The Roadside Camera

The roadside camera vendor office shared a building with Greyhaven Asset Services and a dentist who had left three years earlier.

By the time Brooke and Ruiz reached it, smoke had turned the windows black. Firefighters moved through the lot. A man in a reflective vest repeated electrical fault to anyone holding a clipboard.

Brooke spotted the server rack through a broken side door.

"Traffic footage," she said.

"Burned," Ruiz answered.

"Not all of it."

She pointed to a technician carrying a gray hard case toward a pickup. Not firefighter. Not police. Too clean.

Ruiz moved first. "Sir."

The man ran.

Brooke hated running in boots but did it anyway. She cut behind the pickup while Ruiz shouted. The man slipped on wet ash, dropped the case, and rolled hard into a curb.

Inside the case were three external drives labeled by road camera number.

Briar Creek Road was one of them.

At the station, a digital tech recovered only fragments, but one fragment was enough to change the crash.

The image showed Miles's sedan on the wet bend. Behind it, a dark SUV matched speed. A bright object flashed low near Miles's rear tire. Then the sedan jerked, overcorrected, and vanished out of frame.

"Spike strip?" Ruiz asked.

"Portable road hazard," the tech said. "Could be debris. Could be placed."

Brooke zoomed the frame.

On the SUV's dashboard, just visible through glare, sat a vase shape of pale flowers.

Judith's lilies.

Ruiz looked at Brooke. "We need more than a vase shape."

"I know."

Nora arrived after Ruiz told her not to, of course. She saw the frame and went silent.

"Sophie remembered the flowers," she said.

Her voice did not break. That worried Brooke more than tears.

"Yes," Brooke said.

Nora looked at the SUV, then at the bend where Miles's car disappeared.

"She was there."