No Safe House

Fifty-three

Rona Wedmore got on the phone to one of the department’s tech guys, who went by the name Spock. She wasn’t even sure what his real name was.

“I’m at a bridal shop downtown and I need you here ten minutes ago,” she said into her cell.

“Did I propose and it slipped my mind?” he asked.

Spock showed up twenty minutes later. At five-five and two hundred fifty pounds, he bore little resemblance to the Vulcan, but he seemed to share his smarts. Once Rona let him loose on the store’s surveillance system, which was set up in a storage room filled with hundreds of wedding gowns, he was all business. He’d brought along some equipment of his own, including a laptop, and was plugging things in and running wires here and there.

Instead of reviewing the surveillance data from that morning on the cheap monitor set up in the storage room, Spock was able to see it on his own high-resolution screen.

“What time we looking at?” he asked Wedmore.

“Not sure. Before ten. Can you work backwards, or do you need me to give you an earlier time and you go ahead?”

Spock, eyes fixed on the screen, said, “I can do anything.”

“Let’s go back to eight and work forward.”

Spock went back nearly four hours, then set the footage to play at fast-forward. The camera was positioned over the back door, angled in such a way as to catch the parking area and some of the street that ran behind the shop.

“There,” Wedmore said. “A car just parked across the street.”

“Yeah.”

“What is that? A BMW?”

“I don’t know anything about cars,” Spock said. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“What are you? Fifteen?”

Even on Spock’s expensive laptop, the footage was grainy and indistinct. A man and woman got out of the car, started crossing the street, but bore right, and exited the frame. But a few seconds later, they entered the screen from the bottom right corner, so close to the wall that the camera picked up little more than the tops of their heads.

They spent a few seconds outside the door, then entered the building.

“She put in cameras,” Wedmore said. “But she hadn’t set the alarm. Start fast-forwarding again.”

It wasn’t much longer before another car showed up, but instead of parking across the street, this one pulled in right in front of the door. A beige four-door Nissan. Heywood Duggan got out.

Wedmore felt a tightening in her throat. She made a fist with her left hand, digging her nails into her palm.

“This the guy?” Spock asked.

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

Another five minutes went by. The door opened again, and the man and woman exited. A shot of their backs as they walked past Duggan’s car, crossed the street, and got back into the BMW. The car started, did a U-turn in the street, and disappeared in the direction it had come from.

“Go back — freeze that.”

“Freeze what?”

“When the car’s turning around, we’ve got a shot at the plate.”

Spock froze the image. The car and the plate were equally blurry.

“Can’t you blow that up?” Wedmore asked.

Spock said, “It’s not going to get any better.” And it didn’t. He enlarged the image, but the numbers and letters on the license plate were too indistinct to make out.

“Shit,” Wedmore said.

“I can tap into the traffic system. Check their cameras. Look for that car, in that area, around that time. I’ll have a better chance pulling a plate number off their system.”

“If you can do that, I’ll buy you a full set of Star Trek action figures,” Wedmore said.

“I hate Star Trek,” Spock said.