Leah studied Carter; the way he stood with his head ducked, shoulders drooping, hands shoved in his pockets. He’d come along with his club brothers, but he didn’t want to be in here; didn’t want anyone to see his face, probably.
When he lifted his head, she caught his gaze, and offered a smile.
He turned around.
“Mrs. Cook,” Aidan said, as Marie passed him a bag full of cookies. “Thanks. But I’ve got a favor to ask, too. Can we watch your security footage?”
~*~
“According to my guy at the city, three people have asked to see the records for our new properties,” Ratchet said, bringing up and then minimizing files on his laptop screen at a dizzying pace. “Rodney Cosgrave, who owns that strip mall over by the AMC theater. Doug Wallace, who’s doing all those house flips on the east side of town. And – here’s the interesting part – Pete Weston.” He pulled up a driver’s license photo of a young guy with pale hair and a red-and-white striped tie.
“Why is that the interesting part?” Ghost asked.
“He works for the mayor’s office.”
“He own business property?” Walsh asked, standing behind his other shoulder.
“No, nothing. He’s a glorified secretary. My guess is: he wasn’t down there looking at property records for his own benefit.”
Ghost itched for a smoke. He settled for scrubbing at the back of his neck when the skin there prickled with a premonition. “So the mayor’s looking at who’s buying up property on Main Street.”
Walsh, who, to Ghost’s knowledge, hadn’t promised his wife he’d quit smoking, took a drag off his cigarette and sent Ghost a lifted-brow look. “It makes sense that a mayor would want to know who’s buying property in his city.” There was the faintest note of doubt in his voice, though.
Ghost said, “Forgive me if I don’t believe in coincidence, or responsible mayors.”
Walsh snorted.
“What about the security footage?”
“That. Okay.” Ratchet clicked across his keyboard, and opened up a six-way split screen view of paused black-and-white security footage. “This” – the upper left – “is from the Cooks’ coffee place. This is Maude’s, the café, the empty spot, and Bell Bar.”
He pressed play, and the videos must have all been synched up, because Ghost got to watch two people in dark clothes, faces shielded by hoods, walk down the sidewalk and take spray paint to their store fronts. He got glimpses of both their faces – but only pale flashes of chins and noses.
“Could be kids,” Walsh said, again with doubt.
“Could be.” Ghost didn’t think they were dealing with anyone his own age, at least. But they lacked that lanky, loose-limbed gait he’d come to associate with furtive teenagers out for a bit of vandalism. “Did the cameras catch anything specific?”
“Kinda,” Ratchet said. He pulled up one of the videos, and zoomed in. There was a logo on one of the guys’ hoodies, blurry and out of focus. But it was a large, simple design. “Is that a fish?”
Walsh snapped his fingers. “That custom boat place.”
“Flash,” Ratchet said. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He twisted around to regard them. “They sell shirts and stuff there in the office.”
“Yeah,” Ghost said, and scratched his neck some more.
He could envision the way it would play out: taking a trip to Flash, maybe producing a grainy photo of this footage. Asking around. Getting lots ofnosandno way, mans. Learning nothing – looking like idiots.
Or…
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
Eight
Jazz hadn’t asked him to meet her over at the high school this evening, but guilt had been gnawing at Carter’s gut ever since their last night together. He found her car in the parking lot, left his bike in the space beside it, and made his way slowly toward the side entrance as a sugar-pink sunset tickled the bottoms of the clouds.
The door she normally used was over by the art rooms, where the windows overlooked the soccer and practice fields. The low bleachers there offered the perfect place to sit and wait for her; to enjoy the breeze, and the sunset. And, tonight, he noted with a stirring of nostalgia, football practice again.
The team was split into smaller groups tonight, running position drills. The quarterbacks were set up right in front of him, working on passes, two young coaches doing all the actual catching, then passing the balls over to the QBs to be thrown.
