Teddy hauled his bulk up the steps of the police station. He’d opted for pudgy, middle-aged patrolman Frank Johnson, an out-of-shape, over-the-hill cop just going through the motions until retirement. He lurched through the door, leaned against the watercooler, and panted a couple of times, catching his breath.
Teddy glanced over at the bullpen area, where a handful of cops labored away at desks, and said, “Who’s got the video?”
A middle-aged cop looked up in annoyance. “You expect me to know what that is?”
“I don’t expect anybody to know what that is. I expect it to be a major pain in the ass that ruins my day.” Teddy coughed and slumped into a chair.
“What video are you talking about?”
“Some gossip columnist got killed. They wanted video of his building, but there wasn’t any.”
“Then you can’t get it.”
“No shit. So now they want video of the whole block, to see if the suspect’s on it. So that’s my shit job for today. See if I can spot the guy walking toward the apartment.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“They don’t need to prove the guy was walking toward the apartment. They arrested the guy in the apartment. What does it matter if he was seen walking toward the apartment?”
“Maybe they want to prove how long he was there,” a young cop suggested.
“Whoa, look at the rookie cop, sticking up for his fellow officers, trying to justify the shit work they passed on to me.”
“I been a cop for ten years.”
“That’s a rookie to me. Do me a favor, will you? Point me in the direction of whoever can show me the video so I don’t have a heart attack going up and down stairs.”
A half hour later Teddy was ensconced in a little cubicle with a laptop computer and thumb drives of surveillance video. He let the young cop show him how to use them, though he could have taught the kid a thing or two. Then he settled in to search.
The problem was not having an accurate time of death. The police weren’t going to release one, not having arrested him in the apartment. The prosecutor would want the time of death to be as close to that as possible. Any evidence contradicting that theory would be quickly suppressed.
Teddy’s impression had been that the body hadn’t been dead long, but whether that meant a half hour or two and a half was hard to ascertain without a careful inspection. The cops’ arrival had been unfortunate on so many levels. Not getting an accurate TOD was the least of it.
Teddy looked at the video from the cameras that were closest to the decedent’s apartment building on the same side of the street. He found one that was focused on the building two doors down to the east, and another focused on the building two doors down to the west.
He picked one randomly, punched in about an hour before his arrest, and ran the video forward, looking for anyone headed in the direction of the apartment. Several people went by, but no one he recognized. That didn’t mean he hadn’t seen the killer, but it was a fairly good indication. Gino Patelli was out to get him and would have sent one of his closest enforcers. No one he had seen fit the part.
Teddy sped through an hour’s worth of video from the other direction. Once again, he saw nothing helpful.
Teddy went back to the first video and started it two hours before his arrest. As the images danced across the screen, he suddenly blinked and took his finger off the fast-forward button. He rewound slightly.
Yes, it was someone he knew, but from where?
His mouth fell open.
The odd young man he’d met at the party, Viveca Rothschild’s boyfriend. So, he was walking in the gossip columnist’s neighborhood not long before the crime. Could he be protecting his girlfriend? The gossip columnist wasn’t writing about her, but he was writing about her costar in the movie she was filming.
It wasn’t much, but it was the only thing he had so far.
Teddy ran the video the rest of the hour to see if there was anyone else of interest on the tape. There wasn’t.
The boyfriend was the lead. He had walked down the street toward the apartment. But had he gone inside?
That was a little harder to verify. Teddy took out the thumb drive and stuck in the other one. He watched the video from the camera to the west.
Sure enough, halfway through the video, here came the young man. Teddy was frustrated. The guy had just been walking down the street, out of the frame of one camera and into the frame of the next moments later.
Or was it moments later?
What was the time on the tape?
Teddy checked the time stamp. Viveca’s boyfriend was walking away from the apartment at 3:45. What time was he walking toward it in the other video?
Teddy stuck in the thumb drive and rewound the tape. And here he came down the street at . . . ?
3:32.
He was walking at a normal clip. The second camera should have picked him up within one minute. But the gap was nearly thirteen minutes long.
There was room for discrepancy. But thirteen minutes? That was a hell of a disparity.
Teddy rewatched the footage more closely, looking for any further clues. He ran it slow, backed it up, ran it again. Not that much to see. Just the young man walking right along. His arms were swinging freely.
Except.
Teddy froze the image. He ran it back and forth.
The young man flexed the fingers of his right hand. He straightened them out, retracted them into a fist, then relaxed them again. It was momentary, but it was there. Just the sort of thing a fighter would do if he hurt his hand throwing a punch.
Or stabbing someone in the heart.