Chapter 32 #2
Robin leaned in to watch the black and white video filmed with a grainy, low-res camera.
A sportscar sat not quite in the center of the frame but slightly over to the right a bit as an apron-clad woman emerged into the static shot.
She was older, wearing a dress with sensible shoes beneath that apron.
Her face was round and sweet, but surrounded by powder grey helmet-hair—short curls that were hair-sprayed into an immovable hat.
She was only in the frame for a few short moments as whatever she saw in the car made her react with obvious dismay.
Like most security videos, this one had no audio track, but it was clear that she was making some noise as she dashed away, back from whence she’d first come.
Presumably into the house.
The camera’s time code was centered at the top of the video’s frame in an old-school, computer-type white font that wasn’t the easiest to read.
It showed the date with the year first, then month and day as a clock in military time read 06:23:45, the seconds chugging along.
The woman returned with a man who was dressed in what looked like pajamas beneath a silk robe.
He went straight to the driver’s door of the sportscar, opened it, and pulled another man—young and skinny, presumably seventeen-year-old Milt the Junior—out from behind the steering wheel.
Milt the Junior immediately gifted him with vomit. It was kind of clear that wasn’t his first regurgitation of the morning—the front of his shirt was a nasty mess.
The older man—Mr. PJs—naturally stepped back, trying and failing to get out of projectile range. In doing so, he let go of Milt the Junior, but the kid was unable to stand on his own. He turned into jello and hit the deck, or in this case the driveway, melting into a puddle of limpness.
“Yeesh,” Jules said. “The video I first watched cut that part out.” He put his hand on Robin’s shoulder—warm and steady—because yeah, this shit was teeth-grittingly triggering since Robin had been exactly that kind of a total blackout drunk himself, in those dark before-Jules years.
On the video, Mr. PJs was trying and failing to hide his disgust. He gingerly knelt down behind Jello-Boy as he rather obviously fired off commands for Apron Woman to call for help. She rushed out of the frame as PJs pushed and pulled the boy onto his back to... check for a pulse?
Really?
The kid had just made a major deposit to the vomitron—which kinda meant his heart was beating effectively. The up doesn’t chuck without a heartbeat, Dad.
Also? When blackout drunks threw up, it was kinda bad form to turn them onto their backs. Best position to avoid asphyxiation-from-additional-vomit was on the stomach, head turned neatly to the side.
More info Robin knew a little too uncomfortably well.
But yeah, on that video, Mr. PJs was taking his son’s pulse, which gave the security camera full access to the boy’s face—in fact, the energy in the older man’s body, particularly his shoulders, made him seem almost ridiculously, uncomfortably posed.
Like one of those old-fashioned performance art things that people used to do in merry old England, back before TV or even radio, what were they called. ..?
“Tableau vivant,” Robin said aloud.
“Huh.” Jules said—half laugh, half agreement. “Yeah.”
“Like helping his son is not his primary goal,” Sam chimed in, his voice laced with Texas-accented judgment. “I see that, too, but I thought he was just a fuck-up.”
Robin glanced up to see that the former SEAL had come to watch the video again, too, and when he looked back at the laptop’s screen, the channel five news-team had hit pause on the video and punched in for a grainy but legible close-up still of Milt the Junior’s unconscious teenaged face.
Punched in.
Hmm.
It was the video term for cropping the frame. Punching in was used to zoom in for emphasis or focus—the way the channel five editors had done.
But punching in was also used to cut out unwanted information.
A boom mike that dangled too low could be removed from the top of the frame with that type of easy edit—but doing so would mean you’d lose some of the images on the sides of the video frame, too, often messing with the cinematographer’s intended balance of the shot.
That was the basic math of any kind of cropping, be it video or photographic.
Robin used the computer keyboard to scroll back, halfway through the security video they’d just watched.
He hit play again right after the vomiting incident—no need to see that magic again, thanks a million—but then paused right after Milt Senior dropped to his knees and shifted his son’s body to take his pulse.
While... pulling him back slightly to be.
.. more centered in the frame? Yeah, he definitely did that, which was strange.
Although... When the boy had first fallen, his body was right at the very bottom edge of the video.
