She didn’t have to tell him that he was right.
Eve stopped at the gate on her way out, picked up a hard copy of the log for the last forty-eight hours from Ruthie, and also asked the guard to email it to her.
Although Eve was only a few blocks from the Hilton, she realized she hadn’t eaten all day and was ravenous. So she called ahead to Barone’s in Woodland Hills and ordered a pizza. It was ready for her when she got there. She brought the pizza back to her hotel room and settled down to eat while she fast-forwarded through the Oakdale gate videos, starting the playback at sunrise the day before and comparing what she saw to the logs as she went along.
She hit pay dirt almost immediately. Two pregnant women were among the dozen people who walked into Oakdale from the bus stop between 7:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. None of their names were listed in the logs.
Over the course of fast-forwarding through all twenty-four hours’ worth of footage, Eve counted two hundred guests visiting Oakdale in a vehicle and only two dozen on foot. It was in the final hour of footage, though, that Eve made a striking discovery. One of the pregnant women who came in on foot at 7:30 a.m. the previous day never walked out.
Eve scrubbed the timeline needle back to the woman’s arrival and froze the image. The woman was Hispanic, perhaps in her thirties, and had a huge belly.
Eve felt a wave of sadness as she looked at the woman, arriving for work, unaware of the horrific fate that awaited her and her unborn child.
I promise I will get you justice.
She zoomed in on the woman’s face, snapped a screenshot on her laptop, and AirDropped the photo to her phone so she could ask the Oakdale guard about her first thing in the morning . . .
. . . which it already was.
At first, Eve thought she was looking at the video’s time code on her phone and then realized to her shock that no, it was also seven thirty in the morning now. And that’s when she also realized that the sheriff’s award ceremony at Calabasas Civic Center for Grayson Mumford was happening in thirty minutes.
Thank God it’s next door.
Eve brushed her teeth and, because she smelled like sweat and pizza, took a very fast shower. She dried herself off, got into fresh clothes, and grabbed a Red Bull from her mini-fridge for breakfast as she dashed out of her hotel room.
She ran from the hotel next door to the civic center, a Spanish Colonial–style set of buildings that included city hall and the library. A crowd of about fifty people, a dozen uniformed deputies, and half a dozen reporters and their photographers milled in the front plaza, where a small stage and podium had been set up. The sheriff stood in front of the stage, introducing Captain Shaw to members of the Calabasas City Council as a city photographer snapped some pictures. Ethan Dryer, the head of Big Valley Security, hovered nearby, waiting for a chance to insert himself into the discussion.
She spotted Duncan pacing in the shade of the city hall arcade and walked over to him, catching her breath on the way. He was dressed in a clean suit and a new tie.
“I was about to call you,” Duncan said. “Lansing was worried you weren’t going to show. Now he might be terrified that you did.”
Eve took the last sip from her can of Red Bull and dropped it into a nearby trash can. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“You look like you rose from the grave.”
So much for the shower and fresh clothes, she thought.
“I was up all night watching the Oakdale videos.”
“Of course you were.”
“It paid off. Two pregnant women walked through the gates in the morning but only one left,” Eve said, showing him the photo on her phone. “We need to find out who she is and not waste our time here on this PR crap.”
“You’re doing it again,” Duncan said.
“Doing what?”
“Obsessing over your case to the point of exhaustion. You need a life and some sleep. You can’t physically, mentally, or emotionally sustain being relentless.”
“I’m only doing it now because we’ve got a ticking clock on this one.”
“You’ve done it on every case we’ve had.”
“You make it seem like years. We’ve only been working together for a few months. It hasn’t been that long.”
“Exactly. If you keep up this pace much longer, you’ll burn out, one way or another. Your body will quit on you, or you’ll make a big mistake or take a foolish risk that either kills you, kills your career, kills somebody else, or all of the above. You’ve come pretty damn close to that twice already.”