So Reacher drove on, at an approximately legal speed, with the crystal pendant on the key tapping him on the knee from time to time, as the car rocked and swayed.
It turned out that the gas station had four cameras, all of them monochrome, none of them colour. They fed a hard disk recorder located on a shelf in the booth behind the register, right next to the cigarettes. The four separate feeds were displayed in real time on a quad-split LCD screen to the left of the cash drawer.
Three of the cameras were of no interest to Sorenson. The first and the second were mounted low down at the vehicle entrance and exit, to capture plate numbers. They were zoomed in too tight to show any background. The third camera was mounted in the ceiling of the cashier's booth itself, high up behind the guy's right shoulder, to make sure he wasn't ripping the place off. Standard practice, in a cash business. Trust but verify.
But the fourth camera was better. Marginally. It was a black glass hemisphere mounted high on a bracket halfway up the sign pole. It was dialled back to a wide-angle view of the whole property. For insurance purposes, the cashier said. If two semi-trucks backed up and got their trailers tangled, it was useful to know which one had moved first. If someone stole gas or diesel, it was useful to show the court a composite narrative, the plate number entering, the guy pumping, the guy driving away, the plate number leaving.
The field of view from the fourth camera was wide enough to show the county two-lane heading north and south, and the gravel patch beyond its far shoulder in front of the cinder block bar, and the cinder block bar itself, and part of Missy Smith's cocktail lounge, and the gap between those two buildings. The way the fishbowl distortion tilted the picture made it look like the camera was peering more or less horizontally into the gap. Bright pools of light were visible on the live feed, right at the edge of the shot, from the deputies' parked vehicles.
Picture quality was not great. The night-time world was shown in shades of grey. Lights from passing cars bled and smeared and fluoresced and lagged their sources' lateral movement.
But it was better than nothing.
Maximum effort. Gamble.
'OK,' Sorenson said. 'Show me how to rewind this thing.'
TWELVE
THE GAS STATION night cashier was a willing kid, pretty smart, and certainly young enough to be right at home with technology. He hit a button and made the fourth camera's feed go full screen on the LCD monitor. He hit another button and brought up plus and minus signs next to the time code. He showed Sorenson which arrow on the keyboard matched which sign. He told her to hold the arrows down to make the recording jump backward or forward in fifteen-minute segments, or to tap them once to make it run backward or forward at normal speed.
Sorenson started by jumping the recording all the way back to just before midnight. Then she let it run. She and Goodman crowded shoulder to shoulder in front of the screen, and tried to make sense of what they were seeing at the edge of the shot. The picture was vague and soupy, like cheap night vision, but grey, not green. Headlights flared and burned. The cinder block bar had no cars parked outside, but Missy Smith's lounge had at least three.
There was nothing visible through the gap between the buildings.
'Does this thing have fast forward?' Sorenson asked.
'Hold down the shift key,' the kid said.
Sorenson sped through the next five minutes. The time code hit thirty seconds before midnight. She tapped the arrow for normal speed and watched. Nothing happened at the cinder block bar. But customers started coming out of the cocktail lounge, vague human shapes, greys on grey, smeared by the oily motion of the digital video. They climbed into cars, lights blazed, cars reversed, cars swooped forward. Most of them went south. Last thing out through the lounge's front door was a stout shape that looked female. It climbed into what Sorenson took to be a Cadillac, and disappeared.
Two minutes past midnight.
'That was Missy Smith,' Goodman said.
The neon in the windows clicked off behind her.
The edge of the screen stayed quiet for sixteen more minutes.
Then at eighteen minutes past midnight there was a moving flare of light in the gap between the lounge and the bar. Headlight beams on bright, almost certainly, projecting forward from a car approaching over rough ground, from the left of the screen, from the south, over the crushed stone behind the buildings. The beams slowed, and then paused, and then turned tight through ninety degrees, towards the patient camera, whiting out briefly as they hit the lens head on, and then they continued their lateral sweep and came to rest out of sight behind the lounge.
'That's them,' Goodman said. 'Has to be.'
Sorenson used two fingers and toggled between the forward and backward buttons and isolated the brief sequence where part of the car was visible in the gap. There wasn't much to see. Just the bright lights, and a blur of a three-quarter view of what must have been the car's hood behind them, and then the flash as the lights hit the camera directly, and then a blur of what must have been the car's driver's-side flank, and then nothing, as the car parked out of sight and killed its headlights.
The car had looked a light, luminous grey, which could have been red in real life.
'OK,' Sorenson said. 'They drove north from the scene of the crime, and they pulled into the back lots at the south end of the strip, and they drove all the way up behind the buildings, and they parked at the lounge's back door, and they switched vehicles. We need to know what kind of car was waiting there. So we really need to talk to that waitress.'
'Too early,' Goodman said. 'The waitress didn't get off for another twelve minutes. They must have been long gone by then.'
'You never worked in a bar, did you? We established that, right? The owner had already gone home. The cat was away, so the mice could play. The staff is paid for thirty extra minutes, but they don't necessarily work for thirty extra minutes. They get through as fast as they can and then they get the hell out of there. She could have been leaving right at that moment. And even if she wasn't, she could have been in and out the back with trash or empty bottles.'
'OK,' Goodman said.
Sorenson said, 'Let's see how long our window is, before they leave again.'
She tapped the forward arrow and the time code started spooling onward again. She counted in her head, five seconds for them to get out of the Mazda, five seconds to unlock the new vehicle, five seconds to get in, five seconds to get settled, five seconds to start it up.
She leaned closer to the screen and studied the angled view into the gap, ready to see the new vehicle crawl left to right across the empty space as it prepared to loop north behind the cinder block bar on its way back to the road. Its lights would be tangential to the camera's fishbowl field of view. There would be no flare. No white out. There would be at least one frame where most of the vehicle's front-to-back length would be clearly captured. It might be possible to determine make and model. It might even be possible to guess at colour.
Sorenson watched.
And saw nothing.
No vehicle slid north through the gap. Not in the first minute, or the second, or the third, or the fourth or the fifth. She hit fast forward and raced onward. Nothing happened. The picture stayed immobile, a tableau, a still life, absolutely no activity at all, uninterrupted for almost fifteen whole minutes, until a random pick-up truck drove by on the two-lane, heading south, and crossed with a random sedan driving north. After that brief blur of excitement the screen lapsed back to stillness.
Sorenson said, 'So where the hell did they go? South? Behind the buildings, all the way back to the other end of the strip?'