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Standing just beyond the threshold was a middle-aged man dressed in freshly pressed khakis, a blue button-down, and a tan cardigan. He had thick-rimmed glasses and his hair was losing the fight against age.
“I just want to know what happened to my partner,” Raisa said, because she was certain that was what had persuaded him to open the door where he probably hadn’t to St. Ivany’s men.
“You’re an FBI agent?” he asked, suspicious.
“A linguist,” she rushed to say, because he seemed the type to be put at ease by expertise rather than the idea of some gun-toting G-man. “I’m a forensic linguist.”
“You’re working on the Isabel Parker death?” he asked.
“Yes,” she all but gasped, relieved to find someone who understood without several minutes of explanation. “What’s your name?”
“Jameson Ekblad,” he said, shoving his glasses up. “I’m a professor at the college. Ornithology.”
Raisa glanced over Jameson’s shoulder. “You’re photographing birds.”
“Yes. There’s a rare—well you don’t care about that,” Jameson said, ushering her in. “What do you need?”
“How is your equipment set up?” Raisa asked, crossing to the window. There were two cameras there, pointed at different angles of the street. Or, more likely, the harbor beyond it.
“This is my long range, manual,” Jameson explained. “This is the one I keep on video and running for most of the morning.”
Raisa didn’t want to get too excited. “Do you have footage from Sunday? When there was a hit-and-run right there.”
She pointed to the street, where Kilkenny had nearly bled out.
“I do, yes,” Jameson said, crossing over to his desk. “I was too distracted to take the manual pictures, but the video captured it.”
“And you didn’t think to alert the police,” St. Ivany said, and Raisa shot her a look.
They weren’t going to win favors by slapping him on the wrist.
“I didn’t have anything useful,” Jameson said, his voice tighter than it had been a moment earlier. “I watched the footage. The SUV doesn’t come into frame until the driver is mostly out of view. You can tell it’s a woman and that’s about it.”
He tapped away at his computer, before gesturing for Raisa to come sit. “Here, watch.”
Raisa braced herself, but she had hardly any time before Jameson hit play.
And then there they were.
She and Kilkenny.
They had been arguing about Delaney of all things.
Raisa stepped off the curb, and then the rev of an engine cut over the footage. She looked away as the bumper collided with a stunned Kilkenny—the whole thing playing out in the bottom quarter of the screen.
She inhaled, exhaled, concentrating not on the accident itself but on doing her job.
To find the person responsible for putting Kilkenny in the hospital.
Sometimes, when she was bored, she would watch stupid Flik videos to silence her brain. One of the more famous users was a man who could geo-locate anything or anyone on a map of the world by one photograph alone.
The key was taking in all the details and then forcing them into a context that made some logical sense.
With this video, they had way more than one photograph.
Raisa leaned forward and dragged the video back to the first moment the SUV had come into view.
“Can we do this slice by slice?” Raisa asked, as the SUV accelerated toward Kilkenny. It happened in two blinks of an eye, and Raisa wasn’t going to be able to concentrate if she couldn’t slow it down.