“That’s right.”
Paige felt a note of hope rising in her.
“Then I need any traffic camera footage you have of vehicles on that route without a license plate between… let’s say four and five.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She hung up, leaving Paige to wait for the footage. She didn’t know how many vehicles like that there were likely to be. Maybe it would mean she had to search through hours of clips, trying to find answers. It might not actually save any time, doing things this way. Paige hoped, though, that it might be just a few, and once she looked through the time stamps, she might be able to isolate the car that had been involved in the road rage incident with Gisele’s Porsche.
From there, it would take some work, but Paige should be able to trace the vehicle back to its owner, and possibly to the man who had killed two women in two days.
CHAPTER TEN
When the traffic cam footage came through, Paige felt a wave of excitement, mixed in with the sudden awareness that she now needed to find a way to get something she could use from that footage. She had raw data, but now she needed to find a way to turn that into something useful.
She needed to work out which of these cars might be the one whose driver had been behaving aggressively towards Gisele Newbury, and from that, she needed to find a way to identify the driver. Two separate questions, but both leading towards the same end point.
There seemed to be three hits on the traffic cams for cars without license plates along the stretch of highway that Paige was interested in. Three was a small enough number to be manageable, letting Paige look through them, trying to pick out the correct one. Of those three, two had already been identified by the highway patrol. One belonged to a delivery vehicle, and Paige looked over to Christopher for help.
“Christopher, how hard would it be to trace the route of a delivery vehicle?”
“It shouldn’t be hard. I’ll call the company and ask them. You want to know if it went anywhere near Gisele Newbury’s house or the Ren-Faire, right?”
Paige nodded. She was glad that Christopher understood what she was looking for with all of this, and that he was on the same wavelength when it came to investigating. She saw him lean over her shoulder to get the details of the van from the screen, and for an instant, that was far too close for Paige. She could feel her heart beating faster at his presence there and had to tell herself that she shouldn’t be reacting to him like this.
“Ok, I’ve got it,” Christopher said, moving away. “I’ll try to get an answer from the delivery company one way or another.”
Paige nodded her thanks, but that still left her with two vehicles to check. Paige turned to the next piece of footage, trying to see what it contained.
That section of footage had a pretty clear view of the car the traffic cameras had picked up: a minivan, and the footage gave Paige a good view through the windows of the vehicle. She saw a middle aged woman there, with five children of different ages, from what appeared to be a toddler all the way up to a teenager sitting in the passenger seat.
That left Paige with a simple question: did Paige really believe that this was the killer? It wasn’t just that the majority of serial killers were male and younger, although that was a definite question mark against this being the car. No, Paige found herself wondering more about the simple practicality of the murder. Was she really saying that this woman had tailgated a Porsche in her minivan, followed Gisele Newbury home in it, and then killed her with five children watching?
It just didn’t seem plausible that this could be the killer, even before throwing in the physical aspect of the two murders. This was a murderer who had approached from the front, overpowered his victims, and killed them with a single thrust of a knife. Paige just wasn’t sure that the woman driving the minivan would have been able to do it. Then there was the question of the children. Had she really gone out and killed someone in front of what appeared to be her entire family?
“I’ve checked with the delivery company,” Christopher said. “The delivery van didn’t go anywhere near either murder site. I don’t think that’s the one we’re looking for.”
Especially not when the call to the highway patrol had talked about a car tailgating. That detail suggested that it wasn’t either of the first two vehicles Paige had looked at, and that left only one vehicle for Paige to look at. Almost trembling in anticipation, she called up the footage on the third.
That footage looked far more promising to Paige’s eye, showing a dark Dodge Charger that had obviously had custom work done to it, making its lines even more aggressive than they had started originally, its angles harsher. The windows were tinted, so there was no way to look through the windshield to see the driver, and the back license plate was missing. The whole thing seemed designed to intimidate anyone who looked.
That combination was going to make it harder to find the car’s owner. Paige kept scrolling through the traffic cam footage, trying to find a moment when something more identifying might be visible. She thought she caught a glimpse of a front license plate, but it was so blurred that she couldn’t pick out the details on the camera footage.
It was enough to bring a small sound of frustration from Paige, disappointed in the extreme at being able to make out the car but not having enough to identify it. Paige kept looking through the traffic cam footage, hoping that there would be a clearer shot of the vehicle that might show its license plate, but she couldn’t see one. There didn’t seem to be a single second when she could actually make out the numbers.
This was their current best suspect in Gisele Newbury’s murder, and Paige couldn’t identify him, whoever he was.
She needed a different camera angle, one that might give her a clearer shot of the car’s front license plate, but there simply didn’t appear to be what she needed in the traffic camera footage. Paige sat there staring at it, willing it to come into view, watching the car driving past a row of stores, trying to think of some way of getting the information she needed.
The answer hit her as she stared at the footage. Wouldn’t those stores have security cameras of their own, to try to deter thieves? If just one of them had a camera facing onto the street, then Paige might be able to get what she needed.
“Do you think that we’ll be able to get security footage from any of those stores?” Paige asked, pointing to several that the car was driving past.
Christopher nodded. “We can try.”
*
As they stood on the sidewalk outside the row of stores that the Dodge had flashed past, Paige found her hopes dwindling a little. In the FBI field office, this had seemed easy, but here, the difficulties of it started to hit home. Was a store really going to hand over its security footage simply because the two of them asked? Were any of the stores even going to have a camera with an angle that might show the car? Would they even have access to their footage, if, like a lot of places, they stored it offsite?
Any of those difficulties might be the hurdle at which their attempt to catch the killer fell.
The first step was to find somewhere that might even have the footage that they needed. Thankfully, Christopher was already making his way along the row of stores, obviously checking them for cameras.
“This one has one, but it’s facing the door,” he said, quickly moving on to the next. “Nothing here. Ah, here we go.”