Page 9 of Beauty and the Bounty Hunter

She placed her hand on my arm and squeezed. “I want you to. Please. I don’t belong in jail. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

That I believed. “I can’t promise that the video from the time of the event hasn’t been erased.”

Katrina squeezed again. Now she had the sweet scent of mocha mixing with the lilies and lavender. I’d remember that when I kicked myself in bed two nights from now after turning her in. It was a torturous form of penance. “Thank you for trying. It happened on January the nineteenth, around two in the afternoon.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

She kissed my cheek again, and it made every scar on my body tingle. “I’ll get you something. What do you like to drink? I’m guessing coffee, black.” She lowered her tone when she said it, like she was imitating me. I liked that way too much. Women didn’t normally tease me.

“Coffee, yes. But sweetener. A little cream.”

“Okay.”

She stood and picked up the cup of coffee, then moved into the kitchen. It was simultaneously a relief and agony to have her move away from me.

I clicked around on the websites, searching for a camera with the best viewpoint of her driveway. Lucky for me it was the public red light camera. The city kept records for no more than thirty days, so it was doubly fortunate that we hadn’t passed that threshold. I queued the recording to the time she mentioned. “It’s ready, whenever you are.”

Katrina exhaled, and slid the coffee in front of me. “Okay. I’m ready. Exonerate me, Harbor.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got first.”

I hit the play button, and the two of us waited. Beside me, I could hear Katrina suck in her breath.

She used to have a nice house. Small, cheerful. Window boxes out front that in the summer probably overflowed with flowers. The driveway was plowed, but it looked like there hadn’t been fresh snow in a while, because brown patches showed through the white on her front lawn.

There was a 2017-era truck in the driveway, silver or gray on the black and white image, with a beat-up rear bumper. The license plate was fuzzy, but it looked like a Wisconsin tag. “That’s my car.” Katrina pointed at it. “I paid for the damn thing, but he never let me drive it. I had to take public transit every day from home to work to my studio.”

“What kind of studio?” Impressive. I almost sounded like I didn’t already know.

“I’m a sculptor.” She looked down, her long lashes trailing against her cheeks. Fuck me, she was gorgeous. “I’m not famous or anything. Obviously, or I’d have the money to have this kind of information already. Right now, I’m not even a sculptor. I have a job landscaping at the resort.”

“That’s really cool. If I was on social media, I’d have to follow you. Though I’m not much of an art guy.”

“I’ll bet you could surprise me,” she said softly. There was something in her tone, something soft and suggestive and unsure, that sent all kinds of thrills spinning inside of me.

Instead of saying anyting, I clicked through to another photo from the red light camera log. An electric vehicle speeding through must have triggered it, but the car didn’t obscure the view of Katrina’s old house. One guy in a dark-colored hoodie was at the side of the car, with another at the front door. It looked like the second guy was fiddling with something beside it. It was difficult to tell from a still photo.

“That’s Pete,” Katrina said, pointing to the second guy, who was wearing a backward John Deere hat. “That’s where our front porch cameras were.”

“So he’s disabling them.” I rotated to a different view, from a house across the street.

“Is there a continuous feed?”

I shook my head. “Red light cameras only record when someone runs a light. Here’s another view from your neighbor’s doorbell camera. We’ll get ten seconds of video here.”

“Oh my God.” Katrina steepled her hands in front of her face, her eyes glued to the laptop screen. I watched her reaction as, very clearly, the friend in the hoodie got into the driver’s seat of the truck. Her ex-husband left the front porch, jumped up and down a few times as if ramping himself up, then stood in the driveway. The friend rolled into him, bumping Pete out of the driveway and onto a patch of snowy dirt, then drove the Toyota away.

Katrina’s breathing sounded ragged in my ears. “Play it again.”

Blessing the years of training I had with surveillance imaging in my past careers, I rewound the video. I knew what had to be said. “A good defense attorney will say it’s impossible to identify who the friend is from this footage. And I don’t know how long this house keeps their security. Your new lawyer would have to get a warrant for this to hold up in court. There’s no zoom on most CCTV or security cameras. We’ll also need proof you were in the studio at this time. Do you have a bus pass that we can check trips on or something like that?”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she stared at the screen. “I can’t believe this.”

Tentatively, I raised one hand and patted her back slowly. “I’m so sorry, Katrina. We can try to make it right. This is proof he’s an asshole. He stood deliberately behind your car.” I wished I could have done more. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She deserved everything, but there were so many more hoops for her to jump through.

I wondered if she hated me a little, if I complicated this further.

Then, to my immense surprise, Katrina launched her arms around me and held on tightly. “Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. You have no idea what this means to me.”

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