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Constance raises an eyebrow. “I refuse.”
Welp, even after all of this, I can’t account for Constance’s hard head. “Fine.” I sit down in the chair and tinker around with the system. It’s old and doesn’t require a security clearance, which would never fly in Chicago. But I’m not complaining. At least it’s not running on traditional videotapes.
It takes a bit of tinkering, but I find the exact folder I need, recordings from the hall outside the science room. I’ll take an educated guess the computer dumps the footage after four weeks in order to make more room on the hard drive. No matter. I only need the last two weeks.
“Go to the last day of school,” Constance says.
I click on the clip with the right date.
“I was in the room most of the day, so you can go to the end of the school day,” Chrisley explains.
I scrub to midafternoon, ants of students filing in and out of the room, until finally, Chrisley walks out of the room and starts engaging in a conversation with another teacher. After the two of them disappear, things are still and quiet. For a while.
“This is like watching paint dry,” I mumble.
“Just go forward. A little,” Constance says, leaning on the back of my chair.
I can feel her breath meandering through my hair. Not doing anything good for my sanity.
“There!”
A shadow starts to move down the hall, their face in the opposite direction of the camera.
They’re wearing a yellow raincoat with the hood propped up over their head. They wear a backpack with some stitching on it I can’t quite make out.
Where have I seen that before?
“They have to come back the same way. Maybe we can see their face?”
I scrub a bit more forward, bit by bit, until the figure exits the science room again, backpack now stuffed full. Their face is still tucked in a shadow.
Constance sighs. “It’s impossible to tell who it is.”
“I’ve seen that coat before,” I say.
“People wear yellow raincoats all the time.”
“No, this… this is different.”
I pull the footage back to the point the figure appears on camera and we get a close look at the backpack. I lean in as close as I can. “Is that a monogram on the backpack?”
Constance leans in too. “Looks like. I’m not sure I can make out the letters though.”
“Wait.” I zoom in on the image. It gets grainier, but the letters become easier to make out.
“It’s an ‘L’ and…” My eyes widen. “I know who it is. I know who did it.”
Constance grabs my shoulder. “Who?!”
This case is about to get ten times weirder.
“Liliana Frederickson.”
17
Constance
“That could be anyone,” Fred says, gesturing to the screen of the laptop that shows Liliana walking out of the science classroom.
