She gestured toward it. “Maybe she knows someone there.”
“Possible. Ten percent, I’d say. I think she’ll keep going. Put as much distance between Ferrington and herself as possible.”
“Agreed.”
They’d then sat down, where they were now, and had begun to review footage along Cross County starting from the approximate time she would have fled.
Shaw believed he had a hit of a 4Runner, the color of hers, turning south on 55. There was a truck behind the turning vehicle, though, partially obscuring the view. The tag was not visible at all.
Nilsson peered at the images. “Could be. Anybody inside you can see?”
No. Glare and grain.
Shaw switched to cameras along 55 south, while Nilsson continued to scan for Merritt’s pickup, both west — the first time he’d fled her house — and east, after he’d escaped during Shaw’s visit.
“May have her,” he said.
About a half hour after she’d turned south, a 4Runner pulled quickly from a shopping center parking lot and sped north on 55. If it had been hers that they’d seen turning south, she’d been in Carter Grove briefly. When the vehicle arrived at Cross County, it kept going north. “It’s her.” The intersection camera had caught a clear image of her tag. “Where would that take her, going that way?”
“Chicago; Detroit; Indianapolis; International Falls; Red Lake, Ontario, where I used to fish with my father. Look at this.”
Shaw eased close to her, their shoulders brushing, like they had at the failed attempt to have lunch. She was playing video from the camera closer to downtown, pointed west on Cross County. It was capturing a cityscape, stores, apartments, a car repair garage. A white pickup was driving toward the camera. The time stamp indicated it was not long after Merritt’s second visit to the rental. It turned right, south, and vanished. She rewound it.
“If this were a sci-fi movie,” she offered, “I’d say, ‘Enhance, enhance,’ and we’d get the make, model and eye color of the driver.”
Interesting she said that. And he wondered again about the green hue.
“It’s definitely a 150,” he said.
“Yes, but is it his?” Nilsson wondered. This state did not require a front license plate.
“The street he turned on?”
“Miller. Leads downtown.” She sighed. “It’s a warren. We’d need a dozen sets of eyes and two or three solid days to scan them all.”
“Let’s focus on finding Allison and Hannah. She’s headed north on Fifty-five. Cameras there?”
She looked over a list the FPD had provided. “No city or county ones past Cross County. Some private ones.” Her long fingers, nails dark, typed fast. “Six we can access. We have to log on. Here’s the IPs and passwords. You take the top three; I’ll get the others.” She set a sheet of paper before him.
He concentrated on his monitor, logged in to the first camera he’d drawn — at a gas station. It offered only a partial view of the road. The image was grainy and colors washed out. He had to scrub slowly and pause at each passing vehicle to study it. Fifty-five was a major road; traffic was heavy.
He glanced beside him. Nilsson was in an identical posture. She was frowning in concentration — as, he supposed, he had been too.
Returning to scrubbing, Shaw asked, “Any train stations, bus depots, rental cars in that direction?”
“No trains, but there’s a bus terminal in Herndon. Three car rental places. And dealerships that probably rent cars too.”
“Buses’re always good. Cash and no ID. Rental car possibly, which leaves a record. But I’d say that’s a chance she’d take.”
Nilsson asked, “What do you think, warrant for Hertz or Avis or whoever? Look at their vids?”
Shaw said, “They’d fight it, on these facts. Same with the bus company.”
After five minutes of silence, other than the clatter of keys, Shaw asked, “What’d you fish for?”
Not missing a beat: “Pike and bass mostly. Some muskie.”
Shaw’s mother, Mary Dove, was the primary hunter in the family. The best with a long gun. Colter was next. But everyone fished. Shaw remembered assembling tackle and going out with one or both parents, sometimes a sibling, early — in cold blue-black dawn. Each would take up a different position on a promontory around what Dorion, his sister, had named Egg Lake, for the obvious reason. By 7 a.m. they would have their take for the week.
In the Compound it wasn’t catch and release. It was catch and eat.
Never toy with animals. They aren’t there for your amusement...
“You?”
He told her he didn’t fish much now. “But growing up, we were a self-sufficient family.”
“Okay. That requires some keep going.”
Where to start?
Shaw gave the nutshell version. How his father, Ashton, and mother, both esteemed academicians, fled the San Francisco Bay Area when Shaw was six, his brother twelve, their sister three, for the property in the Sierra Nevadas.
“Fled?”
“Ashton was into conspiracy theories, only his turned out not to be fictional. He found something that threatened some very powerful people. So he taught himself and us survival skills.”
“These people? They came for you?”
“That’s right. My father didn’t make it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She then glanced his way with an expression he deduced meant: And was the matter ever resolved?
“I took care of things.”
She seemed like a woman who would herself be inclined to take care of things too.
“My mother still lives in the cabin. My sister runs a disaster preparedness and emergency response company on the East Coast. My brother works for the government.”
“Yep. That’s a story and some change.”
“Long answer to a question about fish.”
They returned to their frustratingly slow task.
Each scrubbed through two of their allocated videos without finding any image of her SUV. This meant either she’d turned off, or it had been hidden from the camera by traffic.
Shaw and Nilsson started on their last cameras. Shaw’s showed a grainy, low-def and dark image of a gas station pump. You could see a short stretch of 55 on the far side of the apron.
After a few minutes she said, “Noticed. You haven’t taken or made any calls since you’ve been here.”
He had an idea where the inquiry was headed.
“No.”
And, sure enough:
“You’re not married.”
He thought of Margot, as close as he’d come.
“No. You said you’d been.”
“That’s right.” She shrugged. “But a waste-of-time decision. Not an oh-shit decision. You seeing anybody now?”
He thought of Victoria.
“Sometimes.”
He explained how he and the woman — a security specialist herself — occasionally saw each other, if they had jobs in the same area. “Couple of times a year.”
“That’s not seeing someone,” she said, and the keys clattered.
He said, “You have been making calls. The other phone of yours.”
She laughed. “Believe me. Nobody I date.”
Silence for a moment.
Neither of them typed.
Colter Shaw swiveled toward her. Looked into those verdant eyes and the gaze in return contained a message. He gripped her by the shoulders and kissed her. Hard. She reciprocated, and then rose. He did too, sending his chair wheeling sharply into another workstation.
For a short moment the two were as still as statues, eyes locked. They kissed again. Nilsson’s hands slid to the small of his back and this put the two of them firmly together.