“It’s eleven on a Saturday night, and you’re on vacation. Ignore her.”
“I can’t.” She typed a quick response.
Eric shook his head. “You work too hard. You should throw your phone in a drawer and leave it there until it’s time to fly home.”
“That would get me fired.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He turned the computer so that she could see the screen, too. “So how should we do this?”
Still holding her phone, she crossed the room and sat in the seat next to his. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve done so far?”
And, God, he could smell her again.
He willed himself to focus on the job at hand, opening up the video-editing program and showing her the folder where he’d saved the imported footage. “I also imported a bunch of photos of Lexi and Austin as kids. I thought I could edit them in somehow.”
She rested her chin on her hand, her gaze on the screen. “That’s a fun idea.”
“I started going one by one through the interviews, trying to edit them down, but it’s taking forever.”
She nodded. “Video can be extremely time-consuming. Why don’t you show me how you were doing it, and I’ll see if I can teach you some shortcuts?”
Eric found the interview he’d done with his mom in the footage bin and opened it, his mother’s face appearing on the viewer. “I had Mom repeat a few answers because her neighbor was revving his car engine.”
“This is your mom?” Victoria looked over at him, seemed to study his face. “You have her eyes.”
“Lexi’s mom was her best friend. She took care of Lexi and Britta during the day until Bob married Kendra.”
“It’s so sad—Lexi and Britta losing their mother when they were so little.”
“What about your folks?”
“My dad lives in New York.”
Eric waited, and when she didn’t go on, he asked. “What about your mom?”
She shrugged. “Last I heard, she and her Italian boyfriend were lying on a beach in Greece. That was four or five years ago.”
Okay, so she wasn’t close to her family and didn’t want to talk about them.
She got down to work. “The faster way to edit clips is to select your in and out points for the clip and then drag the footage you want onto the timeline. See?”
She turned the laptop toward him. “You try.”
“Like this?” He’d just dragged another segment onto the timeline when his pager went off, one call-tone following the next—county sheriff, his fire station, the Team, Flatirons Emergency Response.
Something big had gone down.
“Shit.” He pulled the pager from his waistband, scrolled through the message.
CAR IN BLDR CRK AT MM31
He was on his feet, the video forgotten.
She stood, too, concern on her pretty face. “Is something wrong?”
He pulled his keys out of his pocket. “A car went off the highway and rolled into Scarlet Creek at mile marker thirty-one. The water’s still running pretty high with snowmelt. If the driver and passengers survived the crash, they’re going to drown if we don’t get them out quickly.”
“I thought you were on vacation.”