Joe watched transfixed as the girl dropped items into a shopping basket.
“She looks like she’s really shopping,” Joe said. “She’s picking things out. It doesn’t look random.”
“I didn’t think of that,” Coon said. “Do you recognize her?”
“Not yet. I can’t see her face.”
“Sheridan?” Coon asked.
“She could be somebody,” Sheridan said. “But I can’t tell for sure yet.”
Said Coon, “Keep watching.”
The girl went from one aisle to the next, dropping more items in the shopping basket. One package was large, flat, and square, the kind of packaging used for electronics.
Joe said, “I think that’s a TracFone.”
Coon stopped the tape and tried to zoom in on the package in the girl’s hand. He couldn’t get the controls to work. “We need to examine this on our hardware in Cheyenne,” he said. “I don’t know how to look closer. But if she’s got a new phone, everything we’ve got goes out the window. We can’t find her again unless she calls or sends a text to your daughter.”
Joe grunted. Sheridan looked at her cell phone as if willing it to ring.
Coon gave up trying to zoom in on the package and let the tape roll. The girl got closer to the camera, to the counter. She flinched and Joe guessed the pharmacist had addressed her. She turned, and for a second she raised her head and he could get a glimpse of half of her face. The other half was still hidden in the hood.
What he could see: her face was angular, smooth, pale, and there was a slightly Oriental cast to her eye, which was widened in alarm.
He couldn’t be sure.
Joe said to Sheridan, “Is that
“I can’t tell,” Sheridan said quickly.
“Want to look again?” Coon asked. “It’s the best shot we’ve got of her face on here.”
Joe asked why. Coon said, “Watch.”
Two things happened at once on the tape. A white-sleeved arm reached out from the bottom of the frame and grasped the girl by the arm and pulled her closer. Unfortunately, it was too close to the camera for the lens to focus. All that could be seen was the top of her hood, which was dark and blurred. She appeared to be struggling. At the same time in the background, Robert threw open the door and strode toward the camera. His face was a snarling mask. He bent into the girl and out of view and emerged a second later with a gun in his fist. He pointed it below the eye of the camera and it bucked three times.
Sheridan gasped, “Did he shoot her?”
“No,” Coon said, “he shot the pharmacist. Killed him. And if you want to wait for a minute here, I’ll advance the tape to where you can see Robert and the girl leaving the store with the shopping basket and some rather large pill bottles. But their backs are turned to the camera, so we can’t see their faces.”
Joe realized that Sheridan was squeezing his hand so hard his fingers ached. He asked Coon to rerun the glimpse of her face again. They watched it over and over. He wanted to recognize April, but he was overwhelmed with the dark feeling that he couldn’t remember her face except in abstract: a ghost at a trailer house window. He wished Marybeth were there to give her opinion.
Was it her? She’d certainly look different six years older. But was it her?
“I just don’t know,” Sheridan finally said. “It could be. But it might not be.”
Coon sighed heavily, shook his head. “We can get that one shot blown up and printed. Maybe then?”
Sheridan shrugged.
“Man, I was hoping for better,” he said.
Joe agreed. It bothered him immensely that April had been an eyewitness to Robert shooting the pharmacist to death. No matter what her role was, there was no reason for her to have to see that. She was fourteen. He despised Robert for what he’d done. Then: “What about April’s cell phone? Cyndi said she left it in Skelton’s truck. Let’s see if it’s the right phone.”
Coon didn’t move.
“What?” Joe asked.
The FBI agent shook his head. “It got a direct hit. Maybe two. The pieces are there, but I don’t know if we can put them together to get anything out of it.”
Joe said, “I’m sure there’s a computer chip or something with the call log on it. Can’t you guys find that and analyze it? Isn’t that what you do?”
Coon nodded. “It may take a while.”
“I’d suggest you speed it up.”
Coon looked over at the SUV and his shoulders slumped. “If I’m not suspended.”
THE FBI INCIDENT TEAM arrived in two helicopters an hour after dawn. Eight men in suits and ties and sunglasses, so crisply and icily efficient that they’d cordoned off the SUV and separated the witnesses within minutes of landing. After Joe gave his statement, he declared himself free to go and was surprised there was no argument from the sandy-haired special agent who’d interviewed him. He was in his pickup with Sheridan and pointed back toward Savageton before someone else decided they needed him again.
In his rearview mirror, he watched as Cyndi gesticulated for three stone-faced men, giving her version of
