Monitoring your RIRC [Request for Interjurisdictional Remission of Confidentiality] re female person of interest in “LV” murders in Dusseldorf, Marseille and Riga. We have one here too, of 10 August 2033, eight months ago. This homicide has been linked to the others by forensic pathology only within the past 24 hours.

My state of exhaustion vanishes. In .01 seconds I am awake and wired.

Your request for FaceRec video file release has been approved by our office. Attached please find a sequential compilation. File total is 27. Most are from traffic-flow and sidewalk surveillance cameras and are unremarkable. Please note however the 22-second clip from a convenience store security camera at 9 August 33 (the morning before the aforementioned murder) that commences at 10:44:45. I think you may find it of interest.

Elisabet Gottmundsdottir, Detective Inspector

I cue the video and tap the PLAY arrow. I’m head-down in a corner at the front of the service room, with the young rabbi who will serve as the officiant for the memorial service approaching me and looking, I swear to God, like he’s about to hit on me. I bury my nose deeper into my phone.

On the screen appears a woman who can be no one but Rachel. The face is the same, posture, hair, everything. She is standing beside some kind of self-serve coffee machine in intense, even passionate confrontation with a tall, broad-shouldered man appearing to be about thirty years old whose back is to the camera. Suddenly Rachel slaps the man, open-handed, across the face, so violently that the take-out cup in her other hand goes flying, sending hot coffee everywhere.

The man does not turn or move.

Rachel bawls something furious at the man, then wheels and stalks from the store. The clip ends when the man, still with his back turned, moves in the opposite direction and vanishes from the viewing field of the camera.

I bolt from the young rabbi before he can open his mouth to say hello.

I find Manning.

I roll the video.

He watches through his two-dollar Walgreens reading specs, peeking over their upper rims at Rachel herself, seated piously in a row of chairs at the rear of the room.

ME

When you questioned her at the impound lot, she said the last time she saw Instancer was in Israel in ’32. This video is from August ’33.

MANNING

But is that Instancer on the video? We can’t see his face.

ME

C’mon!

I urge Manning to confront Rachel with this right now. Walk over and shove the video in her face. To my amazement, he resists.

MANNING

I thought you were her protector.

ME

Fuck that. She’s lying to us!

I see from Manning’s eyes that his head is splitting. It’s all I can do to stifle my impulse to challenge Rachel myself. Whatever Manning is thinking, I know he is ten jumps ahead of me. I bite my tongue.