Read Online Foreign Influence by Brad Thor - Free Book Online Page B

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. Thirtyminutes, 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 in Iraq, he was no stranger to sleep deprivation. In fact, he’d often joked that he could handle sleep deprivation in combat. It was the sleep deprivation of parenthood that was the real killer.
    Because there was no Dunkin’ Donuts near his daughter’s school, he broke one of his hardest and fastest rules and stepped into a Starbucks. The minute he did, he could hear the giant sucking sound of money being vacuumed out of customers’ pockets. Starbucks had good coffee, and as a capitalist, he didn’t fault them for getting the most they could for their product. He just disliked the whole vente/grande, mocha-frappu-B.S.-cino, coffee-as-art shtick. Hot, black, and in a cup—that’s the complete extent of the relationship he wanted with the beverage.
    Instead of taking his large cup of house blend back to the car, he found a table and took a seat. His eyes were glazed over as he stared absently out the window and there were probably multiple customers who found the sight of a man with a pistol on his hip and a thousand-yard stare more than a little disturbing.
    If people were looking, he didn’t notice. The weapon was so much a part of who he was that he never really thought about it. It was just one of several tools necessary for doing his job.
    As his mind wandered, he watched a Yellow taxi drive by outside. He watched as it neared the corner and slowed to a stop. A uniformed crossing guard directed the cab