Keep Her Safe(120)

We both inhale sharply as a black duffel bag goes smoothly sailing into the passenger-side window of the police vehicle.

Gracie grins up at me. A bitter but victorious grin. Probably the same grin Dina saw on Abe’s face that night she walked into the office and caught him watching this video.

“Let’s replay it. See what else we can find.” I reset it to the beginning and we watch again. “Holy shit. Look there.” I tap on the white Cavalier parked across from where the bust is happening. Only the front half of it shows on the screen, but it’s enough. I recognize that car. And the lone figure in the driver’s seat.

My chest tightens. “That’s your dad.”

Gracie’s face pales slightly as she quietly studies her father. He’s sitting still, watching Mantis and the others. Her eyes don’t move from him the entire time, and when the video ends, she resets it to play again.

“Who’s he talking to? Who’s that man?” She jabs the computer screen. A wiry black man is standing next to Abe’s open window at the beginning, but he steps out of the frame quickly. She rewinds it three more times, trying to glean more. But the man never gives us his face.

“My dad’s in the video,” she says suddenly. “That means he wasn’t recording Mantis. Someone else was. Someone standing over here.” She taps the bottom of the screen, her brow pinched with thought.

“Not standing. Sitting,” I add. “This angle is too low for someone to be standing.” And too steady for someone to be holding the camera, I’m thinking.

“Wouldn’t Mantis have noticed someone taping them?”

“He didn’t notice Abe there,” I counter, but she’s right. I find it hard to believe the cops wouldn’t notice someone out in the open, pointing a camcorder at them.

“Unless the person recording this wasn’t out in the open.” She pauses the video and points to the edge of the screen on the left. “This is 116.” Realization fills her face. “I think I know where this video was taken from. Come on, we’ve got to go there.” She nearly knocks me over in her mad dash out of the chair.

“Hold up a sec.” I grab my phone and, resetting the video yet again, begin making a copy.





CHAPTER 52


Grace

“This place comes alive at night, doesn’t it . . .” Noah murmurs, his blue eyes rolling over the row of cars parked on either side of the lot. A few people linger outside—leaning against windowsills while puffing on cigarettes; pacing along the shadowy sidewalks, their phones pressed to their ear. From somewhere within, a television blares the news and raucous laughter carries, serving as an ill mask to the other, more carnal sounds that thin walls can’t keep in.

“I’m ready when you are.” I hit send on the text to Kristian, telling him to meet us here and why. I’m assuming that he’ll come and fast, once he watches the video Noah just forwarded to him.

“Hold on.” Noah reaches over, his sinewy arm sliding between my legs to find the gun box from beneath my seat. I watch quietly while he fits it into his ankle holster, adjusting his jeans to fit over the top. “With what’s been going on lately—”

“The hookers are scary, I get it.” I climb out of my seat with a smile, not feeling as brave as I let on, because I know that Noah’s not thinking about the blonde girl up ahead, in her skimpy black dress and her crimson lips. And I know he’s not too worried about the two guys down by the corner of buildings Two and Three, who are doing a terrible job of hiding the exchange of some weekend recreational drugs for money.

It’s the dirty cops who have gotten away with corruption and murder for fourteen years that have him strapping a gun to his body anytime we leave the house.

The ones who probably would have gotten away with it for the rest of their lives, had it not been for us.

I meet up with Noah at the front of his Cherokee. “How fast will Kristian get here, do you think?”

“Pretty damn fast.” He loops an arm around my waist and holds me close as we walk along the sidewalk of Building One, both our gazes on the exact spot where the drug bust went down.

And where my father watched.

He was barely a shadow in the camera, and yet my heart filled with longing all the same. So many years stolen from me, all because my father was a good man, driven to do the right thing.

I push that ache aside. “It had to be taken from over here.” I hold up my phone, the video open and paused, and keep going—past Room 116, which is dark inside and, I’m assuming, in no shape for rental after the FBI tore it apart—until I’ve found the exact angle, at the window of Room 201. “It was taken from here.”

Noah steps in beside me to survey the angle. “Lower . . .” He takes my phone and crouches down, until my phone very nearly sits on the windowsill. “Here. The camera had to be sitting on the sill. Maybe on the inside. That’s why it was so steady. That’s why Mantis didn’t notice it.”

“So, someone renting this room that night just happened to have a camcorder, and just happened to tape the bust?”

“Having a video camera in a place like this isn’t the surprising part.” Noah gives me a knowing look. “But you’re right, something doesn’t add up. How’d your dad get it?”