Theresa ran the tape forward, frame by frame, looking for an image that might hold up. From time to time, she zoomed in, probed the pixels, zoomed back out. It was difficult. The two people were moving quickly, and they were often blurred. And the lights from the skyscrapers outside sometimes obscured otherwise good images.
It was frustrating. It was slow.
Stop. Zoom in. Slide around in the image, trying to locate a section that had enough detail. Give up. Go forward again. Stop again.
Finally, Theresa sighed. "It's not working. That glass is murder."
"Then let's keep going."
I saw Cheryl grab the door frame, trying to keep from being pulled into the conference room. The man finally pulled her free, she slid backward with a look of terror on her face, and then she swung her arms back to hit the man. Her purse went flying. Then they were both inside the room. Silhouettes moving quickly, turning.
The man shoved her back against the table, and Cheryl appeared in the camera that aimed straight down on the conference room. Her short blond hair contrasted with the dark wood of the table. Her mood changed again, she stopped struggling for a minute. She had a look of expectation. Excitement. She licked her lips. Her eyes followed the man as he leaned over her. He slid her skirt up her hips.
She smiled, pouted, whispered in his ear.
He pulled her panties away, a quick jerk.
She smiled at him. It was a tense smile, half-aroused, half-pleading.
She was excited by her own fear.
His hands caressed her throat.
¤
Standing in the darkened laboratory, with the hiss of skaters on the ice above, we watched the final violent act, again and again. It played on five monitors, different angles, as her pale legs went up, onto his shoulders, and he crouched over her, hands fumbling at his trousers. With repetition, I noticed small things not seen before. The way she slid down the table to meet him, wiggling her hips. The way his back arched at the moment of penetration. The change in her smile, catlike, knowing. Calculating. How she urged him on, saying something. Her hands around his back, caressing. The sudden change in mood, the flash of anger in her eyes, the abrupt slap. The way she fought him, first to arouse him, and then later, struggling in a different way, because then something was wrong. The way her eyes bulged, and she had a look of real desperation. Her hands pushing his arms, shoving his coat sleeves up, revealing the tiny metallic sparkle of cuff links. The glint of her watch. Her arm falling back, palm open. Five fingers pale against the black of the table. Then a tremor, the fingers twitching, and stillness.
His slowness to understand something was wrong. The way he went rigid for a moment, then took her head in his hand, moved it back and forth, trying to arouse her, before he finally pulled away. Even looking at his back, you could almost feel his horror. He remained slow, as if in a trance. Pacing around the room in aimless half steps, first this way, then that. Trying to recover his wits, to decide what to do.
Each time I saw the sequence repeated, I felt a different way. The first few times, there was a tension, a voyeuristic sensation, itself almost sexual. And then later, I felt progressively more detached, more analytical. As if I was drifting away, moving back from the monitor. And finally, the entire sequence seemed to break down before my eyes, the bodies losing their human identities altogether, becoming abstractions, elements of design, shifting and moving in dark space.
Theresa said, "This girl is sick."
"It looks that way."
"She is not a victim. Not this one."
"Maybe not."
We watched it again. But I no longer knew why we were watching. Finally I said, "Let's go forward, Theresa."
We had been running the sequence to a certain point on the tape counter, and then going back to run again. So we had seen a part of the tape again and again, but we hadn't gone farther. Almost immediately as we went forward, something remarkable happened. The man stopped pacing and looked sharply off to one side as if he had seen something, or heard something.
"The other man?" I said.
"Perhaps." She pointed to the monitors. "This is the area in the tapes where the shadows do not seem to match up. Now, we know why."
"Something was erased?"
She ran the tape backward. On the side monitor view, we could see the man look up, in the direction of the exit. He gave every appearance that he had seen someone. But he did not appear frightened or guilty.
She zoomed in. The man was just a silhouette. "You can't see anything, can you?"
"Profile."
"What about it?"
"I am looking at the jaw line. Yes. See? The jaw is moving. He is talking."
"Talking to the other man?"
"Or to himself. But he is certainly looking off. And now see? He has sudden new energy."
The man was moving around the conference room. His behavior purposeful. I remembered how confusing this part had been, when I saw it the night before at the police station. But with five cameras, it was clear. We could see exactly what he was doing. He picked up the panties from the floor.
And then he bent over the dead girl, and removed her watch.
"No kidding," I said. "He took her watch."
I could only think of one reason why: the watch must have an inscription. The man put the panties and the watch in his pocket, and was turning to go, when the image froze again. Theresa had stopped it.
"What is it?" I said.
She pointed to one of the five monitors. "There," she said.
She was looking at the side view, from the overall camera. It showed the conference room as seen from the atrium. I saw the silhouette of the girl on the table, and the man inside the conference room.
"Yeah? So?"
"There," she said, pointing. "They forgot to erase that one." In the corner of the screen, I saw a ghostly form. The angle and the lighting were just right to enable us to see him. It was a man.
The third man.
He had come forward, and now was standing in the middle of the atrium, looking toward the killer, inside the conference room. The image of the third man was complete, reflected in the glass. But it was faint.
"Can you get that? Can you make it out?"
"I can try," she said.
The zooms began. She punched in, saw the image decompose. She sharpened it, heightened contrast. The image streaked, and went dull, flat. She coaxed it back, reconstituted it. She moved closer, enlarging it. It was tantalizing. We could almost make an identification.
Almost, but not quite.
"Frame advance," she said.
Now, one by one, the frames clicked ahead. The image of the man was alternately sharper, blurred, sharp.
And then at last, we saw the waiting man clearly.
"No shit," I said.
"You know who he is?"
"Yes," I said. "It's Eddie Sakamura."
¤
After that, we made swift progress. We knew, without a doubt, that the tapes had been altered and the identity of the killer had been changed. We watched as the killer came out of the room, and moved toward the exit, with a regretful look back at the dead girl.