HIS TWISTED OBSESSION

Chapter 4

Carmen Reyes had been watching the same twelve seconds clip for forty minutes.

Not because she couldn't move on to something else. But because something there's something in it that kept pulling her back, small and insistent and impossible to leave alone once you'd noticed it, that kind of curiosity.

The footage wasn't so clear, it looks like a short video clip from ages with a very low quality and blurred screen, the angle wasn't perfect. It all look like a faded write up on a paper. But the timestamp was clean and the street was lit just enough and at 10:41pm It captured how a dark sedan moved through the bottom left corner of the frame at a speed that was not the speed of someone who had done nothing wrong.

She'd pulled seventeen feeds so far. This was the one that kept her sitting forward.

She rewound it again.

The car. The speed. The way it moved, not reckless exactly, but urgent. The particular urgency of someone making a decision in real time.

She paused it. Leaned in.

The plate was partially visible. Two letters and a number before the angle swallowed the rest. She'd already sent it to the tech unit. They'd come back with a partial match list by morning, a long list, probably, but a list was a beginning and a beginning was more than she'd had at midnight.

She picked up her coffee. Cold now. She drank it anyway.

Twelve years. She'd worked homicides and assaults and cases that had gone nowhere because the right people weren't interested in them going somewhere. She'd worked cases that had moved at a speed that had nothing to do with her effort and everything to do with who was making phone calls from which offices. She had no illusions about what this case was.

But she also knew that footage didn't care who was waiting for an answer. It just showed you what it showed you.

She rewound it one more time.

The sedan. The speed. And then, something she hadn't clocked the first six times she'd watched it because she'd been focused on the plate.

She sat completely still.

The car slowed down.

Not to a stop. But for approximately three seconds, maybe four, the brake lights came on and the car lost speed before it picked it back up again and kept moving. She almost missed it against the warped edge of the lens. Almost.

She marked the timestamp. Pulled up the adjacent feed, a traffic camera on the next block east. Slower to load, the file larger. She waited. Drummed two fingers once on the desk and stopped herself.

The feed opened.

She scrubbed to 10:42pm and there it was. The same sedan, one block over. Pulled to the kerb. Brake lights. Stationary for forty, maybe fifty seconds. Then it moved again and was gone.

So the driver had stopped.

Which meant the driver had thought about it. Had sat in that car on that dark block and made a choice, or tried to make a choice, and then driven away anyway.

That told her something about who she was looking for. Not a hardened person. Not someone practiced at this. Someone ordinary who had done something and panicked and run and then pulled over and sat with what they'd done before deciding they weren't brave enough or ready enough to go back.

She wrote it down. Single line. *Driver stopped ...hesitated ...left.

She stared at that line for a moment.

Then she pulled up the partial plate list the tech unit had sent through. Forty-two vehicles matching the two letters and partial number. Dark coloured sedans, late model. She started cross-referencing registrations against the Lower East Side area, narrowing by zip code, narrowing again by vehicle make.

By 3am she had it down to nine.

She printed the list. Looked at it under the flat precinct light with the building quiet around her and the occasional radio crackle from the front desk the only sound.

Nine names.

One of them had been on that street.

---

Across the city Lena hadn't slept.

She was sitting at the small kitchen table in the grey pre-dawn with the notepad pushed to one side and a different piece of paper in front of her. Blank. She'd been looking at it for an hour.

Ethan was on the couch. She'd made him come back with her because she wasn't leaving him alone in whatever state he was in, and he'd fallen asleep somewhere around 2am the way young people did even in the middle of disasters, deeply and suddenly, like a switch being thrown. She'd put a blanket over him and come back to the table and sat here since.

She'd made her decision somewhere around the Williamsburg Bridge on the cab ride home. She hadn't announced it to herself dramatically. It had just settled, the way decisions sometimes did when you stopped fighting them and let them land.

She was going to the police.

Not Ethan. Her. She would walk in and tell them that she had been driving the car. She would give them what they needed. She would take whatever came from it.

The logic was cold and simple the way only the logic you arrived at after midnight really was. Ethan was nineteen. He had his whole life ahead of him and she had spent every year of her adult life making sure that remained true. She had double shifts and black coffee and $340 in savings and a notepad full of numbers that never balanced to prove it. She was not going to let one terrible accidental moment on a dark street erase all of it.

She was thirty four. She had no record. She would get a lawyer somehow. She would manage.

She took the pen.

She wrote down the address of the 7th Precinct at the top of the blank page, because she'd looked it up at 1am and she wasn't going to pretend she hadn't.

Then she put the pen down and looked at the couch where Ethan was sleeping.

His face in the dim light. Young. Unguarded in the way sleep made everyone unguarded.

She looked at the address she'd written.

She looked back at him.

She picked up her pen again.

---

At the 7th Precinct, Carmen Reyes folded the list of nine names and put it in her jacket pocket.

She looked at the clock. 3:17am.

She was going to need more coffee. She was going to need the DMV records pulled on all nine vehicles by morning. She was going to need to be back here at seven before anyone senior arrived and started asking questions about pace and she'd have to explain that pace on this one wasn't something she controlled.

But right now, at 3:17am in a quiet precinct with a list of nine names in her pocket and twelve seconds of bodega footage running on a loop in the back of her mind, she had something.

She put her coat on.

She had three hours. She'd sleep two and give herself one to think.

The sedan had stopped on that dark block and someone had sat inside it and made the wrong choice.

Carmen Reyes was twelve years into a job that was mostly about other people's wrong choices.

She turned the light off.

She'd be back before seven.