Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [748]
Andrew watched the helicopter almost scrape the trees, and this time it flew low enough that he could see the letters on its side: POLICE.
What the hell was the Omaha police helicopter looking for? Or rather who was it looking for? He wondered if this had anything to do with the call that made Tommy take off.
Andrew hurried back into the cabin. He pulled out the nine-inch TV he had brought with him. Rarely did he turn the thing on. Reception was awful out here. If he was lucky he could sometimes get one channel and that was with masterful manipulation of the bunny ears. He plugged in the set, turned it on and began to twist and turn, finally having some luck with Omaha’s Channel 7.
He glanced at his wrist—no watch—but it looked as though the six o’clock news was still on. He turned up the volume, a crackled sound track to accompany the rolling lines that blurred the station’s anchors. Julie Cornell and Rob McCartney looked a bit purple and outlined in orange but it didn’t matter. They were talking about a search for two suspects. Andrew turned up the volume once more.
“Again, that’s south on Highway 50. Two male suspects in a late-model sedan,” Julie explained as a map graphic showed the route. “The two men allegedly robbed the Nebraska Bank of Commerce late this afternoon. Police chased the suspects south on Highway 50. Details are still sketchy. We’ll have more as information continues to come in.”
Andrew shut the TV off. A high-speed chase on Highway 50? That was an accident waiting to happen. Maybe that’s exactly what had happened. He didn’t need to hear the media’s speculation.
He glanced back out at the laptop and notebooks on the porch’s table. Several loose sheets had blown off into the corners, probably gathering spiderwebs. One was stuck up against the screen, having impaled itself on a broken screen wire. The wind had picked up. The storm was getting closer.
Andrew grabbed another Diet Pepsi from the refrigerator and headed back to his work. He shoved aside the laptop. He picked up one of the empty spiral notebooks, opening it and watching the breeze try to flip the pages. In the distance the whirl of the helicopter now competed with the rumble of thunder. Andrew shook out a Uniball pen from the freshly opened box of a dozen, and for the first time in a long time he began to write, adding the scratching sound of pen on paper to those sounds already around him.
CHAPTER 22
6:11 p.m.
Grace took her place beside Pakula in the cramped confines of the van. Special Agent Jimmy Sanchez from the Omaha FBI office and Pakula’s partner, Detective Ben Hertz, were also huddled inside.
Darcy Kennedy, one of the Douglas County crime lab techs, slipped one of the bank’s videos into a VCR slot. The panel of instruments and equipment didn’t look anything like a home entertainment center. The video display screen was a small computer with a keypad.
“I can’t do much to it here,” Darcy reminded them. “This is the camera shooting the entrance. Keep in mind, there are three cameras in the loop. This one on the entrance, one shooting the teller’s counter and another one on the bank’s vault. They take turns. Even though it’s a video, it’s sort of like quick snapshots. Camera number one clicks, then two, then three. It’s continuous but there is a three-second delay. Three seconds may not sound like much, but when you consider we only have slices of the big picture, every second counts.”
The black-and-white picture barely resembled the bank lobby. No surprise to Grace, especially after a week of viewing crappy convenience-store videos. She put on a pair of reading glasses,