“No!” Jake said.
He hadn’t climbed high enough; the drone was brushing treetops. The screen went crazy, branches and leaves spinning before it froze.
“I’m crashing!”
Jake looked to the forest as they heard the drone falling in the trees.
“You stay here.” Jake gave Carter the controller. “I saw where it fell. I’ll get it.”
Jake ran, opened the fence gate, and disappeared into the forest.
Nate looked up at Carter.
“It’s okay, Dad. The drone crashed. Jake went to get it.”
Nate hesitated but kept working while keeping an eye on the forest for Jake. Carter stared at the phone and the image of leaves frozen on it, expecting to see it move as soon as Jake retrieved the drone.
Minutes went by.
The screen didn’t change.
More time passed.
The image on the screen hadn’t changed. Holding the controller, Carter walked to the fence, expecting to see or hear his friend in the woods.
“Jake!”
More time passed with Carter turning to his dad at the garden shed.
He wasn’t there.
Nate had run through the open gate and into the woods to find Jake.
Eighty-Eight
Erie County, New York
Some twenty-five miles outside Buffalo, near the edge of Erie County, all but cut off from most of civilization, was a long-forgotten acreage.
To find it, you traveled along winding country roads, where neighbors were separated by more than a quarter mile.
Starting in the 1800s, the farm produced potatoes, corn, cabbage, apples, and other crops, with the operation surviving until the 1950s, when descendants of the people who’d toiled there abandoned it.
Taxes were paid by the generations that followed.
But the place was neglected.
A rusted gate with a No Trespassing sign wired to it guarded the entrance. It didn’t stop the few people looking for privacy over the years—hunters, partying teens, and those who were up to no good.
Access was by a rutted dirt road overrun with wild grass as it cut through a dead apple orchard to where the main buildings once stood.
Decades ago, the farmhouse had collapsed into a heap of rotted wood, enshrouded with clumps of shrubs, akin to a burial mound. Birds chirped while streaking over it, and butterflies flitted in the breezes that carried to the barn.
It was nearly wrapped with overgrowth. Many of its boards were missing, the gaps leaving it a leaning, sagging, weather-beaten skeleton at risk of crumpling to the earth.
But it had endured.
Inside, there were the vestiges of a tractor, pieces of a wooden wagon, and rows of livestock stalls. To one side, the way to the barn’s cellar beckoned. A wooden trapdoor led to a staircase.
A naked lightbulb cast the steps in gloomy light.
Someone had expertly altered the wires of the old system to bypass safeguards and illegally siphon off electricity from an existing source that had long been shut off.
The damp, foul cellar reeked of the grave.
The electrical cable snaked along the walkway leading to a new corner room, solidly built with fresh-cut lumber.
Light spilled from the room.
The door was wide open.
Its hinge assemblies had been carved away, ripped from their hold on the doorframe.
The windowless room held a mattress, pillow, blankets. T-shirts, plastic water bottles, and plastic utensils were scattered everywhere, along with overturned buckets.
No one was inside.
The room was empty.
Blood was splattered on the floor.
Eighty-Nine
Albany, New York
The USB key from Clarence Barracks arrived at the Forensic Video Unit where Rose Kemp signed the chain of custody documents.
This new piece of evidence had been given top priority.
“Consider this one a life-and-death matter,” Kemp’s supervisor had said. “Guys in Clarence need the plate on the van in the video, like now.”
Kemp cleared her workstation, inserted the key into one of her computer towers. As it loaded, she ran a mental checklist of what she would do. In her seven years in the field, she’d worked on more than a thousand cases, presented expert video analysis in criminal trials and was considered one of best video forensic analysts in the state.
It didn’t take her long to authenticate the new material, confirming that Zoran Volk’s video had not been altered or manipulated.
That was easy. Now for the hard part.
She played the video several times, focusing on the split-second image sequence that had recorded the rear plate of the van. She was relieved that its rear license plate lights were working; there was illumination. The light from the headlights of the passing vehicle was inconsistent.
She replayed the video, keying in commands.
A brilliant rectangle of a New York state license plate filled a monitor at Kemp’s workstation.
But the plate’s digits and letters were not clear.
The poor quality could be due to several factors—the resolution, the angle recorded, the environment, especially given it was recorded at night from a moving point of view. Zooming in didn’t work. She couldn’t enhance or extract something from nothing.
If the data’s not there, it’s not there.
But there were ways Kemp could make some elements clearer using the array of her unit’s state-of-the-art hardware and software.
This might take some time.
Kemp played the video sequence again. It appeared the slow-frame rate was making it hard to see. She slowed the sequence, stopping the footage and selecting the best quality frames to make stills of the best five. Using the latest software, she layered the stills, overlapping them, combining them into one enhanced frame.
When she was ready, she entered several commands into her system and waited as her monitor displayed the result.
Kemp sat up.
Oh my, I think we’ve got something here.
Ninety
Buffalo, New York, Trailside Grove
At home, his heart racing, Greg ached to do something when his phone rang.
He checked the ID. It was Kat.
“I’ve been trying to reach you!” she said when he answered. “I just heard the news about an arrest. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing.”