We were an hour into our footage and on our third video—that one from a check-cashing store across the street and three buildings down. Some videos were good quality, while others were barely worth watching. I kept my eyes peeled for people walking the neighborhood, and Rue watched the cars that were parked and the ones that passed by.
It was unfortunate that the pawnshop had a back door into the alley. Without stores or cameras back there, we might never know where the killer went.
My phone finally rang. I’d promised Royce I’d let him know as soon as I heard back from Danny, but it wasn’t him. It was Royce.
“Anything from Whitman yet?” he asked.
“No, and I imagine he’s getting the runaround from department to department, people passing the buck until they get someone on the line who will actually give him that phone number.”
“Okay, keep me posted.”
I hung up and started the video again. Men and women passed by the cameras, and some had on black pants, but nobody was dressed in black from head to toe. We couldn’t haul in everyone who wore black pants on the day of the robbery and expect to make a case against them. Black sedans passed, but none looked to be the same shape as the one I’d seen at the cemetery. White cars drove by, yet we had absolutely nothing to use other than the color, making that observation a waste of time too. The robber hadn’t exited the building from the front door, so we needed to see him on a side street after leaving the alley, but nobody who matched the image on the pawnshop interior camera walked by.
Our day was going nowhere fast, and all we could do was to check out the owners of every white or black car that we could actually get a full plate number off of.
We’d had cases go unsolved in the past, but as homicide detectives, we had the job of providing family members with answers—and justice for their deceased loved ones. Everything rode on us, and knowing that gave me many sleepless nights.
Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was Danny, and he finally had news from his service provider—a phone number. He read it off to me but also said he was told it was a prepaid phone. That alone would make it harder to find out who the caller was. We could triangulate the phone when it was in use, but I wasn’t sure there was much more we could do. I needed help from our tech department.
I cocked my head at Rue. “Feel like going for a walk?”
“Why not? Anything to get away from watching these videos for a few minutes. Where to?”
I led the way out the door. “Tech. We need advice from the experts.”
After jogging down the stairs to our lower level, we entered the tech department, where I found Kyle Hiller, second in charge, hard at work. When we walked in, he glanced up.
“Tom around?” I asked.
“Not at the moment. What do you need?”
“Advice.”
Kyle chuckled. “We all do now and then. Maybe I can help.”
“Sure, and I didn’t mean to sound like you couldn’t. We have a phone number for a prepaid phone. Of course, that isn’t going to give us an address or the name of the person using it.”
“You would be correct.”
“Is there a way to find out where it is other than to triangulate it?”
Kyle rubbed his chin. “Only if it’s on and only if it’s stationary. If it’s in constant motion, it could be all over the map, and it would bounce from tower to tower. Do you have a vehicle or a person of interest to look for if we can pinpoint it to a certain location?”
“Not really. We don’t have any solid leads on either yet.”
“It’ll be tough, but yeah, we can follow the number all over the city if that’s what you want.”
“Okay, let me run that by Royce and see what he thinks. Thanks, buddy.”
“No problem.”
We returned to the second floor. I gave Royce’s door a rap, and he invited us in.
“What’s the word?”
My hard sigh showed my impatience. “We have a phone number, but it isn’t attached to a name or an address.”
“So it’s a burner phone?”
“Yep,” Rue said. “We can follow it from cell tower to cell tower as it’s moving, but unless it’s stationary, we’ll never figure out where it is or who has it.”
“But that might be the fastest way to locate the black sedan or the white car if it even exists,” Royce said.
I nodded. “That’s true. So should I tell Tech to go ahead and ping that phone?”
“Yeah, do it. Also find out if we can run that information on our own computers.”
“Will do.”
Rue and I returned to our office, and I made the call. We could afford to dedicate a spare computer to follow that phone at all times, but first, I needed them to check on whether the number was the same as the one that had made the anonymous call to the station that morning. If it was, then we had something to work with, and the likelihood of the caller being the killer would increase substantially.