Page 115 of Maneater
“He’s visible right as they occur, so he’s not the one actually doing the incidents?” Rory asks as she pulls my computer closer to her, speeds through the clip for the thousandth time, then pauses and zooms in onCarter’s face.
“No, I don’t think it’s him. See his face when he saw the mice? He looks absolutely petrified and panicked. He didn’t know that was happening.”
“But he’s definitely involved. Maybe he’s covering up for our true culprit?” I ask.
“Or he’s probably working with someone,” Rory says.
“Working with someone?”
“Either way, I think we’ve got our security leaks, it seems. An accomplice,” I whisper.
“But why? And for whom?” Rory asks aloud. Not knowing the answers to that is really starting to piss me off. “Fuck, I wish we could just grab him and put him into a room and question him.”
I shake my head, knowing that’s not the right tactic for a case like this one.
“No. Not yet. At best, he is the mastermind, with someone else completing the tasks for him and covering it up. At worst, he’s being used by someone, and if we go after him, we lose our real target. We need to have all angles of this to nail it. Right now, it’s far too circumstantial. Plus, he looked shocked when he saw the mice, so my gut says he’s trying to save someone. A friend or a lover…” I sigh, knowing that while we’re getting closer, it’s not close enough.
“I’ll see what I can find while you work on that?” I ask, tipping my head toward the charred cameras she’s holding like a baby.
“Well, actually,” she says with a smile. “Right before you found this, I almost….” She moves back to the camera and fiddles for another moment before lifting something in the air with tweezers. It’s surprisingly clean and in one piece, and my excitement ratchets up.
Thisis my favorite part of the case. When it all starts to fall into place. When I can feel just how close we are to solving this case once and for all. My body feels electric, supercharged, and excited.
“Is that—” I start, but Rory cuts me off with a pride-filled smile.
“A microchip that hopefully holds the footage of the last moments of the rental building before it was torched? Yeah.”
“Oh my god,” I whisper excitedly. Rory smiles and pulls out a chip to slide the smaller one in before putting it into her computer. Ihold my breath as we wait for the computer to process it, and then a screen appears with the files.
“There’s a recording of the last ten minutes before it was burned down,” she whispers, pointing to the last file on the screen. It looks like they’re saved in thirty-minute increments, but this one was cut short. She clicks it, and we watch. It’s dark, but night vision cameras help us see. I smile when a turtle passes the screen, and Rory lets out a laugh, remembering how Rowan caught us the first time we went to check the place out.
And then we see it.
There’s no sound, unfortunately, but in the corner of the screen, a man in all black and a mask moves toward the shack, clearly on a mission. Then he turns, throwing his hands into the air. Our guy takes another step, and another face comes into view, this one not covered. Clearly, they’re arguing. It’s a woman in a white tank top and black biker shorts, carrying a large, long-handled tote with a gym logo prominently displayed on the side.
“Do you recognize the woman?” Rory asks low, that same hint of discovery excitement in her words.
“No,” I whisper, because although we can see the interaction, the quality isn’t amazing. She nods as we watch the rest as he tugs out of her grip, and she clearly stomps off, annoyed or irritated. Then the person in all black pulls some items out of a backpack, including lighter fluid, before liberally dousing the place with it. He sets fire to the shack, and a few minutes later, the camera goes out; clearly, the heat of the fire is too much.
We sit there for a moment, taking in what we just watched.
“And then…what? They came back? Took it?”
Rory shrugs but nods all the same. “Must have, and then tried to stash it.” She opens another window, and after checking the exact time on the shack footage, she leaves the camera screen, spending a few minutes working her magic. I watch as she moves through the resort cameras, attempting to track the woman’s departure through various cameras, trying to work around the missing footage. Right asthe cameras went back online, when she checks the employee parking, we see the woman’s back once more, in the same outfit and bag slung over her shoulder, step into a car and drive away, though we still never get a good look at her face. Rory takes a screen grab of the vehicle.
“License plate,” I whisper.
Rory nods. “I don’t have the equipment to clean this up enough to get some numbers, but Demi…” she says, and I smile, grabbing my phone without another word and dialing our coworker.
“Hey, Man-eater,” she says when she picks up on the first ring. Demi is also great at flirting, but even more, she’s basically a human lie detector, something that I’m sure she’s using on her current mission with our other coworker, Lana.
On the video call, she’s sitting in a hotel room bed, her auburn hair pulled up into a loose knot on top of her head and her glasses perched on her nose.
“Hey babe, real quick: I’ve got a photo for you—any chance you have a sec to work your magic? There’s a license plate we’d love to identify.”
“You caught me at a great time,” she says, smiling. “Lana just left for practice, and I’m here all alone, bored out of my mind. Please send me the file, and I’ll review it to see what I can do. I’ll run it through the MVC as well. I just had the system open.”
“You’re an angel,” I say, then shift the camera to Rory, who is sitting at the computer, sending over the photo.
