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“This is the area where the second earring was located,” Beckett explains. At this particular moment in time, the area was dark and quiet.
The image flips back to the front of the house. The rear of the house. The side. I want to scream. I want to slam somebody through a wall or maybe fire off a few shots—and if somebody gets hit, they get hit. Maybe that will be enough to convince these people I mean business.
“There. Now he’s gone.” Sure enough, the next time we see the rear camera feed, the top of his head is missing. He made his move somehow. And it’s sheer torture waiting for the feed to change. How long was I with Paul? Five minutes? More? I didn’t think to time the conversation. All I cared about what getting what I came here for.
And I did. I hardly remember right now why it seemed so important. Only that there was one person in the world I wanted to share the good news with.
Finally, there’s a flash of silver in the corner of the screen when the feed changes to the side camera. “There she is!” I can’t believe the relief. It doesn’t mean anything beyond what we already know.
“And there he is.” Jock leans closer. “Can we pause this?”
“By all means,” Paul insists. “Whatever you need to do.” Beckett steps aside and Jock takes his place at the keyboard. It takes a second for him to get the handle on how to manipulate the footage but soon he rolls back to that five-second stretch of time and pauses it.
There’s not much to see at this point. Delilah’s dress and shoes. Her captor’s legs. Either he knew about the camera placement or got lucky—either way, not much is visible. “Damn it,” I growl, my hands tightening into painful fists.
“Give me a minute here.” Jock looks up at Beckett. “Can I isolate this camera’s feed?” Beckett instructs him on what to do while I stand by, feeling useless. Not a state of being I happen to enjoy. Not one with which I have a lot of experience, either.
Now we’re only watching the feed from that camera. He rewinds back to when Delilah is first visible, then lets it run. The four of us watch as he pushes her along in front of him. “He’s got a gun to her back,” Jock mutters, pausing and hovering the cursor over the area in question. At the top of the frame, the butt of a pistol is visible, and it’s pressed against her.
Paul is ready to explode, and I don’t blame him. “How the fuck did somebody get in here with a piece? How did nobody pick up on this?”
I can’t focus on that. “Are there any other cameras along that side of the house?”
Beckett’s already a step ahead of me, barking orders into his phone. “Send the feed from east exterior cameras two and three, immediately. Same time frame.” It’s not another ten seconds before a new file appears in the inbox. He encourages Jock to open it.
Now we have a look at much of the eastern side of the property—and now, it’s plain there was a car parked there to purposely set it apart from the other guests. Jock speeds through minutes of quiet nothingness before Delilah’s silver dress pops into the frame. More than once does she try to wriggle free from her captive, and my heart swells inexplicably. She never stops fighting. She never gives in.
If it wasn’t for the pistol at her back, she might have won.
“We don’t need to watch this part,” Jock murmurs. “There’s a partial view of the license plate. We should look at the rest of the feeds to see if it’s picked up any clearer by other cameras.” Beckett takes this as a cue to order footage from the cameras at the gates.
“Leave it,” I mutter to Jock, staring at the video. I doubt I even blink. “I want to see this.” His barely stifled side tells me what he thinks, but I don’t give a good God damn what he thinks. I let this happen. I should at least watch her being taken away.
He shoves her into his car—flashy, expensive, the sort of car built for douchebags who need to tell the world how important they are because they aren’t all that important, really. That alone tells me we aren’t dealing with anyone high-up in an organization. This is not somebody with taste or class. A foot soldier good at what he does, capable of earning but not capable of much else. It would explain why he looks out of place in a tuxedo, too, the way I’d imagine a gorilla looking in one. He can try all he wants, but he doesn’t fit in.
He hardly even fits into the car, literally, contorting himself to squeeze behind the wheel before peeling away. “I couldn’t see her face,” I mutter. I don’t know what difference it makes. No doubt she was terrified, hoping somebody would stop him before he got away with her.
Maybe I need to punish myself. It’s not enough to strongly suspect what she must have been feeling. I deserve to see it, to feel it sink into my bones.
Beckett barely takes the time to excuse himself before reaching over Jock and pulling up another feed, this one from the gate. They go back and forth, making a plan to track down the car while I stand behind them, staring at the screen but looking into the not-so-distant past. Earlier tonight, back at the house. We should never have left. I should have done what my baser impulses urged and stripped her naked before throwing her onto the bed. I could be ravishing her now rather than wondering if she’s still alive.
Jock sits up straighter, his head snapping around as he seeks me out. “Wait a second. You saw this guy earlier? Here at the party?”
“He was tough to miss.”
He pulls out his phone and taps the screen a few times before thrusting it my way. “Was it him?”
I’m looking at the fake ID provided by the bastard who killed the girl at my brothel. He had a beard in this photo and his hair was a little longer, but… “This is the guy.”
“You’re sure?”
“What is this all about?” Paul asks. Jock fills him in quickly and quietly while I stand by and seethe. It’s enough to make me wish I was anywhere but here. Not that I would ever let anything like this happen in my own home, but if I were in my own home I could unleash some of the churning, boiling rage eating me up inside. I have to behave myself. I can’t have someone like Paul looking at me as a liability, hot-headed and temperamental.
Paul’s expression is one of blank-faced shock by the time Jock finishes. “I forgot how good your family is at playing things close to the vest,” he murmurs. “I didn’t hear a word about this.”
“Like you said, that’s how my father always preferred it,” I rattle off without thinking. “And I’m sure whoever was behind it expected me to go off on some half-cocked shooting spree. I’m not going to fall into that trap.” The way my brother would—but that doesn’t need to be said. I might say something like that in front of Jock, but only while we’re alone. Family shit stays in the family.
“We have the plate.” Beckett looks triumphant when he pauses the footage on a clear shot of the back of the car.
