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“Uh oh?” Cal echoed, alarm prickling at the back of his neck. “What ‘uh oh’?”
“There’s a lot of encrypted data in these files. Whoever installed this camera really didn’t want anyone peeking at the footage.” Sawyer frowned, resting his fingers on the keyboard. The reader’s fast-paced voice fell silent as he stopped his exploration.
“Can you get in?”
Sawyer hit one last key and let out a low chuckle, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head. His grin was feral in the dim light of the command center. “Already have. They’d be so pissed to know a blind man cracked it in less than five minutes.”
As video clips flashed onto the screen, Cal gave Sawyer’s shoulders a grateful squeeze. “You are a fucking genius, Murph.”
Sawyer waved him off. “Tell me something I don’t know. Now…” He pushed back from his desk, and Zelda raised her head, her eyes filled with longing. Sawyer stood and motioned for Cal to take the chair. “You’re on your own for this part. Look at this footage and find your mystery girl while I take my girl out for a potty break.”
Zelda scrambled out from under the desk, her feet tippy tapping with excitement.
Sawyer grabbed her harness, and they slipped out the door, leaving Cal alone with a flickering monitor and files upon files of surveillance footage. He settled into the vacated chair and took a deep breath, his hands hovering over the keyboard apprehensively. He wasn’t a tech wizard like Sawyer, but he was confident he could handle at least this much.
A list of video files, each labeled with a date and time stamp, spread out before him. He clicked on the first one, and the screen filled with a color image of the old store. No grainy black-and-white images here. Whoever had installed the camera wanted to make sure they saw everything clearly.
He fast-forwarded through hours of nothing until, finally, a figure appeared in the long shadows of evening—a very thin woman, her face and hair obscured by a baseball cap. There was something ghostly about her as she approached the old store. Like she wasn’t quite real. Like she didn’t fully belong to this world. She paused and looked back in the direction she’d come from and then disappeared from view. She never went near the pay phone. He froze the video and stared at the shadowed figure, tilting his head slightly in an attempt to make out any distinguishable features. She was not just slender but gaunt, her body cloaked in ill-fitting clothes from the early 2000s that kids today would call “vintage.” But that was all he could see. It was too dark, and she’d done a good job keeping her face turned away. She’d known the camera was there and hadn’t wanted whoever was at the other end to see her.
Was this woman his mystery caller?
But he would’ve sworn from his caller’s voice that she was young. This woman carried herself with a sense of purpose and grace that only came from age.
And, besides, the timestamp was wrong. He’d received the call around four in the morning. This woman appeared more than a day before that, so unless she came back…
He clicked on the next file and sat back as the screen filled with the familiar image of the old store. This file was timestamped just hours before he received the call. He fast-forwarded through it, the on-screen time ticking away in the corner.
Nothing.
The woman didn’t come back.
He blinked and pressed his fingers to his tired eyes. What if there was nothing here? What if whoever installed the camera already deleted the footage of his mystery caller?
He clicked on another file.
And there she was.
She appeared at the edge of the frame, flitting nervously around the old store like a hummingbird. She paused near the payphone, glancing around uneasily before picking up the receiver. She wore a robe with a rope belt similar to what he used to wear as an altar boy during Sunday mass, but her belt was gold, and the robe was made of a gauzy, see-through material. He watched her pull a card out of the folds of her robe and study it. The cardstock was creased and battered, but he could clearly see his own name printed on it.
So that was how she’d gotten his number. She’d found one of his old business cards. They wouldn’t be difficult to come by. When he first went into private practice, he’d thrown his cards at people around town like confetti and had left a stack at every local establishment that would allow it.
She picked up the receiver, dialed his number, and put the receiver to her ear.
His heart stopped as she turned fully toward the camera.
Hope.
But that wasn’t possible.
He blinked at the screen, unable to understand what his eyes were telling him. The girl was no older than fifteen, but she looked exactly like the pictures he’d seen of Hope—the same dark hair, the same nose, and the same eyes.
In the video, she quickly hung up the phone and spun as headlights whited out the screen.
And then she was gone.
He rewound the footage and watched it again and again until Sawyer returned.
“You found something,” Sawyer said before he could even open his mouth to tell him.
