“It’ll be a guy. Even if he made some girl buy the burner phone, there’s a guy behind it.”
“What about the kidnapping in Charleston I told you about?”
“One in a million,” he sighed. “I wish I could say different, but violent abduction is mostly a man’s game.”
“It’s not a game at all, and I’ve only worked about a dozen missing persons cases. How many have you done?”
“About the same. I pitched in here in Overton on four of them though. None of those ended well.”
“Found a body?”
“In three cases, yes. In the fourth, we think the ex-husband used lye to dissolve the remains on his dad’s farm.”
“Why is it always a farm?” I asked, shaking my head.
“That guy has a phone. Just took one off the rack. Can you zoom it in?” he asked, leaning in toward the monitor. We both leaned closer, nearly bumping heads. We ended up with his shoulder slanted behind mine, my face practically right against his. His breath fanned over my cheek as we focused on the surveillance footage.
A young guy in a hoodie—he moved like he was young, with that easy swagger—picked up a soda, some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a burner phone. He went to the counter, paid in cash and left. We couldn’t make out his face. There was no distinctive look to him, no scar or tattoo visible that would make him easy to spot. But he had on a jacket even though South Carolina was ridiculously hot this time of year. There was some kind of design on the hoodie, an emblem on the back. It niggled at the back of my mind like I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t place it.
“Dammit,” Brody said, and I knew he was frustrated that we couldn’t use facial recognition software—one of Max’s specialties—to identify him because the guy had kept his face hidden.
“That’s him though.”
He shoved back from the desk and went to find the manager. I got to my feet and stretched. I felt flushed and a little edgy after being so close to him, studying the footage, bantering back and forth, sitting practically in his lap to watch the video. I had to shake it off. There was nothing intimate about this. After I grabbed a couple of iced coffees, Brody asked the manager to email him that segment of the footage for further evaluation. I handed him a coffee, and he nodded his thanks. In the car, we sat sort of awkwardly in silence for a few minutes. I sipped my coffee, checked my phone, and stared out the window. I pretended to be distracted by those things when really I was preoccupied by the simmer of attraction between us. It wasn’t something I could ever acknowledge openly, but the truth was I felt more womanly, more sensual sitting in the passenger seat of a squad car in a polyester uniform than I ever had dressed up for a date or stripped down to lacy lingerie. The difference was Brody. I felt like myself with him, and he accepted me. Flirting with him, even accidental flirting of the mildest sort was steamy and set my pulse thudding double-time.
“I think someone took her and she’s in danger,” he said finally. “But it’s just a gut instinct. We don’t have anything concrete in the way of evidence.”
“It’s been a week. We both know she’s probably past danger by now,” I admitted grimly.
“You think she’s gone?”
“Nope. I think someone grabbed her, maybe somebody she knew, and she needs us to find her. But we’ve got nothing to go on. Nobody’s going to swear out a warrant based on a gut feeling, and the fact is we don’t even know where to search.”
I let out an aggravated sigh, “I’ll pass the footage on to Max to see if he can do anything, but we both know there’s not a single clean shot of his face on that tape.”
“Yeah,” he said. “As a cop I have experience and I know my instincts are telling me she’s out there, like you said. Fact is, you agreeing with me makes me even more sure.”
“What?” I said incredulously, “Like we couldn’t both be wrong?”
“Sure we could, but it’s not likely. You’ve got stellar instincts. If you were sitting there telling me, Chief, you gotta let it go, everything we’ve got says she’s dead—it wouldn’t change my gut feeling, but I’d rethink the case.”
“You’re telling me after a week, I have that much influence over you?” I said with a light laugh.
“I trust you, Vance. And there’s only a handful of people I do trust.”
‘Thank you,” I said. That felt like an honor somehow, that I’d earned his belief in me so quickly. It felt very personal to me.
“You know what?” he said, turning quickly into a parking lot, “We need a beer.”