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I turned to look at her incredulously, but Harper just waved her hand.
“I figured that out hours ago,” she said, dismissively, “and I don’t even want to know how you did it.”
“No,” I agreed. “No, you don’t.”
“That’s fine,” she nodded. “So now what are we looking for?”
There was no time to be duly impressed, though I thoroughly was. Instead, I pointed to the monitors on my left and right.
“There’s a traffic camera at either end of your block,” I explained. “None that capture your house or anything, but I’ve been monitoring all the cars and trucks that drove on and off your street during the time you weren’t home yesterday.”
She nodded, peering into the screen. “There had to be a lot of them, no?”
“There were,” I agreed. “But then I used Google Earth to compile a list of vehicles that belong on your block, in driveways and such, and I eliminated all of those. I also eliminated delivery trucks, postal vehicles, the cable company…”
“Okay, I get it,” she interjected. “That’s smart.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“So what’s this?”
Harper pointed to the grid on my central monitor. The one that showed nine other cameras pointed at various roads and businesses.
“This camera right here,” I pointed to the top left, “is a license-plate reader. It gathers the driver information of everyone who passes through this intersection.”
“Shit,” Harper swore under her breath, as she shook her head. “Privacy really is dead, isn’t it?”
“Oh, that shit’s dead and buried,” I agreed. “Decades ago, in fact. But we may as well use it to our advantage.”
I punched up a few other screens, and spent half a minute flipping through them. Some were from the afternoon, while others were traffic feeds from the evening, and into the night. There was a distinct progression of darkness, as the cameras switched from day to night vision. A few, like the license-plate scanner, were better and higher-resolution than others. Most however, installed long ago, just plain sucked.
“Anyway, I followed any vehicle that had been on your block and cross-referenced it with the plate-reader,” I told her. “I looked for out-of-state plates first, just because I figured they stick out. But there were none.”
Harper nodded, still staring into the screen. Like mine, her eyes were tired. But at least they were no longer puffy from when she’d been crying.
“So right here,” I said, punching the keys necessary to split the left screen into four quadrants, “is a list of drivers who were on your block last night. Name, address, ID numbers… and of course, photos.”
I clicked the mouse a few times, then swiveled my chair to look at her as the screen filled with people.
“Do you recognize anyone?” I asked hopefully.
Harper’s blue eyes darted left and right as she scanned carefully through the grid of driver’s license photos. I got lost in those eyes, thinking about how much she meant to me. I wasn’t just falling for her, I was already in love with her. And I was being honest with myself… I was pretty sure we all were.
There was no way in the world we weren’t fixing this for her.
No matter what the cost.
“I don’t see anybody I know,” she said finally. Her voice was tinged with frustration. “Names, faces, addresses… none of it rings a bell.”
“I didn’t see the kid either,” I told her. “The one from the YouTube videos.”
“Yeah, well he looks barely old enough to drive.”
“True.”
I thought about Adrian and Jax, and whether or not they were having any luck. They’d canvassed the neighborhood twice already, but no one had claimed to see anything out of the ordinary. At the moment, they were expanding their search to a few of the outside blocks.
“What’s that?” Harper asked.
