Barely Alive by Molly Black

Author:Molly Black [Black, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Molly Black
Published: 2024-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The call to the FBI had been concise and quick; the man they needed to speak with was Sam Ragland, and he worked in City Planning and Environmental Management located adjacent to the courthouse and municipal buildings. He’d sounded incredibly eager to help on the phone—the tone of a man who was not used to such excitement and thrills during the course of his typical workday.

Ragland's office was located on the third floor, a space filled with scale models of city projects and walls adorned with blueprints. Ragland himself was just as Tessa had pictured him: mid-forties, blue eyes peering from behind a pair of eyeglasses, his hair thinning with the stress of urban development. When Jake knocked on the doorframe, the door already wide open, Ragland looked up from his desktop monitor, where he was already intently sifting through digital footage.

"Agents,” he said, the tone of excitement still present in his voice. “It was Flint and Sullivan," right?”

“That’s right,” Jake said. “I’m Sullivan, and she’s Flint. Have you found anything yet?”

"Well, I'm getting there. I hadn't checked the feed in quite some time, and the cameras needed software patches. But I'm in now and looking." He nodded beside him to where a chair sat in the corner of the room with a jacket tossed over the back. "Come on over and take a seat. I'm going through the last few days of footage. There's a lot to cover."

Tessa took the offered chair, her posture rigid, her mind sharp. Jake elected to stand behind her. When his hand brushed the back of her shoulder and lingered there for a moment, she wondered if it had been intentional. But the question was quickly dashed from her mind when she saw the footage from the birdhouse's vantage point on Ragland's screen.

There were actually two vantage points. One looked directly into the birdhouse and was useless to them. It showed a well-crafted nest and a few stray feathers, but it seemed that, for now, there were no occupants. The second view was perched on the left side of the birdhouse, affixed to a small wooden platform that served as, for lack of a better term, the porch.

“I’ve got the footage wound out to yesterday but the time skip feature is finnicky,” Ragland explained.

Tessa watched the flickering movements on the screen, each frame a potential clue, each shadow a possible suspect. As Ragland skipped through the footage, she saw mothers pushing strollers, joggers speeding by, and a few squirrels playing by the edge of the trees. She did notice, with some relief, that the area they were interested in was indeed within the shot. It was to the right of the frame, almost right at the very edge—but it was in full view.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea when this guy came through, do you?” Ragland asked as he kept scrolling through the timestamped footage.

“Sorry, no,” Tessa said. “But I’d assume at a slower time. Maybe between one and four in the afternoon.

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