Chapter 8 #2
To his surprise, it wasn’t a rookie. It was a detective Mike knew well from his SWAT days, Jerry Klein, and—Jesus. Harry and Sam, right behind him.
Kelly rose, furious. He was right to be. What the fuck were Harry and Sam thinking? This wasn’t an expression of solidarity with a friend, this was interference with due process. There were legal implications to stopping a law enforcement officer from carrying out his duties.
Before Kelly could open his mouth to blast Jerry for allowing civilians into the interrogation room, Jerry put a laptop on the interrogation table.
“Sorry boss, but I thought you needed to see this. These two, ah, civilians brought it to my attention.” Jerry stood at attention, flicking Mike a gaze he couldn’t interpret. Then, amazingly, Jerry winked at him.
What the fuck?
Jerry powered up the laptop and stepped back to give Harry access to the keyboard.
Harry was a wizard at computers, much better than Mike. Everyone leaned forward to watch him do his thing, but his thing turned out to simply be him opening his email.
He moved the mouse around.
“Ellen contacted me with some news. Chloe called this hotshot private investigator in Boston and damned if she didn’t come up with something.
Something really important.” The email had a series of attachments.
Harry clicked on the first one. It opened and the screen filled with grainy black and white footage shot at night.
The camera had a slight wide angle lens, enough to show about ten yards without too great a distortion.
Everyone watched as a woman came up, punching in something below the bottom of the screen.
It was footage from an ATM. No one spoke as four people walked up and withdrew money.
White letters on the bottom right hand side of the screen showed the time and date: Jan 3, 3:02 am.
At 3:07 am the screen was blank then a figure appeared at the extreme right hand side and streaked across the screen.
Harry’s fingers danced over the keyboard as the four men watched. Harry slowed the film down on a slider, pressed a key and froze the frame with the figure dead center. It was Mike, running. His body was blurred but the camera had caught him as he turned his head and his features were clear.
“That was taken at 3:07:45 am, from an ATM on Griffin, about four blocks from Alameda. We can follow Mike’s path as he runs down to the shore, ending up at the ferry at 4:02 am.”
They watched a series of footage clips from security cameras along his route, fourteen attachments in all.
Whoever Chloe contacted was good. She obviously had excellent facial recognition software and in a short span of time had canvassed almost all the security cameras in a broad sweep from Alameda to the ferry landing.
That took smarts and serious crunching power.
The screen was showing the broad apron in front of the ferry where Mike was jogging in place. Steam from his breath wreathed his face but he was recognizable. He barely remembered the jog home, though he did remember waiting a while for the ferry, on a reduced schedule from midnight to 6 am.
The camera switched briefly to a view of the ocean, and the ferry slowly approaching the landing, then switched back to the passenger side, where four people were waiting with Mike, still hopping up and down.
They watched as five people boarded the ferry, including Mike. The time at the bottom of the footage read 4:10 am.
The final attachment was footage of Mike jogging down to their apartment complex on Coronado Shores, into the condo, exchanging a word with the night watchman.
Mike had said he’d come home at 5:00. It would have been technically feasible—just—to beat Mila Kosavich up at 4 am and drive home breaking all speed limits by 5:00. But Mike had jogged his way home and they had it on film.
“My understanding,” Harry said to Kelly with a hard look, “is that the 911 call came in at 4:02 am. The ferry landing is 14.7 miles from Alameda. Mike couldn’t possibly have been at the woman’s apartment.”
All eyes turned to Kelly. He stood mulling it over, then put his notebook carefully down on the table next to the computer.
He turned to Mike. “Case dismissed,” he said quietly, then gave a half smile. “Glad I don’t have to arrest you, Keillor.”
“Ditto man.” Mike let out a huge breath, realizing what had just happened.
Chloe had set him free.
Sam and Harry clapped both Mike and Kelly on the back and the tension in the room disappeared.
Mike held out his hand to Kelly. Kelly was a good guy. He’d only been doing his duty. “Good luck with finding the bastard who put that woman in the hospital.”
“Yeah.” Kelly’s clasp was warm and hard and brief. “You stay out of trouble, you hear?”
Oh yeah. Mike had learned a really big lesson tonight. Even though he was terrified it was too late for Chloe.
Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get going. We still have to celebrate. Our women are waiting.”
Our women. For Sam and Harry that was literally true.
They had great wives and two lovely daughters waiting for them.
In another world, the world where Mike hadn’t fucked his way through a battalion of women, that other world where he hadn’t met sweet, utterly enticing Chloe Mason after screwing a cokehead who couldn’t get him to beat her up, so she called in someone else to finish the job, he’d go back to his woman too.
In this other world, he and Chloe would have a clean slate, able to start this new fresh thing they had.
Whereas in this world, they’d hardly begun and she’d already learned the very worst about him.