Page 31 of Just Now

The best way of persuading him to talk would be to confront him with evidence that he couldn’t deny. And that job lay with her.

Having managed to retrieve most of the footage from both cameras, she had to look through it, compare the two data streams, and identify the faces she needed to see there. She hoped she would find what she suspected—that all three victims had visited this bar and that the guilty barman knew about it, and was either shielding the perpetrator—or he was the killer himself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was a race against time. The sooner Cami could get concrete evidence from the footage, the sooner they could pin down this evasive barman, who she was sure was guilty.

Cami had now gotten all the footage available, had collated it, and was using a facial recognition program to speed things up. She’d scanned the available photos of Kate, who was the one whose presence in this bar was still unknown, and also of the other two victims, Priscilla and Gracie, so that she could see exactly when they’d been there.

Now, while Connor was face to face with this evasive barman, she was letting her programs run.

“Why did he delete it?” she muttered to herself, knowing that from the conversation in the interview room next door, Connor was asking exactly the same question while face to face with the obstructive barman.

She was searching for the truth in the records, and hoping to find it there.

There was Gracie! Working from the start of the footage four months ago and fast-forwarding with her facial recognition software activated, Cami saw that the young woman had arrived at the bar with a group of four or five friends. They’d gone in and had stayed for about three hours before the footage had shown the group leaving again, at close to eleven p.m. Looking closely, slowing down the speed, Cami didn’t notice anyone else leaving right after.

Gracie hadn’t been followed from this bar, and she hadn’t come back again. That had been her only visit. Cami could understand why. After having been there once, she hadn’t wanted to go back there either.

What about Priscilla?

This footage was more recent. Priscilla had visited this bar just five days ago, and it looked as if she’d stopped by on the way back from work. She was dressed in a smart jacket and carrying a laptop bag. She’d headed into the bar which, Cami saw, surprisingly seemed to be a less dodgy place at night. The diehards seemed to crowd in during the day, she guessed.

Priscilla had been there again two nights later, but again, though Cami watched the footage carefully, she could see no sign of anyone following her out. A man and a woman, holding hands and walking casually, had left a few minutes afterward, and the next person only ten minutes after that.

So, if the killer was using this bar as his hunting ground, he was not following victims out.

But was he hunting there at all?

It all now depended on whether she could find the footage of Kate. The other two had been accurately pinpointed by her facial recognition software, speeding through the camera images.

Cami loved the capabilities of facial recognition software and was hugely admiring of the technology behind it. It all boiled down to math.

As her facial recognition program scanned through the images of the customers leaving the bar, it was reading the geometry of their faces. The distance between the eyes, the distance from forehead to chin, and many other facial proportions. The technology she was using, which was state of the art, identified nearly seventy different measurements.

It was extraordinary to think that a program could turn faces into simple math, and by doing so, pick them out of a crowd with speed and unerring accuracy.

That was what it was doing now. Would it find the third face they needed?

Scrolling back through the footage, searching her hardest, with her program running optimally, Cami wasn’t finding what she hoped to. She wasn’t finding Kate’s face at all, and she’d now gone right back to the start of this recorded footage, four months ago.

Kate hadn’t been to this bar in the past four months, and the other two women had not been followed out. And that likely ruled out the barman, or anyone else from this bar, having used it as the hunting ground.

She felt crushed by disappointment. She’d been so hopeful about this. The fact they’d managed to copy it just seconds before it was erased had felt like a massive breakthrough. And now, it appeared, the footage was no use to them, although she was sure there were other reasons why the barman had tried his best to make sure the FBI didn’t catch sight of it.

Connor needed to know, urgently, that this was not their suspect.

“No sign of Kate on the footage,”she messaged to him.

Then Cami tuned in to the interrogation again. She’d tuned it out while she was hunting for her facial images.

“So, tell me, Mr. Shores, when did you first see this individual entering the bar?” Connor asked.

Cami’s eyebrows shot up as she realized that Connor had managed to get a breakthrough. The barman was now sounding more cooperative, and he was talking. In a tight-jawed, apologetic way, but talking all the same.”

“About six months ago.”

“Did you suspect him at the time?”

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