I watched her as she stared at me, her face the picture of complete innocence, and I wondered if I could have gotten it wrong. Maybe I’d misread something; maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.

“The video,” I said before I could stop myself. “Did you notice anything about it?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I hesitated. “It seemed a bit short.”

She blinked.

That was the mistake. I wouldn’t have noticed anything, yet her eyes darted away for just a moment, and I saw her jaw clench just slightly. Other than that, her expression remained perfectly neutral except for a slight furrowing of her brow in confusion.

“What do you mean?” she asked again.

“The video, Emma,” I said. “All the recordings were four hours long. Exactly four hours, because he set it for the maximum amount of time. How did we lose more than a minute?”

She continued to stare at me, and then I saw something on her face that I couldn’t quite read.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but there was something there that looked like…

Satisfaction.

“Thanks again for convincing me to come in,” she said, and then she began to pull out of the spot. “It was the right thing to do.”

Chapter 30

I was parked a few blocks down from Bolton’s apartment, watching the building. It had only taken a few Google searches to learn that he was the “lead volunteer” at a local animal shelter. I’d called the shelter and spoken to Erica, a chipper veterinary student who’d been more than happy to tell me his schedule for the week.

“I’m so happy you were pleased with Reg’s service the last time you came in,” she had said. “He’s one of our best. He’s in every day except Mondays, if you want to come back on one of those days.”

I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel. It was Wednesday, so he should be leaving soon, and then I was going to have to do something less legal than everything else I’d done in the past few days, which was saying a lot. I was going to have to go in and try to find the original footage of the recording from Saturday night. Emma had all but admitted that she’d cut something from the video because “it was the right thing to do.”

What the hell did that mean?

About ten minutes later, I saw Bolton step out of his apartment, his dog trotting along behind him. I slumped down in my seat and hoped he didn’t see my car; by now, I knew he’d recognize it, and that would be it. But he walked in the other direction and turned the corner.

Was he just walking his dog?

Or was he taking him to the shelter with him?