38

Preach cut back to Main Street, racing toward the shelter on foot, guessing he would arrive faster than backtracking for his car. Maybe Blue had gone in a different direction, but he was betting she wouldn’t leave the camera behind. He could sense it had come to represent something far greater than material value to her.

Though grateful he had saved her from Cobra, if the gang member died from his wounds, then his knowledge of the night of David’s murder would die with him. And if Blue slipped through the cracks again . . .

Preach ran faster.

The smell of burning leaves drifted to his nostrils. Cold mountain air crackled in his lungs. The adrenaline from the confrontation in the alley started to fade, leaving him ragged and nervous, jittery with desperation to find Blue.

As he stepped onto the cement path at the entrance to Promise House, she burst out of the front door carrying a canvas satchel slung over her shoulder. Blue’s fingers and the side of her neck were stained crimson from her wound. She saw him at once. After leaping down the front stoop with a single bound, she took off across the lawn as Betty- Anne tottered out of the door behind her, bearing a look of horrified confusion.

Summoning another burst of energy, Preach ran after Blue, shouting that he only wanted to talk. Nothing slowed her, and her long legs churned with the swift and easy stride of a deer. She might have evaded him, except clearly she had not walked the grounds yet, because the path she chose dead-ended at a six-foot wooden fence beside the house. With Preach steps behind her, she tried to cut through a hedge of holly that led to a neighboring yard, crying out as the edges of the nasty shrub bit into her flesh. Preach pulled her out, holding her at arm’s length as he spoke as soothingly as he could.

“It’s okay” he said, releasing her and raising his badge at a distance to show he meant her no harm. She was backed against the hedge and had nowhere to go. “We got him. He’ll never come after you again.”

At first, Blue looked as if she might try to slip past him or put up a fight, but then she collapsed on the ground and hugged her knees. Her jaw quivered, and she composed herself with an angry shake of her head.

“Let me see the wound,” he said.

“It’s just a scratch.”

He peered closer and saw that she was right. Though messy, the knife swipe across her neck had already stopped bleeding. “Let me take you home,” he said, offering to help her up.

She stared at the outstretched hand. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope he is.”

“Either way, he’s in custody. He’ll go away for a long time.”

She fiddled with the sleeve of her jacket. “I can’t go home. They know who I am.”

“And who are you? What do you know ?”

“I don’t know anything. They just think I do. And nothing I say will convince them I don’t. You don’t know them.”

“I do, Blue. I know exactly who they are.”

“You’re just a Creekville cop.”

“Blue,” he said, taking a knee to look her in the eye. “You overestimate them. Most of them are scared kids, just like you. And I spent more than a decade working homicide in Atlanta. I’ve dealt with gangs far, far scarier than this one.”

She looked away again. “Doesn’t change anything.”

“I’ll tell you what will change things.”

“What?” she said, turning sullen.

“Catching the other person in the woods that night. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I believe two people murdered David Stratton, and one of them was Cobra. Do you think the same ?”

Slowly, untrusting, she raised her eyes to meet his gaze. After a moment, she nodded, once.

“Do you know who the other person is ?” he asked.

“No. I swear.”

“I’ll protect you either way,” he said. “But if we can catch the other one, then there won’t be any need for protection, will there ?”

She thought about it for a moment. “What if they think I talked?”

“These guys aren’t the mafia. They’re small-town thugs. However this turns out, I’ll have a talk with them and let them know you didn’t say a word, and that if they ever lay a finger on you, I’ll spend every second of every day making sure they regret it.”

“You will ?” she said, almost in a whisper.

He stuck out a hand. “You have my word.”

After another hesitation, she accepted his gesture, and he pulled her to her feet.

“How will you protect me right now?” she asked.

“Didn’t you steal a camera?”

“Yeah,” she said, wary again. “Why?”

He gave her a tight smile. “No one told you that sort of thing can land you in jail?”

On the ride home, Blue told him everything she knew about the night of David’s death: how she was filming in the woods and heard voices she could not identify, the muted gunshots, dropping her bag and stepping through the rotten log, the terrified flight through the forest.

Poor thing, he thought. She had lived in fear for weeks.

Unfortunately, her story didn’t do him much good beyond confirming what he already knew, and they were no closer to discovering the identity of the second person in the woods. He hoped to change that back at the station. While Blue said there was nothing helpful on the camera, the video techs might say otherwise.

On the drive home, he insisted Blue call her mother and tell her she was okay. After a phone call that turned tearful, Preach took the phone back and told her mother about his plan to keep Blue in a holding cell for a few days, where he could keep an eye on her. Gigi gratefully consented.

When they arrived at the station, he had never seen anyone so content to sit behind bars. Blue looked relieved, exhausted, and grateful beyond words for a hot meal. He ordered Bill to find some books she liked from the library and bring them over in the morning. Claire, who was three cells further down the hallway, never saw them come in. When he had questioned Blue earlier, she had claimed she knew who David’s mother was but had never met her.

Preach kept Blue’s incarceration off the books, both to ensure her record stayed clean and to keep her off the radar of anyone who might be snooping. The only people he told at the station were Chief Higgins and Terry Haskins. They had video surveillance, and Preach would sleep at the station if he needed to.

When the chief asked why he was off in Western North Carolina running down a camera, he said he wanted more evidence to pin on Claire. The chief had glared at him but let it pass.