Robin backed it up to the kid’s initial tumble and replayed the father’s movement then, too.
PJ Milt absolutely wasn’t just flipping Drunk Milt onto his back to “take his pulse,” he was moving him, too.
Robin rewound and watched it again. And again.
“Milt of the PJs is hyper-aware of his mark,” he told Jules and Sam, who were still silently watching over his shoulder.
He glanced back at Sam. “A mark is something actors use to know where they need to be when the camera’s running—so they don’t accidentally move outside of the frame of the shot,” he explained in case the SEAL wasn’t as fluent as Jules was in actor-speak.
“Gotcha,” Sam said.
Robin pointed to the video as he played it again, using the trackpad to move through the footage slowly—essentially frame by frame.
“Look at him sliding Drunk Milt toward him—up away from the edge of the video frame. He’s trying to make it look natural, but he sucks as an actor.
” The man’s movement was furtive but very definite.
“And look at how he’s kneeling there. Sam’s right.
No one kneels like that when they’re worried their kid might be dying. ”
“Tableau vivant,” Sam repeated.
“But as far as Gavin LaCrosse goes,” Robin said.
“I’m not seeing much here that’s been edited—I mean, maybe an editor could’ve blurred Milt Junior’s face, to make him unrecognizable, but.
.. If that was Gavin’s job, he obviously failed.
Especially since the tape got leaked and ended up proving the kid’s guilt.
So why the monthly payments for... what it is.
..?” He looked at the timeline to find the first payment and did the math.
.. “For fifteen years, Gavin gets a monthly salary from Milt the senior for failing?”
“Or... succeeding,” Jules said, slowly sitting down in the chair next to Robin, staring out the window as if he were doing some kind of complicated logic problem in his head.
But when he looked up at Sam and then Robin, his eyes were sharply back in focus.
“Holy shit, as we used to say back at the Bureau. What if Milt the senior leaked the video because he wanted exactly what he got? To prove to the world that his son was driving the car that killed Marina Santana? Except, what if this... tableau vivant was part of a set-up? A frame? What if it was really...”
“Milt the senior behind the wheel,” Sam finished for him. “Fuck! You think?”
Jules was practically vibrating with excitement as he turned back to Robin. “How hard would it be to remove a timestamp and to add a different one—a fake one? So that the video footage would falsely appear to have been recorded on the morning of the hit-and-run?”
“I don’t know, Jules,” Robin said. “There’s more than just that visible timestamp on a digital recording. There’s data embedded in the video file that would reveal the actual recording date.”
“Devonshire’s security setup isn’t digital—the footage is stored old-school, on VHS tapes,” Jules told him.
“Wow. Okay.” Robin looked back at the video—at the time stamp that ran across the top.
When he’d seen similar time stamps in the past, they usually ran across the bottom of the frame.
This one, on the top, was doubly interesting because its placement meant that it didn’t, rather conveniently, cover any of the action in the lower half of the video—where PJ Milt posed so tragically insincerely over Drunk Milt’s limp body.
“What kind of security camera is this?” he asked. “We could google it and find out—”
“If the timestamp running across the top is the default. Good idea.” Jules stood up and started searching through the files on the table.
Sam asked, “You want me to grab Cosmo and go over to the estate—”
“No. I got it.” Jules found what he was looking for—his note pad. He flipped back through the pages. “I wrote it down.” He looked up at Sam. “You mocked me, remember?” He spoke in an exaggerated drawl, “Sweet Jesus, Squidward, you don’t need to write everything down. I’m hungry.”
“Yup,” Sam said. “That was me. Sorry?”
“The system is something called POMTek,” Jules announced.
Robin jumped over to Google. “Spell it for me.”
Jules did and Robin typed it in and... The website for POMTek Personal Security Systems came right up. He went to their search bar and typed timecode.
“Currently,” Robin reported as he clicked through the website, “the timecode from the POMTek cameras are... boom! At the bottom. Totally different font, too. Although if the cameras at the estate are older models...”
“Much older,” Jules reminded them all as he now searched for something else on the table.
“At least fifteen years old,” Sam said. “If not older than that. The technology is definitely different. I love where you’re going with this, Cassidy, but this really doesn’t prove much.”