Becoming Quinn

by Brett Battles

  He and Berit retraced their steps to the places they’d already checked, and in all but one, they were allowed a look at the security footage. Unfortunately, the men had not stopped at any of those places, either.

  Because they had to watch video everywhere they stopped, their progress was slower than Jake would have hoped, and soon it was approaching noon.

  “This is a waste of time. You know that, right?” Berit said as they pulled away from yet another gas station.

  Jake stared out the front window, saying nothing, but thinking the same thing. They probably should just give up, but that feeling that he was right was still nagging at him, telling him to keep going.

  “Just another thirty minutes?” he asked.

  She frowned, then rolled her eyes. “Thirty minutes. But that’s it.”

  “Thanks.”

  The next two businesses had no security footage at all. After that, they hit a coffee shop called Oscar’s Grind. As they walked in, Jake knew they could make only a couple more stops, at most, before the thirty minutes were up.

  Once more they went through their routine with the manager. Oscar’s had a camera system, but to save on storage space, the system was programmed to take still images every two seconds instead of shooting continuous video.

  “What night was that you wanted to look at?” the manager asked.

  They were in the back room, crowded around a small desk that held a monitor and a VHS player.

  “Saturday, between seven and nine,” Jake told him.

  The manager stuck the appropriate tape in the machine, and soon the monitor filled with an image of the coffee shop. The angle was from behind the cash register, looking over the counter. In the foreground was an employee taking orders, her back to the camera, while on the other side was the front of the line of people waiting to be served. In the lower right corner was a time stamp: 6:58 p.m.

  The playback was choppy due to the still images, but it was more than sufficient to see the faces of the customers.

  “Can you speed it up?” Jake asked.

  “A bit.”

  The manager pushed Fast Forward. On the screen, customers began moving rapidly.

  When the time stamp read 7:48 p.m., both Jake and Berit said, “Stop.”

  The manager hit the Pause button, and the image froze on the monitor.

  “Back up a couple of seconds,” Jake said.

  The manager did as asked.

  On the monitor, standing just beyond the register, were the two men who’d left the Lawrence Hotel at the same time. There was no mistaking them. And unlike in the footage from the hotel, they were no longer acting like they didn’t know each other.

  “You were right,” Berit said, her voice barely audible.

  “Are these the guys you’re looking for?” the manager asked.

  Ignoring the question, Jake said, “Can you move to a couple minutes before this point and let it play?”

  “Of course.”

  They watched as customers came and went, then the two men stepped up, placed their order and exited the frame.

  The manager reached out to stop it, but Jake said, “No. Let it play.”

  They watched for another five minutes. The men didn’t come back, but Jake hadn’t been expecting them to. Who he was really hoping to see was the third man, but there was no sign of him.

  “Can you make printouts?” Jake asked.

  “Printouts,” the manager said, sounding embarrassed. “People can do that?”

  Jake stood up. “Don’t worry about it. Thanks. That’s all we’ll need for now.”

  “Oh, ah, all right,” the manager said. “No problem at all.”

  “How long before you erase what you’ve recorded?” Berit asked.

  “A week.”

  “We’re going to need you to hold on to the cassette,” she told him. “You can at least do that, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Good,” Berit told him. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Neither Jake nor Berit said anything as they walked through the coffee shop and out to her car. The silence continued after they got in, both lost in thought.

  Finally, Berit said, “We have to tell someone.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “What you’ve found out.”

  “And what exactly have I found out?”

  She looked at him like she couldn’t understand what he meant. “The men. They were here.”

  He returned her gaze, not saying anything, waiting for her to realize what he’d already figured out. That no matter how much they might see the connection, there was still absolutely nothing solid. In fact, there was nothing even remotely close to solid. It was all relying on a hunch, a feeling of a rookie cop who didn’t quite fit in with the others.

  When it finally hit her, she said, “Then what are we going to do?”

  “Dig deeper, I guess,” he said. “Find something that can’t be ignored.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  He thought for a moment, then said in all honesty, “I don’t know.”

  11

  “How much does he know?” Peter asked, obviously not happy.

  “No way to know for sure,” Durrie told him. He was in his car, trailing Oliver and a woman cop in a Dodge Charger. For the past several hours, the two police officers had been making the rounds of businesses near the crime scene.

  “He must know something,” Peter said.

  “He has a matchbook, that’s all.”

  “And the security footage at the hotel.”

  “He looked at the footage, but what are the possibilities he could have picked us out?”

  “A pro could have picked you out.”

  “Might have picked us out,” Durrie corrected him. “But this guy’s not a pro. He’s a twenty-two-year-old rookie cop. My guess is, when he couldn’t find out anything at the hotel, he decided to check closer to the crime scene. He’s just playing out some hunches. In another day or so, he’ll forget about the whole thing.”

