A naked Addie would be far too tempting, and an attempt at comfort might turn into full-blown sex. She didn’t need that now.
Probably not, anyway.
And he admitted that wasn’t a good thought to let stay in his head. He tried to shove it aside and focus on the report. Judson soon saw that it was dashcam footage not just from his cruiser but also the one Livvy had been driving when they’d come around that curve and seen Yvette.
Hell.
The camera had captured the woman dying.
Yeah, that was a way to yank his attention away from Addie and shower sex. It was the exact reminder he needed. They were in the middle of an intense murder investigation, and it needed his focus.
Judson watched the dash-cam feed frame by frame as it all played out again. Yvette running on the road toward them. The terror on her face as she begged for help. Help that hadn’t come in time, because one of the slowed images showed the impact of the shot slamming into her body.
But another of the frames showed something else.
And that’s what Judson zoomed in on now.
As that part of the road had just come into view, there was some movement in the trees to the right. Just a blur of motion, really, but judging from the location, it had almost certainly been Yvette’s killer.
According to the memo attached to the report, the lab techs were in the process of trying to enhance the blur, trying to come up with any small detail that would help them identify who itwas. Judson certainly couldn’t tell from that smeared image, but he was hoping for something of a miracle. They needed to know who’d fired those shots so they could arrest him or her and put an end to the violence.
Judson swiveled around in his chair when he heard some movement in one of the bassinets, and he got up to check. Lily was wiggling and kicking her feet, but her eyes were still closed.
Still sleeping, well, like a baby.
It wasn’t a surprise, since it was something that Addie had said the girls would do for at least another two hours. He was hoping Addie herself would do the same soon and get some rest or at least eat some of the sandwiches that Grace had had delivered from the diner in town.
He went back to his work area, sitting and using the keys on his laptop to freeze the screen on that blur.
On the killer.
And he played around with enlarging it and trying to change the colors and pixels enough to coax out some more details. He stopped again though when he heard Addie turn off the water in the shower. She didn’t take long to dress because what seemed like less than a minute later, she came into the room wearing loose gray jogging pants and a black T-shirt.
Addie looked at him, their gazes connecting for a couple of heartbeats before she went to the bassinets to check on the babies. Then she turned, her attention settling on his laptop screen.
“What is that?” she asked, her eyes widening as she began to take it in. Addie headed straight toward him.
Judson sighed. Not that he could have kept this from her, but he’d hoped it could wait until the techs had managed to clean up the image. Maybe then he could have given her good news.
“It’s the feed from the dashcams in the cruisers,” he let her know and added, “You don’t want to see this.”
“Probably not,” she murmured. “But I need to.”
Hell. He debated if he could talk her out of this and decided the answer to that was no. So, Judson rewound it to the starting point of when he’d driven around the curve.
“Yvette,” she said, leaning in closer to the monitor.
He made a sound of agreement, and before they got to the part where the woman was shot, he reversed the feed again and froze it on the shooter.
Again, Addie went even closer, studying it and no doubt doing what he’d done. Trying to figure out who the heck that was.
“The techs are trying to clean this up,” he explained. “We might have something soon.”
She seemed to latch on to that, and he saw some hope creep into her eyes. But that hope apparently wasn’t going to get her to change her mind about continuing to view the footage where she would soon be seeing a woman murdered.
Judson was ready to let her take a look at all of it when his phone vibrated with a text. He’d shut off the sound so as not to wake the babies, but it still made a noise when it skittered on the surface of the desk.
“It’s from Rory,” he relayed to her. And then he saw the attachment. Not the dash-cam footage but something else that he’d been waiting for. “It’s the recording that Jennifer gave Grace.”