Early the next morning, Lela Jimenez hovered over a large monitor in the Chapel Hill crime lab, booting up the department’s latest video enhancement software. Both she and Preach had viewed several times the footage Blue had shot on the Canon the night of David’s death. Starting with Blue’s video of the trailer park, the entire film was less than two hours long. The relevant portion was much shorter, the few minutes in the woods when Blue had tried to catch a rendezvous on film. Date notations on the video feed made it easy to pinpoint the exact start time: 12:43 a.m.

“She didn’t know what she was doing,” the forensics expert said, as the enhancement program loaded. So far, almost nothing could be seen. The footage was too dark and grainy, the subjects too far away. “The low resolution, poor lighting, background noise, shaky picture? That’s not the camera. It’s the operator. This camera is a Cadillac. And that EF-L lens? If she’d known how to use it, she could have shot a snail’s slime on a tree from a hundred feet away.”

“Can you restore anything?”

“It’s not restoring,” Lela chided. “It’s enhancing. Used to be,” she said, as the home screen for the software popped up and she inserted a USB drive with the footage into the computer, “this would take hours, at least. We had to convert, stabilize, register, de-warp, sharpen. Trust me, it was a huge pain. All manual and error-prone.” She snapped her fingers and grinned. “Watch this.”

Her fingers went to work, running through the choices onscreen faster than Preach could follow. Eventually the beginning of Blue’s footage appeared. Lela clicked the mouse, a percentage bar zoomed from zero to one hundred, and the image began to clarify. “Super-resolution-based reconstruction algorithm,” she said, her normally taciturn personality bubbling over with excitement. “De-interlacing, dynamic lighting correction, stabilization. Hours of hard work in minutes. And better results.”

“Just find me something,” he murmured.

“I can’t believe the department splurged on this software. Used to be this was fed territory. DOD and FBI.”

“What’s that?” he said, pointing at the screen. “That’s new.”

At the edge of the picture, two shapes had appeared, clarifying into distinct human forms. The camera lost them again, and Preach cursed.

Moments later, the shapes returned. They were still quite a distance away, shadowy and anonymous, but one of them was clearly shorter than the other, with longer hair. They kept walking toward the camera, and Preach gripped the back of the chair he was leaning over. He had seen this before, though not as clear.

“That isn’t Claire,” he said.

“What? How can you tell? There’s no face yet.”

“Her walk. It’s different.” He leaned back on his heels, feeling as if a great weight had just lifted.

“Different how?”

“This woman and Claire both have good posture, but Claire’s gait is less . . . bouncy.”

“Really? You can tell that?”

“I’m a detective. I’m paid to notice things.”

That, and the way Claire sways as she walks has been burned into my memory for twenty years.

He knew something like that would never hold up in court, and he was embarrassed for recognizing it. But that was okay. He was sure it wasn’t Claire. She didn’t kill her own son.

But who had?

The people stopped moving and began talking. Even with the enhanced resolution, their faces remained unclear, and they were too far away to make out the words. As Preach knew from repeated viewings, after the short conversation, the two people moved offscreen, the gunshots sounded, and they never reentered the footage.

Except this time, in the long pause before the second gunshot, a flicker had appeared at the edge of the screen. A barely visible man stepping out of the foliage to the left of the clearing, then walking forward with a gun in his hand. The man took a moment to scan the clearing, and for a brief instant, his face was visible.

Cobra.

“Got you,” Preach said, staring intently at the screen. One down.

“That’s your guy?”

“Yep. Can we boost the volume ?” he asked. “Try to hear what they were saying at the beginning ?”

“It’s already at the maximum.”

“Damn.” He ran a hand through his hair. They let the portion in the woods run to the end again but never saw a second face. “Back it up.”

“Where to ?”

“Right before they go offscreen, before the first gunshot. I thought I caught a flash of something.”

“Me too. Probably just a trick of the light.”

“Try it anyway. We need something.”

She rewound the video and caught the last instant the pair was visible before walking offscreen. The shorter person with long hair, the woman, had her back to the camera.

“A little bit more,” he said. “Right as she’s turning. Keep going . . . keep going . . . there! Did you see it?”

“Absolutely,” Lela said, leaning closer to the screen. “Can you enhance it any more ?”

“Yes. But we’ll lose clarity.”

“Do it.”

Lela complied. Despite the gradual blurring of the image, before they reached the brief glint of light he had seen, Preach was astonished to find they could now see the victim’s face enough to make out who it was.

David.

“That’s two,” he said, letting out a deep breath. “Who are you, mystery woman?”

David’s enhanced face now filled the screen. The blurry resolution made Preach feel uncomfortable, as if the boy’s ghost, haunting and inchoate, had been summoned from the ether. Though his features were warped by the enhancement, the expression Preach saw, the searching eyes and parted lips, surprised him.

David didn’t look angry or afraid or in trouble. In fact, he looked the opposite.

He looked as if he was about to kiss the person in front of him.

“Pan out,” Preach said. “Get the flash we saw.”

It took Lela a dozen attempts to catch it, but she finally isolated the almost instantaneous sparkle they had both caught onscreen. It came right as the woman, who they could now tell had blond hair, entered the image. For an instant, they caught the side of her head just before it turned completely away from the screen. And in that moment, caught like a piece of glitter from the heavens, a twinkle in the lambent moonlight, was a silver earring in the shape of a star, inset with a deep blue stone.

Lela gave an approving whistle. “Is that a blue diamond in the center? And white diamonds lining that silver star? That’s a serious piece of jewelry. Very rare at the least, maybe even one of a kind.” She looked up. “You might be able to track this!”

“No need,” he said, reaching for his coat. “I already know who it belongs to.”