17 A Wanted Man

quality was not great. The night-time world was shown in shades of grey. Lights from passing cars bled and smeared and fluoresced and lagged their sources’ lateral movement.
    But it was better than nothing.
    Maximum effort. Gamble
.
    ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘Show me how to rewind this thing.’

TWELVE
    THE GAS STATION night cashier was a willing kid, pretty smart, and certainly young enough to be right at home with technology. He hit a button and made the fourth camera’s feed go full screen on the LCD monitor. He hit another button and brought up plus and minus signs next to the time code. He showed Sorenson which arrow on the keyboard matched which sign. He told her to hold the arrows down to make the recording jump backward or forward in fifteen-minute segments, or to tap them once to make it run backward or forward at normal speed.
    Sorenson started by jumping the recording all the way back to just before midnight. Then she let it run. She and Goodman crowded shoulder to shoulder in front of the screen, and tried to make sense of what they were seeing at the edge of the shot. The picture was vague and soupy, like cheap night vision, but grey, not green. Headlights flared and burned. The cinder block bar had no cars parked outside, but Missy Smith’s lounge had at least three.
    There was nothing visible through the gap between the buildings.
    ‘Does this thing have fast forward?’ Sorenson asked.
    ‘Hold down the shift key,’ the kid said.
    Sorenson sped through the next five minutes. The time code hit thirty seconds before midnight. She tapped the arrow for normal speed and watched. Nothing happened at the cinder block bar. But customers started coming out of the cocktail lounge, vague human shapes, greys on grey, smeared by the oily motion of the digital video. They climbed into cars, lights blazed, cars reversed, cars swooped forward. Most of them went south. Last thing out through the lounge’s front door was a stout shape that looked female. It climbed into what Sorenson took to be a Cadillac, and disappeared.
    Two minutes past midnight.
    ‘That was Missy Smith,’ Goodman said.
    The neon in the windows clicked off behind her.
    The edge of the screen stayed quiet for sixteen more minutes.
    Then at eighteen minutes past midnight there was a moving flare of light in the gap between the lounge and the bar. Headlight beams on bright, almost certainly, projecting forward from a car approaching over rough ground, from the left of the screen, from the south, over the crushed stone behind the buildings. The beams slowed, and then paused, and then turned tight through ninety degrees, towards the patient camera, whiting out briefly as they hit the lens head on, and then they continued their lateral sweep and came to rest out of sight behind the lounge.
    ‘That’s them,’ Goodman said. ‘Has to be.’
    Sorenson used two fingers and toggled between the forward and backward buttons and isolated the brief sequence where part of the car was visible in the gap. There wasn’t much to see. Just the bright lights, and a blur of a three-quarter view of what must have been the car’s hood behind them, and then the flash as the lights hit the camera directly, and then a blur of what must have been the car’s driver’s-side flank, and then nothing, as the car parked out of sight and killed its headlights.
    The car had looked a light, luminous grey, which could have been red in real life.
    ‘OK,’ Sorenson said. ‘They drove north from the scene of the crime, and they pulled into the back lots at the south end of the strip, and they drove all the way up behind the buildings, and they parked at the lounge’s back door, and they switched vehicles. We need to know what kind of car was waiting there. So we really need to talk to that waitress.’
    ‘Too early,’ Goodman said. ‘The waitress didn’t get off for another twelve minutes. They must have been long gone by then.’
    ‘You never worked in a bar, did you? We established that, right? The owner had already gone home. The cat was away, so the mice could play. The staff is paid for thirty extra minutes, but they don’t necessarily work for thirty extra minutes. They get through as fast as they can and then they get the hell out of there. She could have been leaving right at that moment. And even if she wasn’t, she could have been in and out the back with trash or empty bottles.’
    ‘OK,’ Goodman said.
    Sorenson said, ‘Let’s see how long our