Free Becoming Quinn by Brett Battles Page B

foreground was an employee taking orders, her back to the camera, while on the other side was the front of the line of people waiting to be served. In the lower right corner was a time stamp: 6:58 p.m.
    The playback was choppy due to the still images, but it was more than sufficient to see the faces of the customers.
    “Can you speed it up?” Jake asked.
    “A bit.”
    The manager pushed Fast Forward. On the screen, customers began moving rapidly.
    When the time stamp read 7:48 p.m., both Jake and Berit said, “Stop.”
    The manager hit the Pause button, and the image froze on the monitor.
    “Back up a couple of seconds,” Jake said.
    The manager did as asked.
    On the monitor, standing just beyond the register, were the two men who’d left the Lawrence Hotel at the same time. There was no mistaking them. And unlike in the footage from the hotel, they were no longer acting like they didn’t know each other.
    “You were right,” Berit said, her voice barely audible.
    “Are these the guys you’re looking for?” the manager asked.
    Ignoring the question, Jake said, “Can you move to a couple minutes before this point and let it play?”
    “Of course.”
    They watched as customers came and went, then the two men stepped up, placed their order and exited the frame.
    The manager reached out to stop it, but Jake said, “No. Let it play.”
    They watched for another five minutes. The men didn’t come back, but Jake hadn’t been expecting them to. Who he was really hoping to see was the third man, but there was no sign of him.
    “Can you make printouts?” Jake asked.
    “Printouts,” the manager said, sounding embarrassed. “People can do that?”
    Jake stood up. “Don’t worry about it. Thanks. That’s all we’ll need for now.”
    “Oh, ah, all right,” the manager said. “No problem at all.”
    “How long before you erase what you’ve recorded?” Berit asked.
    “A week.”
    “We’re going to need you to hold on to the cassette,” she told him. “You can at least do that, right?”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “Good,” Berit told him. “We’ll be in touch.”
    Neither Jake nor Berit said anything as they walked through the coffee shop and out to her car. The silence continued after they got in, both lost in thought.
    Finally, Berit said, “We have to tell someone.”
    “Tell them what?”
    “What you’ve found out.”
    “And what exactly have I found out?”
    She looked at him like she couldn’t understand what he meant. “The men. They were here.”
    He returned her gaze, not saying anything, waiting for her to realize what he’d already figured out. That no matter how much they might see the connection, there was still absolutely nothing solid. In fact, there was nothing even remotely close to solid. It was all relying on a hunch, a feeling of a rookie cop who didn’t quite fit in with the others.
    When it finally hit her, she said, “Then what are we going to do?”
    “Dig deeper, I guess,” he said. “Find something that can’t be ignored.”
    “And how are we supposed to do that?”
    He thought for a moment, then said in all honesty, “I don’t know.”
     
     
     

11
     
    “How much does he know?” Peter asked, obviously not happy.
    “No way to know for sure,” Durrie told him. He was in his car, trailing Oliver and a woman cop in a Dodge Charger. For the past several hours, the two police officers had been making the rounds of businesses near the crime scene.
    “He must know something,” Peter said.
    “He has a matchbook, that’s all.”
    “ And the security footage at the hotel.”
    “He looked at the footage, but what are the possibilities he could have picked us out?”
    “A pro could have picked you out.”
    “ Might have picked us out,” Durrie corrected him. “But this guy’s not a pro. He’s a twenty-two-year-old rookie cop. My guess is, when he couldn’t find out anything at the hotel, he decided to check closer to the crime scene. He’s just playing out