“Like the camera in Greg’s room,” Sam says.
“Exactly. Catch Me and my uncle have something to do with each other. They’re linked in some way, but they aren’t the same person, and I’m still convinced they aren’t working together. Like I said, they are orbiting each other. Greg was with my uncle at the time of the bombing. And Catch Me obviously knew he was going to be there. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to manipulate Mary Preston into creating the video he sent me a clip of that shows Greg leaving something at the information desk for me. And that alone tells me Greg didn’t know about the explosion. If he knew he was walking into the bus station to set off a bomb, why would he leave something at the desk for me?”
We watch through the security footage a couple more times, but none of us find a champagne-colored sedan in the parking lot.
“What else do you have?” Sam asks.
“Well, I’m actually not all that surprised to not see the car at the bus station. He’s far too conscientious to just drive into the lot when he’s going to be planting an explosive. Not only does he not want to be seen, but he wants to be able to get the hell away, so he doesn’t become another statistic in his own spectacle. That’s why I asked Eric to dig up the footage from the security cameras at the surrounding businesses. They haven’t proven very important in the investigation, but I think it’s because he didn’t know what to look for. The investigators couldn’t see the bus station clearly, so they weren’t able to see anybody going into it or coming out, which seems like they don’t see anything at all. But I want to see if we do,” I say.
“Where’s this?” Dean asks.
“The bus station is on a corner. There’s a large main street facing the bus terminals and a smaller street to the side where the doors are. This camera is from across the main street, on a baseball stadium. It mostly shows the gates, but you can see some of the road turning into the bus station up here,” I explain, pointing to the upper part of the screen.
The vantage point isn’t perfect. We can’t see the whole vehicle at any point, but we can see some of each car that turns down the road and even less of it as it moves into the parking lot. I don’t see the champagne car, but on the third time watching through the footage, something else stands out to me.
I minimize the screen and pull up a different folder from my desktop.
“What are you doing?” Sam asks. “Did you see something?”
“Maybe,” I say. “This is all the information Eric was able to give me about Mary Preston and the ongoing investigation into how she got involved with all of this. Right here, it says she drove her own vehicle to the bus station that day. It was found parked in the lot. A white SUV with red spinners on her wheels and a big red decal, advertising her website. You don’t see a whole bunch of cars with spinners these days, let alone pulling into a bus station parking lot. Now, look.”
Going back to the footage from the camera, I rewind it a few seconds back and point to the screen as a flash of red and white moves across the very top and disappears into the parking lot.
“How can we be sure he always drives the same car?” Dean points out. “If he doesn’t want anyone knowing what he’s up to, would he actually bring his own car to the hospital? Or to a bombing?”
“Yes,” I nod without hesitation. “He chose a car that blends in with anything. As long as the plate isn’t visible, it could belong to anyone. So, he makes sure the plate isn’t seen. He parked so far out in that lot at the hospital; we barely caught sight of the car at all. And I haven’t seen it here. But the big thing that convinces me he doesn’t do that is that he wants to go unnoticed. When he’s not coming up with new and interesting ways to torture me, he presumably lives a normal life. It would seem suspicious to anyone who knows him if he was changing cars all the time. Staying in his own car is the most streamlined option.”
“Did you see that?” Sam asks.
“See what?”
He moves closer, leaning around me to point at the screen. “Right there. You can barely see it, but a white SUV with a red decal is parked right at the very edge of the lot, right there.”
I look closer and see the hint of red just beneath the branches of a tree behind the sign for the bus station.
“You’re right,” I tell him.
“Is there more footage?” Dean asks. “Another camera that shows that corner of the lot?”
“I have one more piece. It’s from the building across the side street. During the investigation, it was helpful because it showed how the explosion affected this part of the building and the direction of the blast.”
The last video only plays for a few seconds before we notice the red and white flash come around the corner. It’s not the whole thing, but enough to see its definitely Mary Preston’s car.
“There’s the car,” Sam points out.
“And there’s Mary,” I say as legs appear walking around to the back of the SUV. She steps to the side, and slightly more of her shows up on the screen. “She’s getting something out of her trunk.”
“Who’s that?” Dean asks.
The side of a figure approaches at a diagonal from the direction of the bus station.
“It’s a man,” I say. “It looks like he’s stopping to talk to Mary.”
My hands twitch with frustration, wanting to be able to reach into the image
