Page 14 of To Have and to Hold

“This building is primarily used for rented-out event space. The six lofts are privately owned by one guy, so we don’t have cameras on the floors. Only when she gets back in the elevator—”

“You ready for this?” Knox cut in by holding onto my shoulder, his detailed note-taking (how much did he write down? What was he seeing that I wasn’t?) taking second chair to my increasing edginess.

Good buddy that he was, Knox had no idea that discomfort was the smallest aspect of my fury. Sour temper roiled in my gut, growing teeth. I swallowed down its fork-toothed tongue.

“Roll it,” I said.

“You sure? Maybe I should watch this first—”

“No.” The word was sharper than I intended. “I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t handle it.”

“I have no doubt, Spence, but I’m already breaking protocol having you here, and by the look on your face, I’m thinking I may’ve severely miscalculated where your off switch is.”

Stan cast a wary eye on me.

“You think I’m about to toss this room? Barrel out of here using Stan as a barricade until I find the motherfucker that has Emme?” I asked. Stan went stiff. “I’m not stupid. I won’t compromise anything that could save her.”

Knox let a few beats to pass between us, while I allowed him the time to inevitably relent.

“You do anything that makes me think you’re about to nuke this place, I’m kicking your ass out. I love you like a brother, but even you can’t know what could hurt this situation in your heightened state right now. You’ve got to let me do what I do best.”

I nodded. He was right, obviously. I was what we called a “witness,” maybe even a potential suspect until I’m officially crossed off the list. The one thing I wasn’t was a detective assigned to Emme. Or a prosecutor on her case. But maybe, maybe, I could help her as the man who’d loved every part of her.

“I’ll be good, Knox. We’re wasting time,” I said.

Knox gestured at Stan to fast-forward until Emme was back in frame and in the elevator.

With someone else.

“What the fu…pause. I said pause!” I yelled. Emme was almost completely covered by another body. The whites of her hands were blurred, frozen on tape as they flailed. One leg was exposed. She’d lost a heel, and I knew where it was. Discarded on the floorboards of the fourth floor amidst evidence cards, blood splatter and camera flashes.

But those facts had to recede to the hard drive of my brain, to be accessed with perfect detail later. Other facts were rolling in, zipping by until I found the relevant one. “There’s got to be a staircase, fire escape, something that allowed him to avoid the cameras and get to the loft without us seeing. Go back out. I want to see the outside of the building at the time Emme was riding the elevator.”

Stan was nodding along to my staccato demands, but not fast enough. “Do it!” I said, and he cowered.

“The building is six floors, one loft on each,” he said. “The elevator opens up directly to each one. Normally, to access the floor, you need to insert a key beside the button corresponding to your floor, like the lady did when she entered. Without one, he wouldn’t be able to get where he wanted.”

“And likely he knew there’d be a camera in the elevator, like most in the city,” Knox said.

“There’s a fire escape, but it’s outside. At the front of the building,” Stan said.

Knox nodded. “And narrow. Easy to get up with one person, not so simple to drag a screaming and fighting victim down.”

“If he got her unconscious, it still wouldn’t be easy to descend firefighter style,” I added. “In public view. The elevator was his only option to exit with her. Show me. Show me the outside.”

After a few painful fumbles, Stan had us back to the front of the building. One, two, three…there.

“Dark van,” I said. Only the hood could be seen and half of a front tire. The rest of it was off tape. “It wasn’t there before.”

Knox inched closer to me to get a better look at the left side of the image. Stan, my good man, had the wherewithal to freeze the image as soon as I pointed.

“I see it,” Knox said, then scribbled something on his pad. “We have foot patrol out canvassing other buildings, stores around here. Maybe there’s a camera shot of the license plate.”

I murmured in agreement, though we both knew the chances of that would be too good to be true. Especially if the license plate turned out not to be stolen and led us straight to the fucker’s door.

“Were any of these lofts occupied?” I asked, inventorying every pixel on the screen. The sole of a shoe. The profile of a pant leg. A knuckle. The fucking tip of a nose, I didn’t care. Anything that caught the bastard on camera. “Or did he know that Emme would be the only person in this building?”

“No one was renting space last night,” Stan said.

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