The wide-lens camera had been strategically placed.
Positioned in the parking lot at the side of the building, it provided both a wide shot of the front entrance of Starbucks and a side shot of the back door, too. One camera, both front and back doors. Nice.
A few days ago, Henry Gleason had emailed me the “missing person kit” that I always required for such cases: five recent photos, social security number, cell phone number, driver’s license number, contact information for family and friends, and anything else that he thought might prove helpful.
Although I had committed Lucy Gleason’s face to memory, I had seen the tape a dozen or more times at this point. Most people in the area had. Corona Police Department had released the tape to the public, asking for leads. According to Detective Renaldo’s notes, nothing had panned out. The case had gone cold with his untimely death.
So, what leads they had gathered from those anonymous calls, I didn’t know. But I would, soon. I recognized her immediately when she appeared from the bottom of the frame. There she was, moving right to left, toward the Starbucks. Had I possessed a normal pulse, it probably would have quickened right about now, thumping steadily just inside my temple. Instead, there was no physical reaction to seeing her, other than my own excitement level increased.
There she is, I thought, Lucy Gleason, “The Disappearing Wife,” as the press had dubbed her.
Of course, I had studied the video a dozen more times after taking the case, too. But the video available to me online had been only a fragment of what I was seeing now, which was the complete feed.
We’ll call this, I thought, the extended cut.
Lucy was a thin woman. She was dressed in tight black yoga pants and pink Converse sneakers. The sneakers glittered. Her age was tough to determine, although I knew she was thirty-eight, which was getting close to my own age, although you would never know it.
The woman on the screen, the “Disappearing Wife,” seemed oblivious to the fact that she was about to disappear off the face of the earth. This was evidence for me. It was telling. She didn’t seem fearful. Indeed, she even casually looked down at her cell phone at some point.
“Would give my left nut to know what she was looking at on her cell phone,” said Detective Sharp.
“Too quick to read a text message,” I said.
Sharp nodded. “Renaldo pulled her text records. Nothing around that time. Sent or received.”
“Maybe she was looking at the time.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“No,” said Sharp. “Looks to me like she was expecting to hear from someone, and didn’t. She looks, I dunno, sort of disappointed.”
I was impressed with Jason Sharp. The “Disappearing Wife” was wearing sunglasses, and so there wasn’t much to work with there, as far as discerning her emotions. But, admittedly, I got a sense that she had been disappointed as well. The way she exhaled slightly. The way she paused slightly in mid-step, as if she thought she had just received a message.
“I agree,” I said. “Replay it.”
He did, using a dial next to the keyboard. He turned it slightly, and the video went back two or three seconds and started again immediately. Yes, there it was again. She virtually jumped when she reached for her phone. And then I saw why.
“The person coming toward her,” I said. “Look.”
He replayed the video again. A man, maybe twenty yards away and coming toward her, reached for his own cell phone just as she reached for hers.
“His phone rang,” I said. “Or beeped or chirped.”
The detective nodded. “She thought it might be hers.”
“Right,” I said.
“Except, of course, what are the chances his cell phone sounded like her cell phone?”
“Not a very good chance,” I said.
“Which means she was jumpy,” said the detective. “Reacting to any sound she heard.”
“Almost as if she was nervous about something,” I said.
Sharp nodded. His pointed nose waved through the air like a maestro’s wand. “Or nervous about someone,” he said. “Except, where does that get us?”