Page 35 of The White Picket Fence

Tino had been checking on Charlotte frequently, worried at the way she’d turned in on herself when he’d finished the sketch of the man Kayla had seen the night of the shootings.

“Not really,” Tino murmured, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “She fully cooperated with Vito when he asked her questions, but down deep she’d convinced herself that she wasn’t the common denominator. She wanted to believe that the man who’d attacked her aunt was different than the man who’d shot three shop owners on her street.”

“But it’s the same guy,” Gino said, retrieving the hazelnut creamer that Tino preferred.

With a weary smile of thanks, Tino doctored his coffee, adding enough sugar to make Gino wince. Which was how it had been for decades.

“The same.” Fear had kept Kayla silent in the days after her father was shot, but Charlotte’s arm around her shoulders had given her the courage to tell Tino what she’d seen. “I thought Charlotte would pass out when she saw the sketch.”

She hadn’t passed out, but she’d gone numb. And silent. She hadn’t said a word when Vito had come to her apartment to get Kayla’s statement.

She hadn’t said a word when Tino had packed up Mrs. Tripplehorn’s food and litter box, stowing the cat in a carrier. Nor when he’d put the cat carrier and her suitcase in the back of his car and buckled her into his front passenger seat.

She hadn’t even commented when he pulled into the driveway of the house he shared with Gino. He’d planned on going with her to the hotel she’d reserved, but he needed his home Wi-Fi connection for what he planned to do next.

Hotel Wi-Fi was not secure, and he didn’t want anyone to know what he was doing—especially not Philly PD. What he needed was in the home office that he and Gino shared.

So the home office was where he went, with Gino trailing after him, sipping his own coffee. It was late for Gino. He was typically an early riser, where Tino was a night owl. They rarely shared the same space, which was probably why their living situation had been so successful for so long.

“Could you have been followed?” Gino asked.

Tino sat at his desk. “No. I drove all over the place before we came here. She just stared out the window like a zombie.”

“I get it,” Gino murmured. “She’s blaming herself for the bloodshed. That can’t be easy to accept.”

“No,” Tino agreed. He got it, too, and it was breaking his heart. So he’d tucked her into his bed where she could get some rest. Now he was doing something about this mess. “Oof,” he grunted when Charlotte’s cat jumped onto his lap.

It appeared that Mrs. Tripplehorn needed some comfort, too.

“We should get a cat of our own,” Gino said as he pulled up a chair and sat beside Tino, looking at his computer screen. “What are you doing?”

“No,weshould not get a cat. If we get one, it’ll be yours. I travel too much to take care of a pet. And I’m helping Vito solve this thing,” Tino said grimly as he stroked Mrs. Tripplehorn’s back. “Hopefully he’s already got someone in his department doing this, but I need to do something or I’ll lose my mind.”

Gino leaned closer, his brows lifting as he realized what Tino had begun. “How did you get such a realistic-looking photo from your sketch?”

“AI,” Tino replied. “Easy to do. I already converted the sketch I did from Mrs. Johnson’s description and gave it to Nick Lawrence, but Kayla’s description was sharper than Mrs. J’s. I got a better sketch. Younger eyes, and Kayla wasn’t being beaten up at the time like Mrs. Johnson was.”

“How is Mrs. Johnson?”

“Improving. Still in the ICU, but hopefully they’ll move her in the next day or two.”

“That’s really good to hear.” He pointed to Tino’s screen. “Does Vito have this photo?”

“Yep. Sent it to him before I left Charlotte’s place. I’m able to render it into a photo on my phone, but for the next step, I need my desktop computer.”

Gino tilted his head, frowning. “Maybe it’s my imagination, but there’s something about that guy that’s familiar.”

“I thought the same, but Charlotte didn’t recognize him.” That had been the last sentence he’d extracted from her before she’d gone silent. “She was in shock, though, so after some sleep, she might be able to look again.”

“And now what are you doing?” Gino pressed.

“Facial recognition software.” Tino set up the parameters to the program, then started the process.

“I didn’t know that you knew how to do that.”

“Learned from a tech guy who works for a PI. I got called in to do a sketch for one of their clients, and their tech guy matched the face with a name using facial recognition software. He showed me how to do a search of various databases to match my sketch to a person.”

Gino narrowed his eyes. “Various databases? Which various databases?”

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