because the women’s basketball team wasn’t on the field.”
That drew a laugh from him. Their attention to the black-and-white action—or lack thereof—on the screen was desultory. “I seem to recall them being good a while back. It was a couple years after I’d graduated. Was that . . .” His voice trailed off abruptly. Both of them straightened, their feet hitting the floor in unison as they leaned forward.
“That’s the same guy, isn’t it?” Risa asked, weariness banished by a flare of adrenaline. “Where’s his girlfriend?”
The man on the screen looked a lot like the one that had been filmed in front of the convenience store that had been Patrick Christiansen’s last stop. Same dark-colored hoodie, pulled up over his head, shielding his features from the camera. Except he was minus the girl he’d been having an argument with when he was filmed in front of the store. “Back it up.”
Ignoring the remote, Nate made his way to the TV. He reran the tape. Paused it and started again. Risa got up to join him to get a closer look at the unfolding scene. The car pulled into the lot in front of the pawnshop and jolted to a stop, as if the driver was in a hurry. The guy in the hoodie got out, took something out of the backseat, and jammed it under his oversized sweatshirt before straightening to slam the door behind him and head across the lot toward the east.
“That pawn shop is a block east of the convenience store,” Nate murmured, his gaze fixed on the screen. “He must have been tailing Christiansen from a ways back. Saw his stop and picked the first the place he could leave the car.”
The figure had moved well beyond the sight of the camera. He reached out to rewind the tape again.
“If this is our guy, he wasn’t arguing with his girlfriend,” she theorized. “But it makes a great cover. He sees a lone female, grabs her, and pretends to shower her with some unwanted attention. She tells him to get lost, we pick up that argument on the convenience store’s external security tapes, but it looks like something else. He probably keeps up the guise just past the camera’s range, drops it to run around the building, and comes back on all fours.” He’d stayed well out of range of the convenience store’s cameras, she recalled. Even with enhancement, all they’d gotten from that tape was the shadow initially shown slipping into the backseat of Christiansen’s car. “Maybe later in the tape we’ll see him come back for the vehicle.”
If he heard her, he gave no indication. He rewound the tape several more times, seemed to focus on the car rather than the figure. Then she sat in silence as he ran it forward, pausing it occasionally. Eventually nearby bars and restaurants closed, leaving it the only car in the lot. The passing of time on the tape was evidenced by the gradual lightening of the sky. By the time the tape had run out, the time stamp on the screen said nine A.M. A clerk had pulled into the lot, given the car a glance, and headed into the store. At eleven A.M. the car still sat there.
At eleven thirty A.M. a tow truck backed into the lot and hooked up the vehicle. Hauled it away.
“Son of a bitch,” Nate breathed, sounding as stunned as Risa felt. “Is it possible the offender’s car ended up in the impound lot?”
“Maybe as the truck loads it, we’ll get an angle that shows the vehicle’s license plate number,” she said hopefully. They were standing shoulder to shoulder now, inches from the screen. Nothing short of a natural catastrophe could have had her tearing her gaze away. As the scene unwound, she scarcely dared to breath.
When the plate came into view only the first half of the number was displayed. Nate was diving for his jacket, scrambling for the notebook he always carried in the pocket. She reached out to pause the tape until he was ready, then started it again so he could write the number down. It was impossible to tell the color of the car on the black-and-white tape. “It’s a Ford, isn’t it?” Car models weren’t her forte.
He looked up. Stared at the screen again. “Ford Five Hundred. Two thousand seven or two thousand eight is my guess.”
The information rang a bell. “Isn’t that the same model . . .”