Elias didn't move. He stood under the streetlamp and listened to the hum of the bulb. It was a buzzing, electric sound that made the back of his neck itch. He looked at the house. It was a standard suburban build, white siding and black shutters, but in the dark, it looked like a mouth held shut.
Miriam came down the porch steps. She wasn't wearing a coat, just a thin sweater and a pair of blue slippers that scuffed against the concrete with a dry, rhythmic sound. She looked smaller than she had on the computer screen. Her face was thin, her eyes bloodshot and restless, the kind of eyes that had spent too many hours staring at a wall.
"I saw your car," she said. She stopped three feet away from him. The night air was damp, and it carried the smell of menthol cough drops and old cigarette smoke from her clothes. "I couldn't sleep. I haven't slept in a week. What are you doing out here, Elias? Did you find something?"
Elias felt the weight of the burner phone in his pocket. It felt like a brick against his thigh. In his other pocket, the sharp edge of the Nikon lens cap poked his finger. He had a choice: tell her he was the man in the video, or keep the lie moving.
He chose the lie. He was good at those.
"I needed to see the street," Elias said. He kept his hands deep in his pockets so she wouldn't see the slight tremor in his fingers. "The files don't show the angles. I wanted to see what Clara saw when she looked out her window. Sometimes the data misses the perspective."
Miriam looked up at the dark glass on the second floor. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering as a gust of wind pulled at her hair. "The police said she was depressed. They said she sat on that bed, turned on a camera, and just... gave up. But that wasn't Clara. She was always looking for things. She'd spend three hours taking a picture of a puddle just to see the reflection of the clouds. She wasn't the type to just stop looking."
Elias looked at the spot where he was standing. He didn't remember the night Clara died, but his boots felt like they fit the sidewalk. There was a weird pressure in his chest, a sense of "deja vu" that made his stomach turn. He knew exactly how many steps it was from this lamp post to her front gate. He knew the third step on her porch was loose. He shouldn't have known that.
"She wasn't filming herself, Miriam," Elias said. "She had that camera on a tripod for twenty-four hours straight. You don't do that for a suicide note. She was using that camera as a lookout. She was waiting for someone to show up."
Miriam's face went pale, her skin looking waxy in the yellow light. "Who? Who was out here? Did she see them?"
Elias looked at her. He thought about the charcoal coat in his closet. He thought about the man in the video who moved exactly like he did.
"I don't know yet," Elias said. He hated the sound of his own voice. "But I'm going to find out. I'm going back to the logs tonight. I'm going to run a filter on every car that passed this street in the last forty-eight hours of her life. If someone was out here, they left a trail. Everyone leaves a trail."
Miriam reached out and grabbed his arm. Her fingers were cold and stiff, clamping down on his coat like a vice. "Find them, Elias. Please. The police think she was a tragedy. I need them to know she was a person. Don't let her just be a file someone deletes."
"I won't," Elias said.
He stood there until she let go. He watched her walk back into the house, her head down, her slippers dragging on the pavement. She looked exhausted, the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. The porch light clicked off, and the street went back to being a dark, quiet row of houses.
Elias waited. He counted to sixty. He watched the shadows of the trees move across the road.
As soon as he turned to walk back to his car, the burner phone in his pocket vibrated. It was a short, aggressive buzz that felt like an electric shock. Elias pulled it out.
It was a photo.
The picture was taken from the second-story window—Clara's window. It was a bird's-eye view of the top of Elias's head. He could see the grain of the sidewalk, the scuff on his shoe, and the exact position of his shadow.
A text followed the image.
[YOU'RE STANDING IN THE WRONG SPOT, ELIAS. MOVE THREE INCHES TO THE LEFT. THAT'S WHERE YOU WERE STANDING WHEN SHE STARTED SCREAMING.]
Elias felt a drop of cold sweat slide down his spine. He looked up at the empty window, but there was no one there. No camera, no flash, nothing. He looked back at the phone, then at his feet.
He moved three inches to the left.
His boots settled into two worn patches in the grass at the edge of the sidewalk, perfectly hidden from the main view of the street. It was a blind spot. He realized then that he hadn't just stood here once. He had stood here a lot.
The phone buzzed again.
[GOOD. NOW LOOK DOWN.]
Between his boots, half-buried in the dirt, was a small, white pill. It was a neuro-blocker. One of his.