  Ahead, the Charger turned off the road into a strip-mall parking lot, and pulled into a slot in front of a coffee shop.

  “I have a lot of other things that need my attention now,” Peter said, his tone heavily underlined with anger. “I don’t need some punk cop distracting me.” He paused for a moment. “This can’t become a major headache. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t worry, Peter. It won’t be.”

  “I want to make sure it isn’t. I’m sending someone to help you.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “I don’t care. Larson should be able to get there in a few hours.”

  “What?” Durrie couldn’t help sounding surprised. “I don’t need that asshole messing things up.”

  “I want to be prepared if a termination is necessary. Are you telling me that’s something you’d like to do yourself?”

  “If there has to be a termination, we can make the call later,” Durrie said, slowing his car and pulling into the lot.

  “Either work with him, or go home and I’ll send in another cleaner to finish the job. Your call.”

  Through gritted teeth, Durrie said the only thing he could, “Fine. I’ll work with him.”

  “I though you would.”

  The cleaner found a parking spot at the far end of the lot with a view of the coffee shop’s entrance.

  “Anything else to report?” Peter asked.

  Durrie hesitated a moment. He had yet to mention the fact Oliver had taken on a partner. “Nothing yet,” he said.

  “Report in if something changes.”

  Peter hung up.

  Durrie allowed himself a few moments just to steam. The last thing he needed was someone else meddling with his operation, especially Larson. The guy had screwed up massively at the barn. People made mistakes all the time in the business, and when it didn’t get them killed, they usually learned from it. But Durrie got a sense Larson was not someone who learned much from an
ything. His arrogance would get him killed soon enough. Durrie just didn’t want to be around to get caught in the crossfire when it happened.

  As his anger began to ebb, he focused on the coffee shop. For a second he wondered if he’d been there before. There was something definitely familiar about it. But there was no way he could have been, so he shook the feeling off and kept his eyes on the door.

  He wished he knew exactly what Oliver and his woman friend were looking for. At some of the places they stopped, they were only inside for less than a minute. At others, it was sometimes a quarter hour before they reappeared. The coffee shop was turning out to be one of the latter.

  Finally, the door opened and the two cops came back outside. Gone was the frustrated look he’d seen on their faces as they’d left the other establishments. Instead they both looked deep in thought.

  As they walked to their car, they momentarily covered up the logo painted on the window of the shop. Durrie’s gaze stopped on it once they’d moved out of the way. He suddenly remembered.

  That’s what he’d seen before. The logo.

  It had been on the coffee cup that Larson had carelessly left in the barn.

  Durrie’s eyes shifted to the Charger.

  It wasn’t possible, was it? Could Oliver have traced Larson from the hotel to here?

  Who the hell was this kid?

  12

  Jake got to work an hour and a half before his shift, and spent the time looking through mug shots in the various databases the department had access to. But none of the pictures matched the faces of the men from the hotel—and the coffee shop.

  He finally gave up and headed out to find Haywood and get ready for another night on patrol.

  “Jake!”

  He looked back. Berit was at the other end of the corridor, heading in his direction, so he met her halfway.

  “I had an idea about your friends from the hotel,” she said, keeping her voice low.

  “What?”

  “Their car.”

  “They didn’t have a car,” he said, reminding her of what he’d found out from the doorman at the Lawrence.

  “We don’t know that for sure. But I might know a way of finding out.”

  Looking skeptical, he said, “How?”

  “I started thinking about the security footage we were looking at today. Then I remembered—the route they would have taken goes right through a few road expansion surveys. The company hired to do the assessment uses a combination of automated car counting and video. Cameras have been up for months.”

  “Where are they?”

  She listed off several streets, then said, “I called a friend of mine who works at the planning department. That’s how I found out where some of the cameras are set up and who’s running them.”

  He thought for a moment. “This is great. If they drove by one, we can at least tell what kind of car they were in.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “When can we look?”

  “My friend’s trying to hook us up. I’ll let you know when I hear back from her.”

  “Hey, Snowbird! We taking it half-speed today?”

  Jake looked back and saw Haywood standing in the corridor, just outside the locker room.

  “I’m coming,” Jake told him. He looked back at Berit. “Thanks.”

  “Hope it works.”

  “Me, too.”

  • • •

  The first part of patrol was taken up with a traffic stop, a call for a possible domestic disturbance that turned out to be a couple of college drama students practicing lines for a play, and the inevitable stop at Di’s Diner for a little Haywood-Maria bonding time. They spent the rest of the shift dealing with an attempted robbery that left a night clerk at a discount motel with a nice bruise on the side of his face, and two suspects known to the clerk making a run for it with nothing more than what they’d had when they arrived.

  Jake took preliminary witness statements from motel guests who’d overheard the confrontation, while Haywood concentrated on the clerk. When the detectives arrived, Jake was relegated to his now familiar role of crowd control expert.

