What about it? Camera on the 840 route. The one that would have caught everything from yesterday morning. Grant knocking my cane, grabbing Norah's wrist. Transit office says it malfunctioned.
Whole recording's gone. Nothing on the hard drive but static. Ren sat down her coffee slowly. Malfunctioned. That's the word they used.
Frank's jaw was tight. Funny thing is, the company that services those cameras does the maintenance contracts for the whole transit fleet. It's a subcontractor out of the county owned, as it happens, by a holding company that leases its office space from none other than Colton Properties. Ren went very still. You're saying somebody erased it on purpose.
I'm saying it's a mighty convenient malfunction, Frank said, happening on the one week that footage would have mattered more than it ever has before. He leaned in slightly. But I've got something they don't know about. He reached into his jacket pocket and set his phone on the counter screen, dark. I've been recording video on this thing for a few years now, he said.
Habit I picked up after a friend showed me how. Keep it in my coat, propped in the handle of my cane most days. Angled up. Half the time I forget it's even running. Yesterday morning when that boy started up on the bus, some old instinct told me to reach down and hit record before he ever touched Norah's wrist.
He turned the phone over, thumbed it open, and pressed play. There it was. Shaky, angled, slightly wrong, but unmistakable. Grant's boot against the cane. The laugh, Norah stepping in, the grab, the stumble, every second of it timestamped, undeniable, sitting on an old man's phone because some quiet habit had told him without asking why, that this was a morning worth keeping.
Ren looked up at him, something thick in her throat. "Frank, don't thank me yet," he said, pocketing the phone again like it was something fragile. "Thank me Thursday night after we've used it for something." Chief Doyle confirmed it himself an hour later, standing in the doorway of the bakery in his uniform, looking more tired than Ren had ever seen him. "The transit camera data is gone," he said.