Nothing.
No Volvo.
But we did have footage of the guard’s car moving through the intersection at 5:53 p.m., and the GM Volt of the keeper, Sandra Reynolds, at 7:02.
I made a mental note of the times. However, the storm, traffic, any number of factors could have affected their arrival times.
Try the traffic lights south of the facility.
It would be a more circuitous route from the Metro station where Mollie had been seen last, perhaps indicating that her abductors left the city and then returned with her. And if that was the case, when I drew up the geoprofile, depending on the hot zone’s location, it might prove significant.
Home? Did they take her to their place of residence?
Questions, questions.
I needed facts.
Only seconds after I’d started the second video, Ralph nailed his finger to the screen. “Gotcha.”
At 5:32 p.m. Rusty Mahan’s ’09 Volvo passed through the intersection.
They arrived and then waited for the shift change?
Maybe.
I paused the image, backed it up to the moment the car first appeared onscreen.
Pressed play.
“That’s it,” Lien-hua said, but there was a note of disappointment in her voice. “But you can’t see the driver, too much glare from the rain.”
“Play it again,” Cheyenne said.
I did, twice, and at different speeds. But the glare obscured the driver’s face.
Ralph pulled out his cell. “The lab guys can pull some of that off-”
“No,” I mumbled. I was staring at the image. “That’s not right.”
“What?”
“Look.” I zoomed in on the license plate. “It’s a different plate. The Volvo in the parking garage had 134-UU7 for its tags; this one has IPR-OMI.”
Ralph lowered his phone. “But that is the same car.”
“Let’s make sure.” I tapped the play button again.
Lien-hua ran the second set of plates while Cheyenne, Ralph, and I reviewed the footage to the point at which the emergency vehicles passed through the intersection at 7:14 p.m. on their way to the scene. No other Volvo sedans.
“OK,” Lien-hua said. “Both sets of plates are registered to Rusty Mahan.”
“Two sets of plates for the same car?” Cheyenne turned the keyboard toward her so she could tap at the keys, bring up the case files. “You’d need someone on the inside at the Department of Motor Vehicles to pull that off.”
Ralph shook his head. “No. A driver’s license, address, and a few bucks’ll get you plates.”
“Fake ID?” Lien-hua asked.
“Sixty bucks on the street.”
I shook my head. “I could see switching plates to avoid apprehension, but why switch them if you’re just going to leave the vehicle at the scene? Especially if you use plates registered to the same owner?”
The case seemed to be skewing into a completely different direction.
“All right, let’s think about this,” Lien-hua said. “IPR-OMI. Does that mean anything to anyone?”
“IP is your Internet Protocol,” Cheyenne said. “Your computer’s address within a network. ROM has something to do with computer memory.”
“Read-only memory,” Lien-hua said.
Cheyenne tapped at the keyboard. “IPROM stands for University of Illinois Probability Modules. A software program students use in their probability courses.”
Ralph cut in, “Lien-hua, you said our guy might be a hacker?”
“Yes. But what about the I at the end?”
We were quickly sinking into the quagmire of conjecture.
He shook his head. “OMI could mean ‘oh, my.’”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Rather than worry about what kind of hidden message the plates might contain, let’s find the DMV clerk who filed the registration papers and see if we can get a description of the person who applied for them. See if it was Mahan or not. We can have Angela Knight or the NSA’s cryptographers work the plate angle for us.”
No arguments.
“All right, bring up the video again, Cheyenne.” Then I addressed all three of them. “Is there anything else here? Anything we’re missing?”
She played the footage again.
The traffic light.
Red. Yellow.
“The facility’s cameras…” I mumbled, “the electronics store. .. the killers know video…”
Green.
“Wait,” I said. “Replay it.”
And at last I saw it.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed it earlier.
“Here, here, here. Watch it again. The traffic lights.” I leaned close to Cheyenne. Hit play. I caught the light, sweet scent of her perfume, tried to ignore it.
As the video played, I could see from the looks on everyone’s face that none of my colleagues had any idea what I was talking about. I moved the cursor back and pressed play one last time. “The light. Notice when it changes.”
We all watched as the car approached, the light turned green, the vehicle slowed, passed through the intersection, accelerated.
“He slows down,” Lien-hua said, “as he approaches the light.”
“Yes, as he approaches,” I said. “But it turns green while he’s at least thirty meters away. So why would he slow down on an empty street as he approached a light that just turned green?”
“It could be almost anything.” Ralph put an edge to his words, and it was clear he didn’t think this was significant at all. “He could have been distracted, on the phone, fiddling with the radio…” A stretch of thoughtful silence, then he mumbled the same thing I’d been thinking, “Or he wanted to get caught on camera.”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “Everything else so far has been set up to make us look in one direction while missing the obvious facts in another. They switched the plates and it looks like they wanted us to notice-but not right away.”
“Who would even guess that we would check this?” Lien-hua asked. “The traffic cams?”
“Someone who thinks like Pat,” Cheyenne said.
“But why?” Ralph asked. “Why would-”
My phone rang and my caller ID told me it was Missy Schuel, the lawyer.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse. I hated to step away from this conversation, but this was one phone call I couldn’t afford to miss.
It rang again.
“Hold that thought,” I told my friends. “I’ll be right back.”
I slipped into the hallway and answered my cell.