  When he finally headed out to his Civic at the end of the night, he found Berit half-asleep in her Charger in the next space over.

  She stirred when she saw him, and rolled down her window. “What took you guys so long?”

  “Attempted robbery. They needed my expertise on scene.”

  “Making sure people stayed on the other side of the tape?” she asked, smirking.

  “When you’ve got a talent, you’ve got a talent. Why are you still here?”

  She waved him closer.

  “My friend called me back,” she whispered. “Got us an appointment tomorrow morning at 9:30.”

  “Great. Where?”

  “Let’s meet at Di’s at nine.”

  “Uniforms?”

  She frowned, but said, “Yeah, I guess that would help.” She paused. “Jake.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It doesn’t matter if we can’t prove anything. I think you need to tell what you know.”

  He blew out a breath. “Yeah, I know. Tomorrow before my shift.”

  “Good.” She looked relieved, as if she’d been expecting a fight. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

  “Sleep well.”

  As Jake pulled out of the secured parking lot a few minutes later, he had the oddest feeling that he was being watched. He glanced around. Though it was dark, there were plenty of streetlights illuminating the area, and, except for a couple of cars that were passing by right at that moment, he could see no one else.

  Fatigue, he decided.

  Nothing more than that.

  13

  The company’s name was Raef Planning & Logistics. According to Berit, it was a global company with branches in over forty countries. The local RPL office was located in an area of industrial buildings just south of the airport.

  The lobby was spartan and functional—chairs for waiting, and a counter with a receptionist behind it. Jake and Berit waited less than a minute before Keith Curtis, the person they were supposed to meet, came out to greet them. Police uniforms were useful in that way. There were few companies that liked officers hanging around their lobbies for any length of time, afraid of the impression that might give to customers.

  “Please, come on back,” Curtis said, after everyone had introduced themselves.

  He led them through several hallways, and into a conference room with an oval table surrounded by eight chairs. On a portable stand near one end was a television monitor, and on a shelf below it, a computer. Standing next to the monitor was a man about the same age as Curtis.

  “Officer Davies, Officer Oliver, this is Doug Prescott, one of our engineers. He’s going to help you out.”

  Prescott shook hands with both Jake and Berit.

  “Can I offer either of you something to drink?” Curtis asked.

  “I’m fine,” Berit said.

  “Me, too,” Jake threw in.

  “Then I’ll leave the three of you alone and hopefully you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  Curtis closed the door as he left.

  “The information I was given was not very clear,” Prescott said. His tone and attitude reminded Jake of several of the engineers he’d met one summer when he was working as a messenger. None of them ever seemed to have time for social niceties.

  “I’m sorry for any confusion,” Jake told him. “We’re hoping to look at some of your footage from three nights ago.”

  “I didn’t say I was confused. I just said the information wasn’t clear.”

  “Right. I’m sorry. What is it that isn’t clear to you?”

  “I have the times and the areas you are interested in, but I was not told which direction,” Curtis explained in a tone that said the problem should have been obvious.

  “Direction?” Berit asked.

  “Which direction the traffic was going?”


  Both Berit and Jake nodded in understanding. That was an important piece of info. Once they got it cleared up, Curtis played the video for them.

  They found the car on the third road they checked. It was a BMW sedan, and clearly sitting behind the wheel was Mr. Walters, the dark-haired man from the hotel. In the passenger seat beside him was Mr. Redman. And, as an extra special bonus, the license plate was completely visible. Both Jake and Berit copied down the number and a description of the car, then thanked Prescott and Curtis and left.

  Back in Berit’s Charger, Jake called the substation and had someone run the plate number. When the information came back, his elation quickly disappeared.

  “What is it?” Berit asked as soon as he hung up.

  “It belongs to a BMW, all right,” Jake said. “But yesterday the owner reported that they were missing.”

  “They?”

  “The plates, not his car,” he clarified.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was.” He paused. “The current owner’s actually a used BMW dealership. The car was apparently packed into a back lot, waiting to have its transmission replaced.”

  She frowned. “Smart taking plates from the same kind of car they were driving.”

  “Yeah. Even better from a dealership over the weekend,” he said. “If they got pulled over, it could easily be explained as having not been recorded yet.”

  Berit was momentarily lost in thought. “Who do you think these guys are?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re right. I need to pass this on. Now.”

  She nodded. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” he said. “I should do this alone.”

  She locked eyes with him. “Jake. Think about it. They’re more likely to listen to two of us than just one.”

  “But it’s all based on a hunch that I can’t explain,” Jake said.

  “A hunch that’s looking more and more like it was right,” she countered.

  “That may be, but I can’t be responsible for harming your career. Let me do this on my own. If it goes well, I’ll make sure they know you were a big part of it, but I’m not going to let you take any of the blame. Besides…” He paused and gave her a smile. “I don’t want you to be mad at me later for making you come in on your day off.”