My hands dropped from Bryce’s stomach. My already racing pulse picked up a little.
“Did he say what it was?”
“No, but he gave me a time-stamp. It’s from late last night.” Camden paused, as if just noticing our sweatiness… and various states of undress. “If you guys wanna finish what you’re about to do,” he smirked, “I could show you afterward, or—”
“I’m coming now,” I declared. Extracting myself from Bryce’s arms, I grabbed the towel he’d been using and mopped my brow. “Sorry.”
“Raincheck?” he grinned, nodding casually toward the bench.
I turned back and bounced onto my toes for a moment to give him a long, deep kiss.
“Definite raincheck.”
Forty-Five
KARISSA
The footage was crystal clear, and sharp as hell: a car, circling the outer edge of the property. It stopped near the entrance and a lone figure got out, walking the perimeter of the newly-locked gates. We’d started locking them when the cameras went up.
?
?Wow,” said Bryce, leaning over my shoulder. “How much did we pay for these cameras?”
“Why?” I asked, hunched over my laptop.
“Because they’re fucking amazing, that’s why.”
“Probably too much,” I admitted. “But hey, having the place burned down by a mess of blurry pixels is way more expensive.”
Camden returned, sliding a glass of cold water into my hand. I gulped it down greedily, then punched the button on the laptop that would rewind the footage.
“So… any ideas?”
The man who approached the gates wasn’t short or tall, he was somewhere right in the middle. He had an average build, an average shape. An average-sized silhouette, against the bluish, two-in-the-morning sky.
“He’s too far away to get any features on him,” said Camden. “So no.”
“Enhance!” Bryce joked.
I pushed the footage back and forth at a quarter speed, hoping for a miracle. I only needed one frame. One small area where the man’s face passed through the dim moonlight, and gave us something to go on.
“Shit,” I said after a minute or two. “Nothing.
I took a few screenshots, and sent them to our printer. They didn’t amount to much, though. Just then Roderick entered the room. He squinted into the screen with a concerned look on his face.
“Apparently we’ve got a visitor,” Bryce told him. “Someone was snooping around the gate last night, but—”
“I know. Oscar told me.”
I’d given Oscar a couple of overtime hours to pour through the nighttime footage on the weekends. The motion sensors picked up all kinds of stuff on a windy day, and it got windy often. It was a lot to go through.
“So what do we have?”
“A guy trying the gate. Finding it locked.” I shrugged. “Not much else.”
“What’s he driving?”
I zoomed in on the car, which was parked some distance away. It was a sedan, not an SUV or a truck. And it looked a little on the smaller side.