If one thing went in their favor, it was the head of security letting them into the back office to view the tapes. Morgan should’ve known then and there that nothing after would come easy. After all, he’d been in this situation one too many times, and it never got easier.
The room was a small square, most of it taken up by a cluttered desk and a tattered old office chair with foam spewing from its tears. The guard pulled it out and offered it to Morgan, but Gary slipped in before anyone could complain.
“What? I have a bad back,” he said.
Morgan couldn’t care less who had to sit or stand. There was only one thing he wanted, and that was to find out what had happened to Mason Black. Equally important, the question of who’d been driving his car continued to bug him.
The guard switched on the computer and made small talk while it booted up. He talked of how business had slowed down since Christmas and how he had a vacation to Canada planned with his wife of twenty years. Morgan listened with all the manners he could muster, but his mind was elsewhere, his eyes focused on the computer screen.
“All right,” the guard said. “Let me show you what we have.”
Morgan crouched beside Gary while the guard leaned into the desk on the other side of him, dragging a time cursor back through multiple days. “It’s only the nighttime we want to look at,” Morgan said, a cramp seizing his legs as he watched the guard switch to the night recordings.
Unfortunately, there was no view of where Mason had parked his car, but Morgan did see the Mustang pull into the lot and drive out of sight, right into the corner. As Morgan watched, he wondered what’d happened to Mason. For all he knew, the poor guy could be lying dead somewhere. He hoped not—he had no idea how to explain that to his family.
The guard set the screen to double the speed, and the images flickered quickly by. The chef from the burger van appeared from the corner, coming closer to the camera like he was looking for something. He stood for a moment, paused, and then returned back to his trailer, just like he said he had. Moments later, the Mustang came back into view. It raced down the strip and left the lot before vanishing out of sight.
“Completely useless,” Gary muttered.
But Morgan wasn’t convinced this was a waste of time. Something else stood out to him, and he wanted to have it checked. “Could you go back further? Long before when the Mustang arrived please.”
“What are you thinking?” Gary asked as the guard processed the request.
“That car.” Morgan pointed to the only car on that side of the lot—some small thing that was a pale yellow. “It’s been there for hours. I want to see just how long.”
The recording went back through the night, and then it became day. Morgan asked him to double the speed, and they kept going back through the hours with the car not having moved an inch. It wasn’t until they saw it being parked that Morgan had him stop the replay.
“There,” he said, watching a woman climb out. She was thin, with black hair and young features. She headed inside, and although Morgan wanted to follow her from the other camera points, she soon came back on the scene with a bag of potato chips and a bottle of water in her hands. She got back into the car and waited for… what? Mason? “Okay, keep going forward until she gets out. I want to see what she does.”
The film jerked like it was playing on an old VHS, and nighttime soon rolled around. By then it was too dark to see the woman inside, but the dome light eventually came on before blinking out again. She’d obviously exited the vehicle, but where had she gone?
A few minutes later, Mason had pulled up in his Mustang. The rest was history.
“This is driving me nuts,” Gary said.
“You’re telling me.”
“You think the woman had something to do with it?”
“Seems likely.”
“So a woman killed Mason Black?”
Morgan craned his neck to stare up at him. “Who says he’s dead?”
“It seems like she took his car. Maybe she had to kill him.”
That was one possible explanation, but it didn’t seem likely to Morgan. Why would she look into someone’s past, impersonate an old friend, and have him drive all the way to Washington just to steal his car? No, there had to be more going on here.
An idea occurred to him.
“Hey, roll the tape forward, will you?”
“How far?” the guard asked.
“Just keep going.”
They watched in silence, all three of them staring like hawks. Morgan gnawed on his thumbnail, hoping to see what he needed. Eventually he got his wish, and the woman returned from outside the parking lot. She unlocked her car, climbed in, and drove it out of there.
“Bingo,” he said.
“She took the car.” Gary sounded excitable.
“I don’t doubt it.” Morgan continued to watch, anticipation of some greater explanation keeping his body tense. It felt like his brain was about to catch fire, and if he didn’t start getting some answers, then he wouldn’t know what to do.
“I’ll run the plates. Want me to send someone to check her out?”
“Not just yet. I still have questions.”
“Such as?”
“Well,” Morgan said, “what the hell happened to Mason?”
Gary stood and stretched, his deep breathing audible in the small confines of the room. He let it out in a long, ragged exhale that sounded like a shiver. “Obviously something has happened to him, but what exactly?” He shook his head. “Because I don’t have a clue.”