And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(86)

“Gary, I need a favor. When I was here after the incident with the crossbow—”

“Accident with the crossbow!” Cora blurted out.

“You said you had a security system watching your property.”

Gary had wooden clothespins in his mouth. He took one out and pinned the corner of a blanket, shook out the rest of it, and pinned the other corner. He was wearing Carhartts and a flannel shirt over a black T-shirt that said Eagle on the front. “I do. I can see all back here, my rig, and across the way to Cora’s. I got cameras on the kennel, the dog run, and the front of my house. Full coverage, as they used to say when I was in the movie biz.” He gave Packard a knowing wink. Cora was looking away at the cameras mounted under the soffits of Gary’s house and missed it.

“Is it always on? Does it record?”

“It does. Got a big old hard drive that takes two weeks to overwrite itself. Why do you ask?”

“I want to look at the video from last night. Something strange might have happened next door. I want to know if your cameras caught any of it.”

“Something strange? Like what?”

“Can we just see the video?”

Gary hung up the last blanket and pulled the wire basket behind him. Packard followed. Cora stood her ground, looking up like she was seeing blue sky for the first time.

“Come on, Cora.”

“I’m not going in that house.”

“Yes, you are. I want us both to see whatever Gary’s got on camera. I’m not running back and forth to describe it for you.”

Gary waved her over. “Come on, Cora. It’s not like you’ve never been inside. You used to visit with Mom all the time.”

“That was before.”

“Honey, it ain’t changed one bit. I got all the same doilies on the furniture, the same dusty bowls of potpourri. Still smells like cigarettes and Mom’s hair spray. It’s in the walls.”

Cora looked seriously conflicted. She held the Bible up with both hands, leaned her forehead against it, and mumbled something to herself. Packard caught Gary rolling his eyes. “Not a word,” he warned.

“Honey—”

“Shut it.”

Cora came along and they followed Gary and his rolling basket up the ramp. Packard held the door for Cora, who looked like she was being prodded into an animal’s lair. Her shoulders were up to her ears. She looked to her left and to her right, Bible clutched to her chest. When she saw everything as Gary had described, maybe as she remembered it, her shoulders dropped. Half an inch.

Gary took a seat at his computer, pecked at the keyboard. Cora said, “Your mother didn’t have a computer there. That was her sewing table.” She said it like she’d caught him in a lie.

Gary turned in his chair toward Cora. “That’s true. Mom’s grasp of technology pretty much ended with her 1970s Singer sewing machine. She wouldn’t even touch a TV remote. She left the TV on twenty-four hours a day. Said all those buttons scared her to death.”

Cora pulled out the remote she was still carrying in the front pocket of her house dress. “It’s not that hard. You really only use two or three buttons most of the time. The rest are just for looks, if you ask me.”

“Can we just look at the video from last night?” Packard prodded.

Gary double-clicked and double-clicked. He brought up video from the camera that captured where his semi cab was parked on the side of the house and also almost all of Cora’s front yard. “What time do you want to start?”

“What time did you go to bed?” Packard asked Cora.

“Ten o’clock. Carl was still home and the wrecker was in the driveway then,” she said.

Gary moved the slider until the clock showed just after ten the night before. The footage was in black and white. “This is the night vision. It’s color during the day and much higher resolution.” Gary clicked until the video started playing at four times the speed. White streaks flew across the screen every once in a while. “Bugs,” Gary said.

It was almost 1:00 a.m. when a white car eased in front of the third garage door. Packard made a mental note of the fact that the car’s headlights were off when it turned into the driveway. Like it didn’t want to be seen.

A fat man in a stocking cap got out of the car. Carl came out of the house at the same time, and they stood in front of the wrecker almost out of sight of the camera. After a minute they got in the truck and it backed up the driveway away from the house.

“Who was that?” Packard asked.

“Emmett Burr,” Cora said.

Packard felt every hair on his body stand on end. “How do Carl and Emmett Burr know each other?”

“Emmett had a welding business in town. He used to do work for Carl in the early days of the garage.”

“They’re friends?”

“Carl doesn’t have friends,” Cora said. “He knows people and people know him.”

Packard told Gary to keep the video moving. An hour later, bright-white light entered from the side of the screen and the wrecker came into frame towing a car behind it. “Pause it right there,” Packard said. He already knew the answer to his next question before he asked it. “What kind of car is that?”

Cora had relaxed a bit. She had her Bible by her hip and was leaning over Gary’s left shoulder to get a closer look at the screen. “That’s a mid-nineties Pontiac Grand Am.”