8: Suspect #6

The old school Buick's car door slapped shut quickly. Detective Growden took extra care to make sure she was locked and under the shade of a maple tree before he scanned the area of Rosemary and Thyme street. It was like many other streets in the city, though tucked nicely under the arch of a highway. Of all the buildings on the corner, Growden noticed two had surveillance cameras outside. This was a start.

He walked first towards the vehicle body shop. Overhead there was the ding of a bell before he spilled into the front lobby. At first there was no one to be seen but soon enough a woman stepped in through the open door beside the desk and greeted him.

"Morning handsome, what sort of work are you looking for?"

Growden smiled at the older woman and waited for her to get comfortable behind the counter before responding.

"I've actually got a question about the wreck that happened here a month or two ago."

The woman's brows raised and she nodded, red nails pointing out the door.

"Ohhh- yeah that was a nasty wreckage. There was a man and his driver. They had the road blocked for hours, my nephew and I were trapped here."

Growden nodded.

"Yeah I imagine, damn wrecks. Could I trouble you to look at the footage from your camera system from that night?"

The woman looked skeptically at the young man. She didn't peg him for a cop, still, who the hell asks for footage of a wreck?

"Why?"

Growden sensed her skepticism and sighed.

"The man from the wreck hired me to figure out what happened to his wife."

The older woman's eyes widened. She didn't remember there being a woman in the car. 

"His wife?"

Growden nodded, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and fiddling with it.

"She was in the car that night and he hasn't seen her in two months. Trouble is, he lost his personal memories from the concussion and his driver died on impact."

The woman shivered in discomfort. And began glancing out the door nervously.

"Well alright- but I won't be held accountable for whatever you find."

Bingo, Growden thought.

The woman led him through the open portion of the body shop where two men were working on an earlier model charger. Neither of the men stopped to acknowledge his presence, a relief in Growden's mind.

"Right, the chair on the right is empty."

It was a small room tucked off to the side behind the area where the front desk lobby was positioned. The woman slipped behind the desk with what was possibly the world's oldest computer system. Growden sat down in the seat across from her, waiting patiently as she muttered to herself about getting "this old piece of shit" started.

Growden took the time to glance around, noting a cork board note holder on the wall behind her with a couple photos. He was fairly sure that this was a family business. Of all the smiling and joking faces in the photograph behind her, she was one of three women present. Seemed that the gene for boys was rather strong. 

He recognised one of the men from the lobby as being just beside a younger version of the woman in front of him. Though judging by their age gap, Growden figured it was likely her son or the nephew she had mentioned.

"What date did the crash occur?"

"August 1st."

Growden answered immediately, with no falter at all. The older woman nodded and began clacking on the gray keyboard. 

"Do you know about what time?"

Growden knew the explosion occurred at exactly 10:52pm but he decided it would make the most sense to have the woman start a few hours back. 

"Are you able to run it back around 7:30pm that night?"

The woman glanced over the computer monitor at him with a raised brow, before shrugging. She then rose from the chair and gestured to it as she stepped around his own spot. Growden blinked confusedly.

"I don't mind helping you sir, but I haven't got the time to sit here scrolling through hours of camera footage. I've got to get back to the front desk."

Growden nodded, cheeks tingeing pink in light embarrassment. She was being completely reasonable and polite, still he couldn't help but feel silly.

"Of course ma'am, thank you."

She quickly turned and pointed at him as she stepped close to the door.

"And don't fuck up my computer, hear me?"

  Growden smiled lightly, nodding at her. She reminded him of one of the nuns from Honourhall, one of the good ones. He pulled his small leatherback notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and borrowed a pen from the collection on the shop owner's desk. He'd forgotten his own in the shotgun seat of Nessie, and there was no time to go back for it now.

He hit play and for the first bit it was exactly as expected. Hours of normal business footage, people walking up and down the sidewalk and the occasional flashy car pulling up to the drive. The footage itself was slightly grainy but the colors were clear. It wasn't very long before Growden discovered a button which allowed him to speed up the footage. He opted to speed it up only very slightly- after all he didn't know yet what details would be important. 

When the timestamp hit 10:30pm Growden had slowed the footage all the way back down and began studying every detail with skeptical eyes. The sidewalk was entirely empty by this time, not a single car driving down the side street either. Just a little after 10:45, Growden noticed a man walking down the sidewalk. He paid little mind apart from jotting down that the figure was present. 

As 10:52 struck, Growden cringed as he saw the car Adriel owned explode from the top right end and flip over on its side. Flames swallowed up the engine portion and he couldn't see any movement in the car for two minutes. Growden had started to falter in his search when something peculiar happened. The man on the sidewalk turned and beelined for the car. He was wearing a dark hoodie of either gray or blue as he moved over to the backseat passenger's door.

Growden's eyes widened as he watched the figure pull a slumped Yanire from the passenger side and begin sprinting down the street back in the direction he came from. He paused the footage, going backwards and replaying it several times, recording it on his own phone and scribbling notes like a madman. This was it, this was certainly their culprit.

He paused the footage on the moment when the figure stood at the passenger door and tried to get a look at their face. Between the darkness and the hood, it was hard to capture hardly any detail up until a particular moment where the angle allowed for some of the fire to illuminate a part of the face. Growden snapped a picture and wrote down what little details the grainy footage allowed. White Man (Approx. 6 foot), middle aged. 

His mind was racing now, completely panicked. The face looked nothing like any of the ones from the files he and Adriel had been going over. Their original theories were likely very off-base. It couldn't be the Shuss or Kokei families, rather it was someone that they hadn't expected at all. Growden saved the footage he'd gathered on his phone and backed it up to a cloud before gathering his things and closing out of the footage quickly. 

He strode from the room and to the front lobby, stopping to thank the woman and pay her for her trouble. She raised a confused brow at the man's nervous demeanor and paused his movements for a moment.

"Dear- you look worried. Is everything alright?"

Growden could tell his cheeks had paled and he took a deep breath.

"I don't know. I don't know if this is alright at all."

The woman herself looked spooked as Growden pushed through the door and jogged across the street to the lot where he'd parked Nessie. This was not very good at all.

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