Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,65

of hope. Or is he going to tell me that he’s done some looking and I’m completely wrong?

“Good morning, Emmy.”

“You got the results from the tox screen?” It was the one concession I dragged out of him; because of the unexplained puncture wounds on Nora Connolley’s body, he agreed to have the ME test her blood.

“I do,” he says. “It’s negative. Negative for illegal drugs, paralyzing agents, anything that would have subdued her.”

I close my eyes. If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.

“But you put a bee in my bonnet,” he says. “Are you near a computer?”

“Uh—yeah, give me one minute.” I turn on my computer and wait for it to boot up, wondering what Sergeant Robert Crescenzo has for me.

“So you piqued my curiosity about Nora Connolley, and I followed up on a few things,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate that.”

“You don’t have to thank me for doing my job. Anyway, I checked her credit card activity. The night before she was found dead”—Sunday night, I think—“she went to the grocery store. I’ve seen the interior video and she’s on it, she’s in there, but there’s nothing unusual about it. I can send it to you just in case.”

“Please do.” With my free hand, I type in my computer password.

“The store has exterior surveillance too. Cameras that look over the parking lot. I saw something interesting there. Something that—well, it’s interesting. I just e-mailed you the clip. You remember her car?”

“Yeah. It was a pretty standard car. A Honda, I think.”

“Honda Accord.”

“I remember getting inside it in her garage. And the driver’s seat was way too far back for her to have been driving it last.”

My computer comes to life, and I open the e-mail from Robert Crescenzo. “The attachment here is the video of the grocery-store parking lot?”

“Yup,” he says.

I click on it. The video is gray, colorless, showing a large parking lot, probably eight rows wide and twenty deep. The store wasn’t getting a great deal of traffic that night, so there are only about fifteen cars parked near the front of the store.

“You see Nora Connolley’s car pulling into the sixth slot, one of the middle rows?”

I do. At the time stamp of 17:33:04—just after 5:30 p.m.—the Honda Accord angles into a slot, and Nora Connolley emerges from the car, her purse hiked over her shoulder. She is petite, as described, walking with the cane that I found in her house, and looking rather athletic at the age of fifty-eight (her details are coming back to me) as she approaches the store.

I get the creeps and shake them off. I’m watching a woman who has no idea she has only hours to live.

“Nothing happens for about four minutes. Fast-forward to five thirty-seven.”

At 5:37, the parking lot still looks like a normal grocery-store lot: people carrying bags or pushing shopping carts to their cars, some of the carts with children sitting in the front compartment. Two women stop near their cars and chat; a man grabs his little boy’s hand before they cross the lot into the store, pausing for a vehicle moving past; a man in a wheelchair rolls past them toward his car.

“What am I looking for?” I ask.

“You’re looking for the wheelchair guy,” says Robert Crescenzo.

“Seriously, Robert.”

“I’m as serious as a heart attack,” he says. “Watch the guy in the wheelchair.”

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ON THE fuzzy gray screen, the man in the wheelchair has his back to the camera. He keeps his eyes forward, his face turned away. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a light jacket of some kind with the collar turned up, further obscuring him. Also wraparound sunglasses, even though shade has covered this parking lot.

He’s motoring his wheelchair down a row of cars. But not just any row. The row where Nora Connolley parked her Honda Accord.

He stops right by her car. He leans forward and then to his side, as if checking something on his wheelchair, the wheel or the brake.

I lean forward too, toward the fuzzy images on the screen.

He’s not looking at something on his wheelchair, I realize. He’s pretending to while he glances around, making sure nobody’s watching him.

In one smooth maneuver, the man in the wheelchair reaches out with his left hand, tucks it under the rear bumper of the Accord, and leans forward. Not much to see here—it looks like he’s checking something by his feet, using the car bumper as a brace so he won’t fall out of