Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Candace saved him by saying, “Yeah, me too. I had to go sit in my car for a while. It’s a mixed bag, even though this is supposed to be the feels-good ending.
The man is dead. She’ll never have to testify in his case.
They’re going to take care of her, and I can still hope that she will grow up and be okay.
” Candace cleared her throat. “Gabriel, I know you're probably saving another soul. I’ll let you get back to it. I was so excited. I hope you don’t mind my bursting in. ”
“I appreciate the bursting.” He sent her a forced grin. “Thank you.” He touched his heart. “Truly. Little Bird’s been weighing on my mind since you brought her to me. I appreciate the closure.”
After she left, snicking the door shut behind her, Gabriel stood and shook his body from head to foot, getting the circulation flowing again.
Then he sat down to make a fresh start of the video.
This time, he wouldn’t let the men in the van distract him.
After hours of pouring over every little visible bit of the van, Gabriel concluded it was an attention black hole. He picked up a sticky note and pasted it on the screen, right over the image where the van was. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
He was going to narrow his focus to his area of expertise, geolocation, and focus only on clues that would help him track down the exact spot where the van had been sitting.
It wasn’t his responsibility to discover the who, the when, the how, or the why.
In fact, those questions moved him away from actionable information.
“Systematic,” Gabriel said, shifting the still image in the computer software to the far right corner—remembering what Reaper had said about humans liking to work counter-clockwise—then opening the picture as large as he could and still maintain sharp details.
At this point, Gabriel found that using an old-fashioned magnifying glass was helpful.
Maybe it conjured the idea of Sherlock Holmes, and Gabriel could borrow some of his brilliance.
In the back corner of the gas station, there was an air machine where two people could pull up to have their tires inflated. Just behind that, there was a well-weathered picnic table where a fast food container and a cup were set down.
Gabriel noted these on his pad.
There was a dog running out of the frame, an oak, and brown grass.
On the other side of the sticky note hiding the van, Gabriel could make out two doors lined up; the first had a WOM visible. The bathrooms were outside. That would help Gabriel to guess the age of the building. The doors were filthy with peeling paint and rusty hinges. That, too, was information.
He noted these on his list of discoveries.
Later, Gabriel would take them one at a time and see if he could put two pieces together.
Surely the fast-food restaurant wasn’t far from the gas station or the food would grow cold and unpalatable.
They would have eaten in the car. Gabriel would search for a list of the chain restaurant locations, take out those in urban and suburban zip codes, then look around and see their proximity to gas stations that had been around for over thirty years.
Life would have been easier; the hunt would start faster if the man who was brave enough to take this video had focused on the name of the station.
Or called 9-1-1.
Gabriel could understand why a young guy might not make that call. The cops would have a record of his phone number, and who in their right mind wanted to be connected to the abduction of four FBI special agents?
He might have had other reasons to want to keep his distance, a warrant for his own arrest.
But Gabriel gave the man props. The entire time he was videoing, he knew he was in danger.
He tried to help anyway.
He took steps anyway.
Fortune favors the bold, and Gabriel hoped that life would reward the witness.
Gabriel moved forward in the video to see what changed in this next frame. The witness had jerked the camera as he twisted quickly towards a car driving onto the lot.
The witness kept walking, bringing his phone hand down by his side.
Frame by frame, Gabriel watched that car drive, not looking for the license plate, but for the images that reflected off the windshield.
And there it was in mirror letters: Tamra’s Pump and Go.
A single frame captured just before the witness slid his phone into his pocket.
Gabriel had a key to the lock.
Focused and energized, all the doom that had been building in Gabriel’s system over the last few days fell away.
He leaned forward with excitement as he pulled out his own computer, typing the name of the gas station into his satellite search.
There were only two in the tri-states area.
Now came the moment of truth. He began comparing the two images.
A two-station air pump, a weathered picnic table, a tree without leaves, possibly the oak.
Across the street and down about the distance of two blocks was the fast-food restaurant.
Gabriel’s heart was pumping with excitement, but he’d also thought he’d had a site, done three points of landmarks, and then something didn’t fit, and the find was a bust.
He moved the cursor around to look at the bathrooms, but they weren’t visible on this satellite image.
Here, though, where the sidewalk was blocked by the van in the witness's video, was a display of gallon-sized jugs of blue liquid.
Moving the witness video forward and backward, there was indeed the color blue up against that outer wall.
Gabriel looked up the second Tamra’s Pump and Go location. At a glance, Gabriel realized it looked nothing like the witness video. One wouldn’t be mistaken for the other.
“Bingo!” Gabriel said as he scribbled down the address.
The next step was to get special agents on site to evaluate Gabriel’s work for accuracy.
He scooped up the laptop that held the witness video and ran through the halls to the Joint Task Force wing, where he burst through the conference room door without knocking.
The team turned as he held up the laptop in one hand and flourished the sticky note in the other.
Finley jumped to his feet. “You’ve got it?”