Page 29 of Out of the Shadows
“Friend?” she said with her eyebrows raised. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
Jack pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I noticed you had a security camera on your garage.”
She looked toward the garage. “My husband put those in last year when we caught our oldest sneaking out of the house.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him grounding was sufficient, but he insisted. Two months later, Chris tried it again, my husband put on the floodlights, and you’d have thought the police had surrounded the place.” She laughed. “He hasn’t done it since. Groveled sufficiently, but my husband said the cameras were a good deterrent.” She frowned. “Poor Laura. Did she lose much?”
“Nothing appears to have been taken. I’m hoping that your camera is set to record?”
“I think so?” she said as a question. “My husband is at work, he won’t be home until late, he handles—”
“I can do it, Mom!” a voice piped up from behind her. A tall teenager—not the one who answered the door—towered over his mother and was nearly as tall as Jack.
“All right, if you have time,” Kerry said. “Mr. Angelhart, this is my son Chris.”
“No problem,” Chris said. “I don’t have to be at work until three today. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
“Call me Jack,” Jack told them as Kerry led him into the house.
“How do you know Laura?” Kerry asked with a sidelong glance.
“Through her brother.”
“Ah,” she said. “And you’re a private investigator?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jack was beginning to feel like he was getting the third degree. Friendly, but odd.
Kerry said to Chris, “Don’t go through your dad’s things, computer only, understand?”
“Yeah, Mom,” he said.
Kerry said to Jack, “Chris is a good kid, truly. Being the oldest of six, he sometimes flexes his wings a bit too far, but since he got a job at the beginning of the summer, it’s night and day.”
“I’m the oldest of five, I did my own flexing,” Jack said.
She laughed, then a crash in the other room followed by shouts had her running out of the den.
Chris rolled his eyes as he sat down at the computer and booted it up. “Jared and Michael are constantly going after each other. Do you have a brother?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fight with him?”
“We argued about things, but we never really fought.” Nico was five years younger than Jack. They’d shared a room growing up, but Nico had been in and out of the hospital until he was twelve, when the doctors finally diagnosed a rare but treatable bone cancer. Jack had always been involved in sports and spent a lot of time outside the house. He liked his brother, but they didn’t share common interests, other than an interest in criminal justice. Nico worked in the Phoenix Crime Lab. “I fought more with my sisters,” Jack said with a smile. “Tess would talk me to death, and Margo was sneaky when she got back at me.”
“That’s my sister, the sneaky one.” Chris typed on the keyboard. “Okay, what time?”
“Sunday, I don’t know the time, but I’d like to look at between 10:00 p.m. and midnight first.”
“Sure. Okay... do you know what you’re looking for? I can speed through it.”
“I’m looking for any vehicle that turned onto Laura Barrett’s street, so I’m only interested in the camera on your garage that faces the intersection.”
“The garage is Camera Two... okay, here we go. Here’s the current view.”
Jack looked over Chris’s shoulder. The camera showed the driveway and part of the street. He would be able to see any car that turned from the east, but not the west. As they watched, an older white pickup turned up Laura’s street. Jack thought it might be the handyman to fix the door, but Chris said, “That’s Mr. Berg. He’s kind of a jerk.”
“Neighbor?”
“He lives next to the Barretts. My sister was over there horseback riding with Sydney once, and he came out yelling at them for no reason. Then a couple weeks ago, our goats got out. We have three, they’re really good at getting out of their pen. Other neighbors think it’s funny—like Laura once found them sleeping on her back porch and brought them home. But this time, they went to Mr. Berg’s house and ate from his vegetable garden. He said he’d shoot them next time, and Jared and my sister started crying and my mom was angry, and then Dad went to talk to him and came back mad and told us we had to do better keeping the goats secure. We have an alarm on their pen now.”
