Barclay, Linwood - Broken Promise 03 - The Twenty-Three by Barclay Linwood

Author:Barclay, Linwood [Barclay, Linwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

When she got off the phone, she did not immediately go into the tech room. Instead, she sat stone-still in her desk chair and felt herself start to shake. She gripped the arms of the chair.

I will not lose it.

She took several deep breaths, fought back tears. She’d managed to hold it together through the rest of that phone call. If she could listen to two people be overcome with grief and not start crying herself, she could do anything.

Right?

She thought about calling her husband. She wanted to hear Ted’s voice. But she was sure the moment he came on the line, she’d go to pieces.

She would talk to him later.

Joyce hoped the next time she talked with Duckworth, he wouldn’t ask whether she’d quizzed Lorraine Plummer’s parents about whether their daughter had ever mentioned a married man.

She couldn’t do it. The people were too distraught. She’d broken the news to them. Duckworth could ask them his questions.

Joyce seated herself at the desk in the tech room, moved the mouse around, entered in the time period. She wanted to see footage from 11:20 p.m. through to 1:20 a.m. Duckworth had said he believed Lorraine had been killed about twenty minutes past midnight.

Cameras were posted on the road near the library and the athletic center. There were other cameras, too, although none close to the dormitory where Lorraine lived. But anyone driving onto the Thackeray grounds, headed for that building, would have had to pass either the library or the athletic center.

She brought up the video that had been taken from the athletic-center camera first. Set it up to begin at 11:20 p.m.

There wasn’t a whole lot to look at. With so few students in attendance, there were no cars, and very few people walking about. At 11:45 a young man and woman, holding hands, walked across the screen.

At 11:51, a jogger. White male, late teens or twenties, pair of shorts, white T-shirt. Wires coming down from his ears. On-screen for maybe seven seconds. She made a note of his appearance, scribbled onto a pad: “runner 11:51.”

At 12:02 a.m., he reappeared, going the other way. Joyce made another note.

She was able to fast-forward through the stretches where there was no activity. And there was nothing after that jogger’s return trip on the athletic-center camera. At one point, she thought she saw something, rewound, started the video again at regular speed.

Something moving along the side of the road, up close to a building. Very low to the ground. Was it a person? Someone crawling? Was it someone who had been injured, or someone sneaking around?

She rewound, watched it again. It wasn’t one moving object, but three, or possibly four.

Raccoons.

Joyce laughed. Her first laugh in some time.

Time to turn her attention to the other camera, the one mounted near the library. One corner of the library building was in the upper-right quadrant of the screen. A road bisected the screen horizontally. The upper left was wooded area, and below the street, sidewalk. The camera itself was mounted atop a student residence—not Lorraine’ s—across from the library.

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