Crowe squinted at the glare of the morning sun. Hopefully, the shop owner will be here soon, she thought. She kicked the back of her runner against the wall and yawned. She had been working pretty much straight through for almost three days. No sleep the first night and just a couple of hours on a sofa in the station on the second. Tyrell had ordered her home at one this morning to get some proper sleep. Not that he seemed to take any break at all.
She smiled at the effort Tom had made when she got home. Her heart pinched when she saw he had cleaned the apartment, even the bathroom. A box of camomile tea had been left out on the counter beside a cup, a spoon inside, along with a chicken sandwich, wrapped in foil. Small gestures, but welcome ones in the worst of days.
Not that it helped her sleep. She was down for a few hours when she leaped clean out of bed, images of Grant’s smiling face pulping under a wheel catapulting her awake.
She was back at the station by 7 a.m. Her team had made solid progress in the three days. They had identified and gathered all private cameras on access roads off MacBride Road and main arteries out. One house camera on Dangan Road had captured a red BMW speeding by at 8.04 p.m., a minute or so after the shooting.
Crowe had assembled numbered maps on the walls in the Imagery Office, where they were based, and made copies for the incident room. One map marked known or suspected sightings of the car; a second mapped possible routes to the shooting; a third mapped possible routes after and a fourth was a blown-up map of MacBride Road. They had got an image at Phoenix Park of a similar car and a partial reg, some fifteen minutes before the shooting. Two of her team were beginning the laborious process of viewing images from there to MacBride Road. She and two others were on the roads after the shooting.
This brought her to a row of shops on Philip Road, which intersected with Dangan Road. One of them had a camera.
Back at the station, Crowe slid in the disk from the shop. Private cameras were notoriously unreliable for police purposes. Images were often poor. This was a ritual she went through, dampening expectations, so as not to be disappointed.
Images uploaded onto the screen. The quality was sharp and Crowe straightened in her seat. The shop owner had told her he’d got brand new cameras in, after his third burglary, when he had a gun pressed against his cheek. The camera only went up the morning of the shooting. Crowe raised her eyebrow when he said it, calculating the chances of that.
The camera captured the entire front of the shop, including a lane that ran beside it and a good part of Philip Road, which was a main artery out of the area. The lane went right around the rear of the shops and back onto the road again. Crowe had walked around the block earlier. There was an industrial unit at the rear. The lane was completely hidden from view from the road or any houses. There were no cameras back there. Crowe forwarded the disk to the time of the shooting. She glanced up at the clock as it hit 8 p.m. Then 8.03, 8.04, 8.05. 8.06. Nothing. She knew the BMW headed along Dangan Road and this was the most likely route, the other road bringing cars back towards the canal, which they would have avoided.
She leaned forward when a vehicle lumbered slowly out of the lane. The clock said 8.10. She sunk back when she saw the front of an articulated truck, with a blank black canvas draped over it. Coming from the industrial estate, she presumed. She wondered, wasn’t it late for a truck to be heading out? She watched as the container emerged into view and swung onto Philip Road. She tilted her head and scratched down the reg as the truck manoeuvred away. The edges of the canvas flapped loose at the rear. She looked at the bolts across the back. The bars hadn’t been pushed over. A thought popped into her head. A crazy one, but one that chimed with her instincts.
Crowe ran out the door with the note of the reg in her hand.