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“What?”
“C’mon, Cal. You know this.” He dropped back down to the ground, pulling off his gloves. “There’s no evidence of a crime.”
“Someone called me about a twenty-year-old missing person case. That camera might be our only lead.”
Ash held out his arms. “But where’s the crime here? Point me toward it, and I’ll apply for the warrant.”
“Fuck,” Cal muttered and ran a hand over his head. Ash was right. No judge in their right mind would give them a warrant with what they had now.
Ash sighed and dropped his arms back to his sides. “Okay, listen. I’ll try to get in touch with the realtor and see if the previous owner’s kids will give us permission to take it down.”
Cal scowled up at the camera. “By then, whoever installed it will have it removed or wiped.”
“You know better than anyone my hands are tied by the law.” Ash went back to his Tahoe but paused with his hand on the door and glanced back. A small smile curved the corner of his hard mouth. “But, you know, if a private citizen were to wander up here and the camera disappeared, I doubt whoever put it there will report it.”
“Why, Sheriff Rawlings…” Cal grinned at him. “Are you telling me to steal it?”
“I said no such thing.” Dante, Ash’s big black German Shepherd, poked his head out the window with a sloppy grin. Ash grunted a soft laugh and nudged him back before sliding into the car. “Whatever you do, Holden, I don’t want to know about it.”
Cal watched the Tahoe until it disappeared in a cloud of dirt on the unpaved road, then turned back to the store. “Didn’t plan to start my day with petty larceny, but… okay.”
He returned to his car and rummaged through the trunk until he found the old toolbox that his uncle, a mechanic, had given him when he graduated high school.
“This is for your car,” Uncle Rob had said firmly. “You keep this in the trunk. Never know when you’ll need to fix something.”
He could count on one finger the number of times he’d actually used the toolbox, but he’d dutifully kept it in his trunk all these years to make his uncle happy.
The box was well-stocked. He found a pair of wire cutters and a screwdriver and grinned. This probably wasn’t what his uncle had in mind.
He made his way back to the old store and climbed up on the window ledge. With a bit of effort and a couple of scraped knuckles, he managed to pry the camera from its perch. Jumping down, he studied the thing, turning it over in his hand. It was compact, sleek, and looked expensive. Whoever had installed it wasn't using some cheap surveillance tech. They meant business.
Was there also some kind of encryption on the video?
He had no idea, but he knew exactly who to ask.
“Can you hack it?”
In Redwood Coast Rescue’s command center, Sawyer Murphy sat back from his computer, his blind eyes staring straight ahead as he ran his hands over the camera. “Yeah, but…”
Cal groaned. “Oh, c’mon, don’t give me a but.”
“But,” Sawyer said again, stressing the word, and hit a button on the side of the camera. A compartment on the back popped open, and he pulled out a small chip. “I don’t need to hack it because it has local storage.”
Cal blinked, then grinned at the sudden wave of relief. “And here I was thinking you’d have to do some Hollywood-level hacking to get into it.”
“I never get to do Hollywood-level hacking,” Sawyer said somewhat glumly and turned the chip over in his hand, tracing its contours with his fingers. “It’s most likely a redundancy in case the live feed gets interrupted, or there’s a problem with the server.”
“Do you think my mystery caller is on there?”
“How long ago did you get the call?”
“Early. Before dawn.”
“These cameras can hold up to a few days’ worth of footage locally, so unless someone already erased it, she should be.” Sawyer shrugged and slid the chip into a card reader connected to his computer. “Let’s find out.”
A series of clicks later, Sawyer was sifting through files, his nimble fingers flying over the Braille keyboard. The room filled with the rapid-fire babble of his screen reader and the occasional snore from Zelda, his seeing-eye dog, who lay curled up on his feet under the desk.
“Uh oh,” Sawyer finally said, breaking the silence.
