“It’s not bad or anything,” Tobias said. “I only thought, you know, that it looks like a gangster from the seventies should drive it.”
Sullivan frowned. “Stop trying to butter me up and get in, will you?”
Tobias studied him across the roof. “You’re very odd, you know that?”
“You’re very judgy, you know that?”
Tobias clamped his mouth shut and got in.
The security guard on shift at Riviera Condominiums was a big white guy with beady eyes who wore a short-sleeved yellow button-down, sweat stains discoloring the fabric at his armpits and the small of his back. He eyed Sullivan’s hair with disdain and fiddled with the offered business card while Sullivan explained the situation. “And you think maybe someone took the guy in 121 against his will?”
“Maybe.” Sullivan nodded to the bank of monitors against one wall, trying to look unimpressed. He could only hope that Tobias, who was standing by the door behind him, was managing to do the same. “Do you have any security footage of that parking lot?”
“Maybe,” the guy parroted. His smile turned sly. “But I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to have a warrant or something.”
“Not a cop. Also, not if you let us.” Sullivan no longer had to pretend to be unimpressed. People were so predictable, honestly.
“Oh, I don’t know if I could do that. Sounds like an invasion of privacy to me. There are rules, you know.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’d hate to get in trouble.”
“Let me guess. You’ve got hungry mouths to feed.”
“I do.”
Sullivan gave a mental sigh. “How’s fifty sound?”
“I was thinking more like two hundred.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Two hundred.”
Tobias interrupted with, “I only have a hundred on me, sir.” Both Sullivan and the guard glanced at him and he offered an apologetic smile.
The guard frowned.
“That’s better than nothing,” Sullivan added.
The guard shrugged. “That’ll do, I guess. But you’ve got to look at it here.”
“We don’t know when he went missing,” Sullivan protested. “It could take ages to find the—”
“Not my problem. When a copy gets made, the security system automatically notifies the corporate contact, and that’s my boss. You’ve got to do it here. Now gimme my money.”
Tobias paid up and the guard set a stack of CDs in front of them. “That’s the lot outside of 121. They’re organized backward from today, two twenty-four-hour periods per disk. Load ’em there, scroll forward and back with this button thingie here, print stills here, and don’t touch anything else.”
“Best behavior,” Sullivan promised, and the guard gave him a suspicious look.
“You better do this fast. If I see my boss coming, I’m kicking you out whether you’ve gotten what you want or not.”
The guard headed for the front door down the hall to keep watch, and Sullivan sat down at the terminal and kicked the other chair back for Tobias, pulling Ghost’s phone out at the same time and passing it over. “Look up the date of the last text message he sent.”
Tobias thumbed through the list. “Last outgoing text is on the 21st of July.”
“Let’s start there.” Sullivan grabbed the stack of discs.
The camera’s angle didn’t show Ghost’s condo, but it caught the parking lot and most of the sidewalk out front. That was lucky, as it meant that his and Tobias’s breaking and entering earlier that week hadn’t been recorded. Over the next forty fruitless minutes, they worked their way through the disc, fast forwarding when they could, slowing down during peak times, and eventually moving on to the 22nd of July. The guard stuck his head in five times to glare and complain that they were taking forever, and it sure as hell felt that way to Sullivan, but on minute forty-one, Tobias sucked in a breath and jabbed his finger at the screen.
“There! There, that’s him.”
“You sure?” The picture quality wasn’t great—Sullivan mostly got blond and slim—but Tobias nodded.
“Yes!”
Ghost was carrying a big duffel bag over one shoulder and was followed by a balding man in slacks and a polo shirt.
“Who’s that?” Sullivan asked.
Tobias squinted at the screen. “No idea.”
They were definitely together, though. Ghost paused at a sedan near the sidewalk, waiting while the balding man unlocked the door and popped the trunk. Ghost put the bag inside before he circled the vehicle to get in the passenger seat. The car drove away, and that was that.
“No sign of distress.” Sullivan backed the disc up so they could watch it again. “His body language is calm. Don’t you think?”
Tobias nodded. “He looks all right. He might be all right. Ghost could’ve run and he didn’t.”
“There are other kinds of coercion besides force, as you well know,” Sullivan said, not a little bitterly.
Tobias nodded again, not looking at him.
Sullivan grabbed a nearby pen and a scrap of paper and scrawled out the date—July 22nd, thirteen days ago—and started making notes about the car, only to decide that was dumb. Instead, he took a quick screen capture, both printing it and emailing it to himself, remembering to log out of his account because he was basically a professional badass. “Light-colored sedan. Maybe a Nissan? Can you see that?”
“Here, wait until he pulls out.” Tobias reached over to the desk and turned off the light so only the overhead was on, killing the glare.
Sullivan leaned closer. “Regular Colorado plates. That’s a Q, isn’t it?”
“Yeah? I think? Then an F?”
“E.”
“F.” Tobias hummed thoughtfully. “That’s definitely an F.”
“That’s definitely a line at the bottom.”
“That’s definitely mud.”
By now they were both so close to the screen that their noses were practically touching. Sullivan muttered, “Mud my ass. That’s an E.”
Tobias made a dissatisfied sound. “Then a L. Then an 8.”
“3.”
“8.”
“You know, I’m the private detective here.” Sullivan turned his head, ready to give Tobias a pointed look, only to realize how closely they were sitting.
“Doesn’t mean your vision’s better.” Tobias’s raised eyebrow was somehow dour and civil at once, at least until he realized what Sullivan already had—too much proximity.
Sullivan’s heart jumpstarted in his chest. Up close like this, it was
