15 Seconds

Chapter Twenty-Six

Carrie left the Exxon station with an envelope full of security tapes from the morning Martinez was killed. A camera had been focused onto Lakeshore, but the angle was wide enough to catch a view of vehicles driving toward the highway.

She drove back to headquarters by way of Avondale, where Mike Dinofrio lived. Whoever killed him had likely driven via I-95 and gotten off at the Riverside Boulevard exit. From there, it was another six or seven minutes to Avondale. Martinez and Dinofrio had been murdered within about thirty minutes of each other, and Carrie calculated it would have taken approximately fifteen minutes or so to get to Dinofrio’s given traffic and the time of day. Whoever had done it-either the person in the blue car or Steadman via taxi-would have needed to get there fast.

She exited at Riverside and scanned both sides of the street as she drove past familiar office buildings-the Florida Times-Union, Haskell, Fidelity-until the structures along the road grew residential. Under a canopy of old oak trees, she passed the stately, historic homes that lined both sides, looking for cameras.

Nothing.

Eventually she hit Riverside Park, the neighborhood growing progressively more upscale, but still she saw no obvious cameras.

Until she happened on something that gave her hope.

A speed warning. YOU ARE GOING 35 MPH, the digital sign read. SPEED PATROLLED BY AUTOMATIC CAMERA.

Her heart rose with excitement. It would have definitely caught whoever had passed by two days before.

A couple of hours later, Carrie was back at the office, in the fourth-floor video station, reviewing the tapes. She’d gotten the speed-warning video from a friend who worked at the Transportation Authority. She began, frame by frame, with the tape from the Exxon station near where Martinez was killed.

The camera was focused on the comings and goings at the station, but it also took in the first two lanes of Lakeshore Drive heading west.

This was the best she had.

Carrie fast-forwarded to 10:06 A.M., the approximate time of the Martinez shooting. She sighed that it would have made this process a whole lot easier if Martinez had just had an in-dash camera in his car like a lot of the patrol cars now had.

She rolled the film forward, estimating that it was approximately two miles to the highway from the crime scene, and taking into account the traffic flow, which was steady, the blue car would have had to have passed by the station sometime between 10:09 and 10:11.

If it hadn’t turned off sooner.

And if Steadman wasn’t lying.

She watched the footage closely. It was going to be difficult to read the full license plate, especially on a car driving in the outer two lanes, because the camera angle wasn’t exactly positioned to capture that view. Steadman had said the car was a domestic make. A dark blue. Which wouldn’t exactly be helpful since the film was black- and-white.

10:07… Just a steady stream of traffic passing by. Nothing yet.

Carrie advanced the frames. 10:08… At the slower film speed, she studied every car she could. In real time, they had driven by in a flash, the camera picking them up for only a split second.

It was impossible to make out the car color, so she focused on the plates. South Carolina. ADJ-4…

10:09:23… Still nada. She was thinking a car might have already passed by this time. This was starting to feel like a giant waste of-

Something flashed by her on the screen.

A midshade sedan switching lanes. The camera picked it up for only a second. Carrie stopped the tape, rolled back, was able to zoom in. It was a Mazda. Not what Steadman had said, but he’d also said he wasn’t sure.

At the higher magnification the resolution grew even grainier. But she was able to make out numbers-at least some of them, though only on the right-hand side of the license plate: 392. The left side was completely obscured.

On the bottom of the plate she could make out a word that made her heart sputter:

Carolina.

Not South or North. The left side wasn’t clear.

Just Carolina.

It wouldn’t be hard to figure out which Carolina; however, she didn’t know state license-plate colors by heart.

And the plate also wasn’t ADJ-4, like Steadman insisted. Nor was it a Ford or a Mercury, whatever he thought it was. The only thing that stood out was the state.

10:09:46. Driving by at a high rate of speed. She wondered if that could be it. She made a note of the time and license numbers and continued forwarding the frames, just in case.

A minute later, another car passed by. This one she recognized immediately. It was Steadman’s white Cadillac STS. Carrie even verified the plate numbers.

He was clearly in pursuit, like he said, chasing the car that had gone before him.

She reversed the tape and replayed the first car over again. There was nothing, nothing even remotely suspicious about it. The plate didn’t match up, though she couldn’t make it out completely. The make was different. If she brought this information to Akers, or one of the detectives, as if it proved something, they’d look at her like she was crazy.

Shit, if she brought it to Raef, even he’d probably look at her like she was crazy.

Carrie sighed, filled with frustration. What the hell are you doing? she asked herself. This proved zero. She took the Exxon tape out of the player, marking down the one car that had caught her attention.

Then she put in the tape from the speed warning on Riverside Avenue.

Dinofrio had been alive at 10:15, when his wife left to go to her Pilates class. His killing had to have occurred before Steadman arrived, which, according to the cabbie was, 11:02. Accounting for the time it took for him drive back to the scene, escape the police, ditch the car, walk to the Clarion Inn, find the cab, and drive there.

Calculating the probable time it would take someone to get to Dinofrio’s house on Turnberry Terrace, she started with 10:30 A.M.

Carrie started advancing the tape. This one was a whole lot easier. While it was also black-and-white, the camera focused directly on an oncoming car’s front grille and license plate.

It was a speed trap.

But the work was still slow. There was no exact way to know precisely what time anyone would have passed there. Or, it occurred to Carrie, if they had even come by this route. Who could be sure?

Dozens and dozens of vehicles went by. With no matches.

10:35. Carrie started to grow disheartened. Give it up, said a voice inside her. Sometimes people who do bad things don’t fit the part. Look at Ted Bundy. He didn’t look the part. He could charm the pants off a-

10:40. Twenty minutes or so until Steadman would have passed by in the cab.

Still nothing.

Then suddenly it came into view. Her heart lurched to a stop.

Oh my God.

10:41:06. There it was. The very same Mazda. 392. This time with South Carolina plates. Perfectly clear.

And this time, Carrie saw all the numbers.

Her eyes doubled in size.

ADJ-4, the license plate read. Followed by what she had seen before. On Lakeview.