, and the commercial aggregator Steel Protection paid for.
Then he created an alert for county dispatch and incident reports.
Axel called Reese again, and the call went straight to voicemail. He’d called nine times since morning and gotten the same result. Her phone was still off. He set it down and returned to the camera feeds.
Dom stopped near his desk. “Tell me what you have.”
“She left before dawn and headed east on US 20,” Axel said. “I found the Corolla on the highway camera outside town. After that, coverage disappears. I flagged the plate anywhere it might surface.”
Dom studied the map. “She could’ve gone a long way by now.”
“I know.” Axel looked at the empty stretch between towns. “What worries me more is that her car is old. It’s been ticking all summer. If something goes wrong, that stretch of highway doesn’t have cell service.”
A county dispatch notice flashed in the corner of Axel’s left monitor.
He clicked it open. A passing motorist reported a disabled gray Toyota sedan on the eastbound shoulder of US 20.
Hazards on. No driver visible from the roadway.
Response pending. The plate was incomplete, but the make, color, and partial plate matched Reese’s Corolla.
Axel opened the dispatch note on the main monitor. Dom leaned closer to read the report. “Is that her car?”
“Yes. But she’s not in it.”
The fear went cold in Axel’s chest. A breakdown was bad. An empty car was worse.
“Do you think she walked from there?”
Axel kept his hands steady on the keyboard. “Possibly.”
He pulled up the map around the dispatch location. US 20 cut through open country, long stretches of sagebrush and fence line with only a few roads branching away from the highway. Dom asked about cameras, and Axel shook his head. “There aren’t many cameras out there.”
Axel widened the map. A railroad line crossed the highway about ten miles from the Corolla’s location. A crossing meant cameras. Low resolution, poor angles, bad maintenance. Better than nothing.
He hacked into the railway camera feed and searched the hours before the dispatch call. He was looking for a woman walking the shoulder. The image was poor, washed out by sun and dust, but the shoulder was visible enough. Reese didn’t appear.
A white Ford Transit with a ladder rack passed the crossing heading east about an hour before the dispatch call. It looked exactly like Wade’s work van.
Axel froze the frame at the clearest moment and pulled it into the plate tool he used for bad surveillance footage.
He isolated the rear plate, stripped the color, corrected the angle, and ran the contrast until the glare broke into separate characters.
Three came back clean. Two were probable. The last one was noise.
He ran the partial against Washington commercial registrations. One white Ford Transit with a ladder rack matched. It was licensed to Sutton Residential Contracting.
His jaw tightened. But he made himself keep working. Axel opened Reese’s intake file and pulled up the financial authorization she had signed during the first week of the case.
She had a joint checking account with Wade at Spokane Federal Credit Union.
Reese Marie Sutton and Wade Allen Sutton.
Reese had stopped using it when she left Spokane, but her name was still on the account.
During intake, she had given Axel permission to monitor Wade’s purchases through the account.
He opened the bank portal through a secure browser and entered the access information Reese had provided. The account opened. Dom stood behind him and said nothing.
Reese hadn’t used the account since spring.
Wade had. The recent activity filled the screen.
The older activity showed the drive south: fuel in Spokane, The Dalles, then Bend.
After that, the pattern tightened around central Oregon.
Groceries in Prineville. A hardware store purchase.
An ATM withdrawal near Paulina. Then a pending charge from a Bend rental management company.
Axel clicked the charge.
The transaction details gave him the company name and a reference number but nothing else. He opened the company’s website. It was for rural cabin rentals.
Axel found the management portal behind it. The software was cheap, the security was weak, and there was no two-factor authentication. He got in within minutes.
The reference number from Wade’s bank charge pulled up an active reservation. Wade A. Sutton. Three-week cabin rental. Cash balance due on arrival.
The property address was listed beneath it, along with GPS coordinates and access notes.
Axel put the map on the center monitor. “He’s rented a cabin south of Paulina for the next three weeks. It’s at the end of a nine-mile gravel road. That must be where he’s taking her.”