“We don’t know. We’re still waiting for her wireless carrier to produce the call log.”

“Okay,” says Mac. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say this wasn’t a suicide. Let’s say someone pushed her off the balcony. How the hell are we ever going to prove that? We have no witnesses. We have no evidence of a breakin. All we know is she ended up dead on the sidewalk with a fractured skull.”

A skull with two different fractures. Frankie crosses back to the computer, where Taryn Moore’s x-rays still glow on the monitor. “I have a question about these separate fracture lines, Dr. Fleer.”

“What about them?”

“You said she hit the ground, bounced, and hit it again. How do you know that?”

“I told you, it’s based on Puppe’s law. The compression fracture of the temporal bone came first. The second impact caused the fracture of the frontal bone.”

“What if she didn’t bounce? What if she only hit the ground once? Is it possible the first fracture happened before she even fell off the balcony?”

Fleer’s eyes narrow. “You are suggesting two separate traumatic events.”

“The x-ray doesn’t exclude the possibility, does it?”

He is silent for a moment as he considers her question. “No, it doesn’t. But if what you propose is what actually happened, that would mean . . .”

“This wasn’t a suicide,” says Frankie.

CHAPTER 17

FRANKIE

They sit at Mac’s workstation, where a photo of his wife, Patty, tanned and wearing a smile and a bathing suit, is prominently displayed. At fifty-two, Patty is still trim and bikini-worthy, and that photo never fails to annoy Frankie because she herself has never felt bikini-worthy. Also because it smacks of bragging: I’ve got a hot wife; what’ve you got? Which seems more than a little insensitive since half their colleagues in the unit are divorced or on the verge of it. Still, she can’t fault a man for being proud of his wife.

Frankie avoids looking at smoking-hot Patty, even though the photo is hanging right above the desktop computer, and she focuses instead on the video that’s playing on Mac’s monitor. It’s footage from the surveillance camera mounted on the building across from Taryn Moore’s apartment, and while her balcony is too high to be in the camera’s field of view, this recording should have captured footage of her plummet to the ground, as well as the moment the Lyft driver discovered her body. Frankie dreads viewing the first event, that final split second between life and death, and her shoulders are tense as Mac fast-forwards the video and the time code rapidly advances from midnight to 12:30 to 1:00 a.m. A storm blew in from the west that night, and falling rain obscures the camera’s view. Suddenly there is the body, magically materializing on the sidewalk. It is little more than a formless dark lump beyond beads of falling rain.

“Back up,” says Frankie.

Mac rewinds to 1:10. The body is not there. They both lean forward, watching intently as the video now plays at normal speed.

“There she is,” says Mac. He rewinds, frame by frame, and freezes the image.

Frankie stares at what is captured on the screen at 1:11:25. Taryn’s falling body is merely a dark smear suspended in midair. They can make out no details of her face; they only know that they are looking at the last split second before she slammed onto the concrete.

“I don’t see her cell phone anywhere,” says Frankie.

“Maybe it fell somewhere out of frame.”

“Let’s see if anyone walks by. Picks it up.”

Once again, the time code advances. At 1:20, a car drives past without stopping. At 1:28, another car. It is raining hard, and the drivers are no doubt focused on the road ahead as they peer through the water sheeting down their windshields. Car after car passes without stopping as Taryn Moore’s body lies there unnoticed, slowly cooling. Considering the foul weather and the late hour, it is not surprising that no pedestrians walk past.

At 3:51, a black sedan glides into the frame. This vehicle does not drive past as the others did. Instead it slows down and stops, blocking the camera’s view of the body. For a few seconds the sedan idles at the curb, as if the driver cannot decide whether to brave the rain and investigate or to simply drive on as everyone else has done before him. At last the car door swings open, and a man steps out. He circles around to the sidewalk, where he crouches out of view. Seconds later, he scrambles back into his vehicle.

“The nine-one-one call came in at three fifty-two,” says Mac. “So this is our Lyft driver, right on schedule.”

“He’s being a very good citizen. I can’t imagine he’d steal her phone. So what happened to it?”

“You and that phone. Look, there’s nothing here that changes our conclusion. We now know the exact time of death was one eleven. At three fifty-one, the Lyft driver finds her body and calls it in. Suicide’s still at the top of the list.”

“Let’s see what the front-door camera shows.”

The entrance to Taryn Moore’s apartment building is around the corner from where her body landed, and the only available surveillance footage is from a camera mounted three feet above the front-door intercom. The camera is old and the video quality grainy, but it would have recorded everyone who entered the building.

Mac starts the playback at 9:00 p.m. At 9:35, they spot Taryn’s neighbor Helen Ng, her hair plastered down by rain. It was Friday night in a college neighborhood, and as the clock advanced toward midnight, tenants continued to straggle home.

“There’s gotta be at least eighty, ninety people living in that building,” says Mac. “We gonna try matching names to every one of these faces?”

“Let’s just keep watching. Maybe we’ll get lucky and pretty boy Liam will show up.”

“Still won’t prove he killed her.”

“It’ll prove he’s lying about the last time he saw her. And that’s a start.”

“Only a start.”

At 11:00 p.m., a couple appears, shaking off the rain. The young woman nibbles on the man’s ear, and as they step inside, he’s already pawing at her breasts.

“That was not my college experience,” says Mac.

At 11:45, two young men stumble to the door, obviously drunk.

At 12:11, a weary-looking Domino’s Pizza deliveryman trudges in from the rain, holding an insulated delivery bag. Five minutes later he exits the building, carrying his empty bag.

Then, at 12:55, an umbrella appears. Unlike that garish paisley umbrella that Mac brought to the death scene, this one is black and anonymous, indistinguishable from a million other umbrellas, and the nylon dome hides whomever is holding it. Umbrella Person walks into the building without ever revealing his—or her—face to the camera.

Frankie leans closer. “Now this might be significant.”

“It’s just someone with an umbrella.”

“Look at the time, Mac. It’s just sixteen minutes before Taryn Moore’s body hits the sidewalk.”

“It might be another tenant coming home.”

“Let’s see what happens next.”

For the next thirty minutes, not much does happen. As the time stamp advances, no one else appears in the entranceway. The only movement captured on video is the occasional splatter of gust-driven rain blowing in. Everyone in the building, it seems, is home for the night.

No. Not everyone.

At 1:25 a.m., someone exits the building. It’s Umbrella Person. Once again, Frankie cannot see the face, cannot even determine the gender. Shielded by that dome of black nylon, he or she moves unseen past the camera and slips away into the night.

“Go back,” says Frankie. “Ten seconds.”

Mac rewinds the video, and Umbrella Person is sucked backward into the building. Frankie scarcely dares to draw a breath as the video once again advances, but in slo-mo this time, frame by frame. The umbrella stutters into view. Just as it’s about to move out of the frame, Mac freezes the image.

“Hey,” he says. “Look at that.” He points to the black bulge that peeks out behind the umbrella, a bulge whose glossy surface reflects a splash of light from the entranceway lamp. “I think that’s a trash bag,” he says.

For a moment Frankie and Mac are silent, focused on the screen, where the video is now paused at 1:26 a.m. At that moment in time, Taryn Moore lay sprawled on the sidewalk around the corner, her skull shattered, her blood mingling with the rain.

“Maybe there’s no connection,” says Mac. “Even if there is, it’s gonna be hard for us to prove.”

“Then we’d better get to work.”

CHAPTER 18

FRANKIE

The apartment’s ancient elevator seems even slower tonight, wheezing as it carries its four passengers and their boxes of forensic equipment up to the fifth floor.

“At least this time we’ve got an elevator that works,” says one of the crime scene techs.