“You don’t want to do that,” I said. “Besides, we’re not here to steal anything.”
Vigo moved down the line of racks next to the chips and brought his bat down on a rack of canned food. Cans flew every which way, some kind of soup or stew or chili or some shit splattering all over the gray linoleum floors.
“Jesus christ!” Griggs said. “Okay, okay! I’ll… I’ll get you the footage!”
Vigo turned to him with a smile. “Nice!” He looked from Hawk, who was standing by with a pained expression, to me. “And see? No assault.”
19
HAWK
The back roomof the Sunoco was a shadowed space filled with stacks of boxes and racks of extra inventory.
We followed Griggs through a maze of inventory — cookies and band-aids, Tylenol and Doritos, canned ravioli and boxes of instant rice — to a small office with a metal desk, a sagging chair and a desktop computer that looked as old as I was.
“Um… I don’t know if the footage will still be there,” Griggs said, sitting in the chair. “It overwrites after a while, but I don’t know how long.”
“Pull it up,” I said, standing behind him.
I watched as he logged into the computer and tabbed to the security footage. “The 12th?”
“From about ten in the morning until two in the afternoon,” I said.
His hand shook as he maneuvered the computer’s mouse, and a moment later a grainy black-and-white image of the gas station’s exterior appeared on the screen. A digital date and time stamp in the bottom right-hand corner showed the current date and time, the camera feed displaying real-time images of the empty pumps, the G-Wagon still the only car in the lot.
“I haven’t ever had to look at old footage.” Griggs moved the cursor randomly around the page.
“Move,” I said.
He stood. “Just… please don’t fuck anything up. And hurry. If my boss finds out I locked up I’m going to get fired.”
I sat in the chair and maneuvered the mouse to the computer’s folders, found the one containing old security footage, and opened it up. I hadn’t been in digital forensics at the bureau, but we’d all had enough training to know our way around a basic computer system.
Once the folder was open, finding the footage from the 12th was easy: all the files were labeled by date. I looked for the 12th, double-clicked, and an image of the gas station’s exterior appeared like magic.
The footage started at 12:01 a.m., and I forwarded through the overnight hours and into the morning, watching as cars pulled up to the pumps, drivers getting out of cars and getting back in, the images displaying in a blur of color and movement, the time stamp flying forward at warp speed.
I stopped forwarding when I hit 7 a.m. just in case whoever had been driving the SUV had started staking out the road earlier in the morning. I still didn’t know how they’d known she was on her way up the mountain. Still didn’t know whether they’d parked on the side of the road, hoping she’d pass by, or if they had some way of knowing she was going to Daisy’s.
And what if she’d never driven up the mountain? Would the psycho who’d tried to kill her have stopped her some other way, maybe on the wooded road leading to Daisy’s house?
And what then? Would he have kidnapped her, killed her himself?
The questions — the danger, the fact that the guy was still out there — had been enough to make me lose sleep, tossing and turning in bed, torn between wanting to murder someone —anyone — and wanting to walk down the hall to Cassie’s room, get in her bed, fuck her until we both forgot what someone had done to her.
Now it felt good to have something to do, and I forwarded through the footage of that morning more slowly, watching the clock tick from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m to 9 a.m, looking for a black SUV stopping for gas.
I found what I was looking for at 10:23 a.m.
“Wait!” Vigo said when I accidentally forwarded too far, the SUV pulling away from the pump after getting gas.
Behind him, Griggs paced the small office, his hands in his hair, probably wondering how he was going to explain this to his boss.
“I know,” I muttered.
I rewound the footage, watching as the car backed up to the pump, then backed up even farther, disappearing from view.
I hit play again, this time at normal speed.
