“Can you see her face?” Max leaned in eagerly.

Niki moved the frames forward and back, bringing the SUV closer and then farther away from the camera. The angle was wrong. Niki again moved the footage frame by frame, stopping it when she had the clearest view. “That looks like an arm with a hand on the wheel.”

Max leaned in. “Yes, but the arm of a woman or a man?”

“I can’t tell.” Niki zoomed in, but that only made the image blurry beyond recognition. Then she zoomed back out and studied the frame for several seconds before saying, “It’s definitely not a woman.”

“How can you tell?”

“Look for what’s not there, Max.”

Max leaned even closer to the screen. “I don’t…”

“What kind of car do you drive now?”

“Jeep Cherokee.”

“About the same size as a Passport, wouldn’t you say?”

“Pretty close.”

Niki stood. “Come with me.”

They walked out of Janelle’s office, stopping at the bar so Niki could ask Janelle to copy the surveillance footage for them. Then Niki took Max outside.

“Pull your Cherokee around and park it where the Passport was at in that last shot.”

Max drove his car out of the lot and parked it in the street where the Passport had been. Niki pulled her unmarked squad car behind the Cherokee and turned on her strobes, so that they could block the lane. She told Max to stand beneath the camera, and then she climbed into the Cherokee.

“Can you see me?” she asked.

Just like in the surveillance video, all he could see was an arm and a hand. “No.”

“How tall is your missing woman?”

Max pulled out a piece of paper where he had written down Sandy’s information. “She’s five-feet-six.”

“I’m five-five,” Niki said. “Now watch.” She moved the driver’s seat forward and slowly came into view. “Can you see me now?”

“Son of a bitch.”

They pulled their cars back into the lot and went inside, taking seats at the bar to wait for the footage. Niki was the first to speak. “If she had the seat adjusted for her height, we would have been able to see her in the video—maybe not a clear shot, but more than just an arm. The person behind the wheel is taller than five-six.”

“It’s not Sandy.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. It’s possible she’s in the backseat. The tint on the window is too dark to tell. But my gut… I don’t know. I don’t have the instincts I used to. What do you think?”

“I’m probably not a good one to answer that question,” Niki said.

“Why is that?”

“People like us… we see the worst side of humanity. Every day it’s another homicide, or sexual assault, or… Well, you remember. After a while, you start to see every situation as a worst-case scenario. You get jaded. I suppose it’s enough to make a person want to disappear from the world.”

Max thought that Niki was taking another jab at him, but she stared straight ahead with neither anger nor insult in her eyes.