“Do you have backups off-site?” June asked. “Does your system back up to the company that supplied the system for you?”
“Yes,” Tom said, nodding, and pulled out his phone, dialing the number.
Holt and June gave him some space to talk to the company, but Holt watched Tom’s expressions carefully and knew what he was going to say as he hung up.
“Apparently, I sent in a request to have all the old footage up to just before the storm erased,” Tom told them.
18
ACE
The drive to Gainesville took forty minutes.
Ace had driven it before, knew the highway well enough to do it without thinking, which was fortunate because thinking was something he was struggling to do in any organized way with Sienna in the passenger seat, talking at a pace and volume that suggested she’d been saving the conversation up for some time.
She was in a good mood.
That was the first thing that struck him as he drove, and it struck him because it was inconsistent with the situation a person in her position ought to be in. Sienna’s mother was missing and under active investigation. The family home had been searched by a forensic team. The town was talking. By any reasonable measure, Sienna should have been stressed, subdued, and at least performing some version of daughterly concern.
Instead, she’d come to the door of the pool house looking like someone heading out for the best evening of the month, and had spent the first twenty minutes of the drive telling him about theband’s last album with the enthusiastic focus of someone who had absolutely nothing more pressing on their mind.
Ace drove and listened, trying to ask all the right questions at the right intervals. Then, when he lapsed into silence, Ace thought about the questions Holt and June had given him in the briefing room that morning.
Keep it casual, June had told him.She’ll close down the moment she feels interrogated. Let her talk. People who are hiding something talk more than people who aren’t, because talking gives them control of what’s being heard.
Ace had thought about that on the drive over. He was still thinking about it.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Sienna observed, somewhere around the thirty-minute mark.
“Just enjoying the drive,” Ace replied.
Sienna looked at him for a moment with the particular, appraising expression she wore when she was deciding whether something was worth pursuing. Then she went back to talking about the band.
The venue was a converted tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of Gainesville, transformed into one of the region’s better live music spaces. The exposed brick walls and the high industrial ceiling gave the sound somewhere to travel, and the crowd that had filled it for the evening carried the compressed energy of people who’d been looking forward to this and intended to make full use of it.
Ace stood just inside the entrance with Sienna and looked around the space, doing what he always did in unfamiliarvenues: locating the exits, identifying the sight lines, and getting a sense of the crowd’s density before he went any further.
Sienna’s two friends were already there when they arrived, positioned near the front of the general-admission floor, with drinks in hand. Ace shook hands, was introduced, said the right things, and, within approximately three minutes, registered that this was a couple who were considerably more interested in being observed at an event than in the event itself. Sienna seemed entirely comfortable with both of them.
Ace accepted a drink from the bar and settled in beside the group, letting the support act wash over him while thinking about nothing in particular, watching everything carefully.
It was twenty minutes before he saw her. Willa was about thirty feet away, standing with Margo on her left and Harvey on her right. She was laughing at something Harvey had just said with the full, unguarded quality of her real laugh. Willa was in a dark green dress he hadn’t seen before, her hair down. Harvey leaned in to say something close to her ear over the music, and Willa tilted her head toward him in the easy way of people who were comfortable with each other.
Ace looked away. He looked at Sienna, who was talking to one of her friends about something that required a lot of hand gestures. He noted that Sienna’s sleeves were pulled down over her hands in the habit he’d been watching for weeks, even here, even in a warm and crowded venue where a long-sleeved shirt was a strange choice.
He looked back at Willa. A spurt of jealousy hit him at how close she and Harvey were standing. It was like they were on a double date with Margo and Rad. Ace had to look away again before he rushed over there and did something incredibly stupid.
The main act came on and the room lifted with it, that particular surge of collective energy that a crowd produced when what they’d been waiting for finally arrived. Ace let himself be present in it for a while, keeping his expression easy, his body language open, and his attention carefully split between the three people he was supposed to be monitoring and the green dress thirty feet away that he was supposed to be ignoring.
He was not ignoring it as successfully as he would have liked.
Sienna moved closer to him as the music got louder, which was natural and expected and entirely in keeping with the evening she’d clearly planned. Ace let it happen and kept his eyes on the stage.
Ace watched Sienna’s face in the moment of unguarded amusement that followed. She was performing tonight. That was the word that kept coming back to him. Not performing in the obvious way of someone putting on a show, but in the subtler way of someone who had decided what this evening was going to be and was executing that decision with considerable skill.
Ace had been around enough people who were hiding things to know the specific, faintly elevated quality of ease that came with active concealment. The slightly brighter engagement. The carefully managed reactions. The moments when the face did something a fraction of a second after it should have.
Sienna had all of it tonight.
