CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
We walked out into the parking lot. I turned to J.D. “Don’t leave town? Who are you? Marshal Dillon?”
“I just like to use that sometimes. They always say it on TV and the idiots I deal with all watch a lot of TV. They take it seriously.”
“Look,” said Jock. He was pointing to a bank building across the street. “See that camera above the front door?”
J.D. and I looked. There was a small box attached to a bracket that extended from the wall above the entrance to the bank. It was making slow sweeps back and forth.
“That’s a security camera. It’s panning the bank parking lot and probably saving the images on a hard drive somewhere. It may pick up pictures of this parking lot too. We might get a look at the guy who hired Bates to kill us.”
J.D.’s cell phone chimed. She answered and listened, occasionally asking a question. She hung up. “That was the shift commander at the Charlotte Police Department. He sent a unit out to the Brewsters. He thinks they’re gone. The house is locked up and this morning’s paper was still on the sidewalk. One of the neighbors said he’d seen the daughter’s boyfriend pull up in a utility van from U-Haul and load some boxes into it. He left and the Brewsters followed in their car.”
“They’re on the run,” I said. “But from whom?”
“You?” asked Jock.
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. “Why would my visit have spooked them?”
J.D. said, “If the boyfriend was the killer, they’re protecting him for some reason. Maybe they think you know more than you do.”
“Could be,” I said. “Or maybe whoever killed their daughter is after them.”
“Why don’t we get Debbie to check out the van rental?” asked Jock. I called Debbie.
She answered. “I’m leaving for work. Don’t have time to talk to you.”
“Just need a little favor, sweetcakes.”
“Wow. You call me pet names and my heart goes into overdrive. What do you want?”
I told her and she said she’d get back to me within the hour.
“Now,” said J.D., “let’s go talk to the bank about that camera.”
The bank was local. In addition to the one we were in there was a branch in Sarasota down near the Gulfgate Mall. The manager was pleasant and willing to share his technology with us as soon as J.D. had shown her credentials. He took us to a small room off the main lobby, unlocked it, and asked us in.
“This is the computer where we store all the images from our security cameras. They stay on the hard drive for sixty days and then are automatically erased.”
“How many cameras do you have?” asked Jock.
“Six. Two in the lobby, one at the ATM machine, two covering the back parking lot, and the one over the door that covers the front of the building.”
“Can we see some footage from the one over the entrance?” asked J.D.
“Sure.” He went to the keyboard and pulled up a program, used the mouse to manipulate it and sat back with a little laugh. “There.”
The clip he’d brought up showed the three of us walking across the street and into the front door of the bank. “If you’d been robbers, we’d have you,” he said.
“The camera gives us a view of the parking lot across the street,” I said. I pointed out the parking places that were right in front of the bar. “If the mystery man parked here, we should be able to see him.”
J.D. asked the banker, “Can you pull up the video from yesterday afternoon from, say, two to four?”
“Sure.” He fiddled with the computer and then sat back so that we could see the monitor. It showed the area running from the front steps of the bank, the street, and the parking lot of O’Reilly’s. A time stamp appeared in the lower right corner of the screen. The images were in black-and-white.
We watched for a couple of minutes as cars on the highway drifted by. A woman leading a small boy came into the bank at 2:02. At 2:03 a car pulled into the lot and parked in front of the bar.
“Freeze that,” I said. “Can you zoom in on that car there?” I pointed to it with my finger.
The car became bigger until it filled the screen. “Home in on the license plate,” I said.
We couldn’t read the tag. It was too blurry. The resolution on the video wasn’t that good to start with and when it got blown up, it was just short of useless.
“Pull back,” I said, “and let’s see who gets out of that car.”
We watched as a man unfolded from the driver’s side. I asked the banker to zoom in on the driver. No go. Too blurry. I couldn’t see anything about his features.
J.D. said, “Can you make a copy of those few minutes? I think the Sheriff’s office has some sophisticated equipment that might be able to give us a better view of this.”
“I’ll put it on a flash drive,” said the banker.
We drove south on Highway 41, crossed the Manatee River on the Green Bridge, and a few miles farther turned right onto Highway 301 Boulevard and pulled into the Manatee County Sheriff’s Operations Center. Debbie called just as J.D. was parking the car.
“Doug Peterson rented the van from a U-Haul center on North Irby Street in Charlotte yesterday morning at eight o’clock. He returned it at six p.m. yesterday. Paid by a credit card in his name. He put a hundred thirty-four miles on it and returned it full of gas. I checked his credit card, and he paid for the gas with the same card he used to rent the van. He also bought lunch with that card at a McDonalds in Hickory, North Carolina. And before you ask, Hickory is about sixty miles from Charlotte.”
“You’re a doll,” I said.
“I know. See you later. I gotta go to work.”
“Thanks, Deb.”
I related the conversation to J.D. and Jock.
“Sounds as if young Doug took the Brewsters to Hickory,” Jock said. “Why?”
“We’ll work on that tomorrow,” I said. “Let’s see if the sheriff’s wizards can help us with this video.”