Harlequin Intrigue April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 by Carol Ericson (beginner reading books for adults .txt) 📗

They sat still, side by side, Kyra barely breathing. Her proximity overwhelmed his senses, and then her knee touched his pant leg.

Jake rubbed his eyes and brought his face closer to the monitor. About seven minutes in, Kyra jabbed him with her elbow. “Is that Rachel? I see black hair.”

“That’s Rachel.” Jake stalled the video and took screen shots of Rachel’s progress through the store. “Too bad she didn’t use her phone to buy the coffee.”

“She told you that already?”

“Yeah, like I said—” he tapped the side of his head “—she’s a sharp girl.”

Kyra squinted at the screen. “I’m trying to figure out if I can see her phone in her purse but no luck. I have a pocket on the outside of my bag where I keep my cell. You can see the outline of the phone when you look at my purse.”

“Is that on the other side of where you keep your gun?” He raised one eyebrow.

“You’re not supposed to be able to see the outline of that.”

“I’m a cop. I can spot a purse with a gun pouch a mile away.”

She poked him in the leg. “Our girl is up.”

Rachel stepped to the counter and ordered from the female barista, exchanging a few words. She swiped her debit card to pay for the purchase, then wandered out of the camera’s view, stepping back and to the left to wait for her coffee.

The camera didn’t have a clear view of the pickup area. Baristas shoved drinks and little bags of food onto the counter, where impatient, caffeine-deprived hands grabbed them. Jake jabbed a finger at the monitor. “That’s Rachel. Notice the tat on her wrist? The nails?”

“We can’t see her purse, can’t see anyone around her.” Kyra slumped in her chair. “I guess I expected to discover someone clearly reaching a hand in her bag and snatching her phone. We can’t even tell if she had her cell phone going into Uncommon Grounds.”

“We can’t—” he swept one arm to the side “—but maybe someone else will pick up something.”

As Jake clicked on the timer to run the tape back to see if they’d overlooked something, Billy swept into the war room. He raised one eyebrow when he homed in on Jake’s partner and then shrugged.

Clapping his hands, Billy shouted, “How close are you to being done, and has anyone found anything?”

His words were met with a few grumbles and groans and not one eureka.

One cop in the corner raised his hand. “We had Rachel’s morning coffee run, and we saw her on the phone. So, she had it then.”

“All right. All right.” Billy stepped up to a clean whiteboard and made a notation. “Time stamp?”

The officer gave him a time, and Billy ran down the whiteboard with a red marker as others called out their times and findings. With Rachel still in possession of her phone at lunch, Billy circled around to Jake and Kyra. “Which brings us to you two for the coffee break after lunch.”

Jake leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. “We didn’t see anything—no evidence of her phone, no unusual encounters.”

“Anyone have footage from the sidewalk of Rachel’s return to work? I think that’s our last piece since she said she didn’t have the phone when she was getting ready to leave for work for the day.” Billy swiveled his head from side to side, and the room remained silent.

Jake pushed out of his chair. “Brandon, who had that last part of Rachel’s timeline?”

Brandon popped up, red faced, from where he’d been crawling on the floor connecting cables. “We don’t have it. It’s the same camera from the street where we watched her go in for lunch and then into the coffeehouse, but for some reason there’s no footage from later that day.”

Jake ran a hand through his hair, the ends of his fingers tingling with frustration. Unlike Kyra, he hadn’t expected to see the culprit lifting Rachel’s phone, but accurate footage showing a clear timeline would be good.

“I have a question.” Kyra wiggled her fingers in the air. “For those of you who saw Rachel with her phone, was she on it or did you see it in her bag or pocket?”

Billy asked around the room, and the teams that had seen her with the phone reported that she had the phone in her hand.

Picking up on Kyra’s train of thought, Jake asked, “When Rachel got off the phone, did she put it in her purse? Zip it up so nobody could get to it?”

One of the female officers spoke up. “We saw her texting for several minutes while she was eating lunch outside with her friend. When she was done, she put the phone next to her on the bench. I’d never do that. When I saw her, I thought to myself that was a good way to lose your phone. When she left, she did drop it into her purse, no side pocket or anything like that.”

“So, you think she might have left it out at a later time and somebody picked it up.” Jake rubbed his chin. “Nobody had to pick her pocket or lift it from her purse if she just left it sitting somewhere.”

Billy put a big red arrow pointing at Rachel’s lunch and another aimed at her store at three o’clock. “She lost the phone between here and here.”

Kyra nudged Jake. “That’s us. Can we play it back again?”

“Sure.” Jake raised his voice. “Thanks for your hard work, everyone. We’ll coordinate with the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station, and do some more canvassing in that area. It has another connection to one of our victims, so it’s a hot spot for us. Leave any stills you took with Cool Breeze, and you can take off.”

Chairs scraped and empty soda cans hit the recycling bins, and the officers shuffled out of the room.

Billy scribbled a few more words on his whiteboard timeline and pointed the