Page 42 of Stay Awake
He kisses me before getting into a cab. As he closes the door, I realize that Marco will be going in the same direction as Amy. She’s heading to Brett’s place so she can be there when he gets back from work.
“Marco.” I tap on the cab window. “Can you drop Amy at Brett’s apartment?”
“Sure,” he says. It’s obvious that Marco’s not crazy about the idea, but he knows it makes sense since they really are going in the same direction.
I hustle Amy over from where she’s standing by the curb trying to book an Uber. We hug and she gets into the backseat.
Marco’s cab drives off. I watch it disappear around the corner before I turn and walk away, encouraged by the thought that maybe the two people closest to me in the world have finally reached a point where they can be civil.
In truth, I wish Amy had come home with me rather than head over to Brett’s place. I’m still rattled by that incident at the apartment the other night and I’d rather not sleep there alone.
Even though it’s midweek, the streets are busy as people leave restaurants and stroll home in the refreshing night air, or head somewhere for a nightcap or dessert.
I get so lost in my thoughts that I don’t notice the streets have emptied until I’m walking alongside a park on a dark stretch of street. I walk faster. After what happened at the apartment the other night, I want to get out of this lonely area as quickly as possible.
As I walk, I hear myself breathing. Heavily.
Too heavily.
My stomach drops like I’m plunging down a roller coaster. That’s not my breathing I’m hearing. It’s coming from someone walking behind me.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Wednesday 2:20P.M.
“We have a problem.”
Detective Tran signaled to Detective Halliday to come over to the desk where he was trawling through CCTV footage.
“What’s wrong with your screen?” Halliday asked as she leaned over Tran’s desk and looked at his computer screen. It was filled with static.
“There’s nothing wrong with my screen,” said Tran. “The static you’re seeing is the footage from the security cameras at the rear basement exits of the building.”
“You’re telling me those cameras didn’t film anything last night?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. They were both offline.”
“Do we know if someone tampered with them?”
“The security company supervisor won’t know until his technicians have physically checked the cameras this afternoon. I just got off the phone with him,” said Tran. “He thinks it’s more likely it was a technical fault rather than sabotage.”
On the whiteboard, Halliday had taped a screenshot of the CCTV footage taken just after 2A.M.in the hallway outside the apartmentwhere the murder had taken place. The murky shadow of a person could be seen leaving the apartment and going into the stairwell. The investigative team were all working on the assumption that the figure was the killer. An innocent person would have taken the elevator rather than try to leave surreptitiously.
Tran had gone through the CCTV footage from all the other entry and exit points in the building trying to track the mystery person’s escape route, but the figure hadn’t appeared in any of the footage from the other cameras at the relevant time period.
He’d had high hopes of getting a visual of the killer in the CCTV footage of the basement exits. Instead, all he got was static.
“What’s going on?” asked Lavelle, who had just finished taking a phone call at his cluttered desk.
“We’ve hit a brick wall,” Halliday said. “It appears the security cameras filming the basement exits weren’t functioning properly last night. Tran believes the killer used one of those exits to leave the building. He’s already checked CCTV footage from the other exits.”
Tran turned his laptop so that Lavelle could see the static on the screen.
“Unless the killer never left the building,” Lavelle theorized.
“We won’t know for sure because we’re missing key footage that could tell us definitively if the killer left the building or not,” Tran said.
