Gabriel often had to ignore something that roiled his nervous system: a pool of blood, a child’s shoe, because emotions took him out of an analytic frame of mind.
Daniel had often said they worked the same damned job; only Daniel went off on foot, exposing himself to the elementsand the intrinsic dangers of a manhunt, while Gabriel sat in his comfy office hunting people.
Gabriel took the chiding; that was fine. A victim saved, a bad guy in the clink, everyone did what they could, and few people had the kind of brain that could do what Gabriel did.
Gabriel locked in on a frame of the video and snipped it.
From the shift of the camera and the line of light, this was the frame that picked up the best reflections in the high-rise across the street.
What Gabriel needed were clues.
The first one was that it was morning. How did he know?
The garbage bins were empty but hadn’t yet been pulled back from the curb.
No bags were lying in the street. They’d already been collected.
Cars parked along the curb made way for the trash collectors to get in.
And there were dew streaks on back windows.
Morning.
Which morning?
Gabriel homed in on the street sign on the pole—it was written in English, which narrowed the possible countries.
Street cleaning was every Monday and Thursday on that particular road.
If he could get an idea of the city, he could narrow down which streets were serviced on those days, which should tighten things down further.
This attack didn’t happen on a Monday or a Thursday. Municipalities were careful to schedule trash collection on other days so the street sweepers wouldn’t be obstructed by objects in the gutters.
It didn’t happen on a Saturday or Sunday morning, when trash usually wasn’t collected.
This was most likely filmed on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday morning.
Which Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday morning?
Icing on the cake if he could figure that out, but Gabriel was a geolocator, not a psychic.
If someone saw something that was going wrong and they taped it from the … yeah, they’d have to be on the third story. If they taped it from a third-story window …” He pulled a pad over and plucked a pen from his jar, writing:Find the location, then check the weather for temperatures and dew point, and sunrise information to figure out possible dates.
The person who took the video was cunning.
There was a difference between smart and cunning.
A cunning person—someone with a strategic mind—might try to include clues for the FBI to follow.
Granted, it wasn’t a given that the person who took the video was cunning. They could have called a cunning person and asked them for action steps.
Gabriel tried that scenario on. Someone was looking out their bedroom window—it was so early that they were either on a shift job or waking up somewhere. Regardless, they saw something terrible happening below and started recording it on video.
Once the bad guy dragged the FBI agent from the scene, the witness would have shakily called a friend—a boyfriend?
Someone close and reliable.
Gabriel thought it was a woman who took this video. There was something about how things were framed that, after thousands of videos and pictures over the course of his career, he just got a feel for the eye that gazed through the lens. Gabriel would wager that this was a woman, that she called someone, and that someone helped her come up with a plan.
