Foreign Influence_ A Thriller - Brad Thor [23]
He had no idea that the car he was now driving was the biggest giveaway of all.
CHAPTER 11
CHICAGO
After leaving Area Five headquarters, Sergeant John Vaughan drove to the intersection where Alison Taylor had been struck. He parked his vehicle and surveyed the entire area on foot.
Beyond the lone Chicago Police Department blue light camera used to discourage street crime, Vaughan located five other privately owned security cameras that might have footage of the hit-and-run.
The first belonged to Alison Taylor’s apartment building. Vaughan scared up the resident manager, who had “already” spoken to the Area Five detectives. John mollified the man and explained that he was simply following up.
The manager told him exactly what he had told the detectives. The building’s exterior camera provided a 24/7 feed so that residents could see who was buzzing them from the front door. Unfortunately, the feed wasn’t recorded.
Was it possible that a resident could have had their TV switched to the video loop when the accident occurred? Yes, but at three o’clock on a weekday morning, he doubted it. The majority of his renters were young professionals like Ms. Taylor. What’s more, he assumed that if anyone had seen something, they would have alerted the police.
The manager agreed to send an e-mail to his residents asking if they had seen anything and took Vaughan’s card.
The next three cameras belonged to merchants near the intersection, all of whom had previously spoken with the detectives. Of the businesses, one’s camera had not been turned on that evening, another stated that her camera was a fake and only there to deter crime, and the third merchant replied that unless he’d been broken into during the night, he automatically erased the footage every morning when he came in and started anew.
The fifth camera was from a bank ATM, and they still had their footage from the night in question. Though the Area Five detectives had already screened the footage, the bank manager was happy to let Vaughan see it.
Considering the camera’s field of view, it should have been perfect. In fact, it would have been perfect if not for a large delivery truck that had parked on the street just in front of the ATM that evening. All of the bank’s customers had been recorded perfectly, but seeing beyond the truck to the intersection was impossible.
Vaughan had figured it was a long shot, but sometimes those were the ones that paid off. His hopes of catching the act on tape now were all but gone.
After dinner at home with his family, homework, and baths for the kids, Vaughan returned to the intersection and went into the subway station. He wanted to re-create the scene for himself as closely as possible to the way it had happened.
Coming out of the subway, he turned to the right, exactly as Alison and her friends would have, and retraced their steps along the sidewalk.
He spent hours studying the intersection and its flow of pedestrians and traffic. He watched the timing of the lights and how many vehicles rushed the reds. He charted the vehicles that turned into the crosswalk where Alison had been struck and noted their rates of speed.
For most people it would have been mind-numbing tedium, but for Vaughan it was a challenge; a puzzle. He was convinced that he could find the answers he was looking for here. He just needed to keep looking.
At 5:30 in the morning, he went home in time to shower and change into a new suit before the children were up and wanting breakfast. Thirty minutes, four kisses, and one family hug later, his wife took their son off in one direction to his school, while he took their daughter to hers.
As a Marine who had seen hundreds of firefights