“I appreciate the bursting.” He sent her a forced grin. “Thank you.” He touched his heart. “Truly. Little Bird’s been weighing on my mind since you brought her to me. I appreciate the closure.”
After she left, snicking the door shut behind her, Gabriel stood and shook his body from head to foot, getting the circulation flowing again.
Then he sat down to make a fresh start of the video.
This time, he wouldn’t let the men in the van distract him.
After hours of pouring over every little visible bit of the van, Gabriel concluded it was an attention black hole. He picked up a sticky note and pasted it on the screen, right over the image where the van was. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
He was going to narrow his focus to his area of expertise, geolocation, and focus only on clues that would help him track down the exact spot where the van had been sitting.
It wasn’t his responsibility to discover the who, the when, the how, or the why.
In fact, those questions moved him away from actionable information.
“Systematic,” Gabriel said, shifting the still image in the computer software to the far right corner—remembering what Reaper had said about humans liking to work counter-clockwise—then opening the picture as large as he could and still maintain sharp details.
At this point, Gabriel found that using an old-fashioned magnifying glass was helpful.
Maybe it conjured the idea of Sherlock Holmes, and Gabriel could borrow some of his brilliance.
In the back corner of the gas station, there was an air machine where two people could pull up to have their tires inflated. Just behind that, there was a well-weathered picnic table where a fast food container and a cup were set down.
Gabriel noted these on his pad.
There was a dog running out of the frame, an oak, and brown grass.
On the other side of the sticky note hiding the van, Gabriel could make out two doors lined up; the first had a WOM visible. The bathrooms were outside. That would help Gabriel to guess the age of the building. The doors were filthy with peeling paint and rusty hinges. That, too, was information.
He noted these on his list of discoveries.
Later, Gabriel would take them one at a time and see if he could put two pieces together. Surely the fast-food restaurant wasn’t far from the gas station or the food would grow cold and unpalatable. They would have eaten in the car. Gabriel wouldsearch for a list of the chain restaurant locations, take out those in urban and suburban zip codes, then look around and see their proximity to gas stations that had been around for over thirty years.
Life would have been easier; the hunt would start faster if the man who was brave enough to take this video had focused on the name of the station.
Or called 9-1-1.
Gabriel could understand why a young guy might not make that call. The cops would have a record of his phone number, and who in their right mind wanted to be connected to the abduction of four FBI special agents?
He might have had other reasons to want to keep his distance, a warrant for his own arrest.
But Gabriel gave the man props. The entire time he was videoing, he knew he was in danger.
He tried to help anyway.
He took steps anyway.
Fortune favors the bold, and Gabriel hoped that life would reward the witness.
Gabriel moved forward in the video to see what changed in this next frame. The witness had jerked the camera as he twisted quickly towards a car driving onto the lot.
The witness kept walking, bringing his phone hand down by his side.
Frame by frame, Gabriel watched that car drive, not looking for the license plate, but for the images that reflected off the windshield.
And there it was in mirror letters: Tamra’s Pump and Go.
A single frame captured just before the witness slid his phone into his pocket.
