Noah's hands went still on his knees.
"I used to film everything when I was a kid. Birds. The road. Cars going by. Police activity. Kid stuff. Most of the tapes were garbage. But one of them had something on it." Connor leaned forward. "I was filming something across the road one evening and the camera swung and caught a truck in the frame. Just for a second. It was parked near the Hale place. The image is terrible, mostly dark, but in one frame you can make something out on the tailgate."
Noah didn't answer the question. "What does it say?"
"Saranac Lake Motors. It's one of those stickers dealerships put on when you buy from them. You can just read it if you blow it up."
Saranac Lake Motors.
The name landed in Noah's chest and stayed there. A truck from Saranac Lake.
He kept his face neutral.
"Did Liam see this footage?"
"Yeah. I called him after I found it. He came back. Sat at my kitchen table and watched it on my laptop maybe six or seven times. Didn't say much. Just watched."
"Did he see the dealer decal?"
"He saw it. Asked me to zoom in. I did the best I could. He looked at it for a long time." Connor paused. "Then he said, 'That's enough.'"
"That's enough?”
"That's what he said. Like he'd been looking for one piece and he'd found it. He thanked me and left."
"Did he say what he was going to do with it?"
"He said he was going to look into it. A dealership keeps records. If you knew the make and model and the approximate year, you might get to an owner." Connor looked at the cigarette burning between his fingers. "He didn't seem excited about it. He seemed... settled. Like whatever he was going to find, he'd already made peace with it."
"Did he seem angry?"
"No. That was the thing. He wasn't angry. He was..." Connor searched for the word. "Focused. Controlled. Like someone who'd already decided something and was just confirming it." He looked at Noah. "Didn't feel like someone looking for answers. Felt like someone checking them."
The room was quiet. Through the window Noah could see the shop, the faded sign, the cat still on the sill. His girlfriend was still moving in the kitchen. A faucet ran and stopped.
"Can I see the footage?"
Connor hesitated. Then he stood and went to a desk in the corner of the room. He opened a laptop, clicked through a few folders, and turned the screen toward Noah. "I transferred the clip after I found it. The original tape is still in the camcorder somewhere in the garage."
The footage was dark. Grainy. The kind of low-resolution video that a consumer camcorder produced in 2014. The frame showed the edge of a road, a fence line, trees, and then a sharp swing to the right as the camera followed a sound. For one second, maybe two, a truck was visible. Dark. Full-size. Parked near the shoulder. The image blurred as the camera continued to swing and then the truck was gone.
"Go back," Noah said.
Connor dragged the slider back. Frame by frame. The truck emerged from the blur and held for a single frozen instant. The tailgate was partially visible. And there, in the lower right corner, a rectangular shape. Light text on a dark background. Dealer decal.
"Can you zoom in?"
Connor enlarged the frame. The pixels spread and the image degraded, but the letters held just enough shape to read.
SARANAC LAKE MOTORS
Noah stared at it. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The dealership was twenty minutes from High Peaks. It had been in business for forty years. It kept records.Was it possible that somewhere in those records was the person who had purchased the truck and driven it past Rebecca Hale's house in the years before her murder?
The name settled into place. Seeing the decal on the screen, the same image that Liam had seen and watched six or seven times, made it real in a way that nothing before had.
"I'd like a copy of that clip," Noah said.
"I can put it on a drive for you." Connor pulled a flash drive from the desk drawer and started the transfer.
