“Or maybe the slime is from our real perp.” Archer scrolled through the menu of security camera logs. They’d been turned over to the manhunt in the hope that they’d somehow help. At minimum, they would be a great motivator to catch Franks, because there was nothing like watching your friends and coworkers get executed in cold blood. Archer had already watched several portions of the video and they seemed pretty conclusive. “Something’s not right here.”

“Like Franks suddenly shooting a bunch of people?” Grant muttered. “Tell me about it.”

Franks shooting a bunch of people wasn’t really farfetched, but that wasn’t his problem. “The SAC thinks Franks’ motive was to kill Director Stark, only Stark’s in the hospital, injured, but he’ll probably live, and then Franks went and shot everybody else because . . . what? He was upset? He was having a bad day? Does that sound like the Franks we know?”

“Like anybody really knows Franks,” Grant said. He poked his head over the top of the cube and looked around for anyone who might know they weren’t supposed to be there.

“Bullshit. We might not know what he does for fun, but we know how he takes care of business. We know how he conducts violence. This is too unfocused. If Franks wanted to kill the Director for personal reasons and then mess up headquarters, he would’ve found a way to blow the whole place to kingdom come.”

“Maybe Franks wanted to minimize casualties?” Grant thought about that for a second. “Okay, never mind. Minimize and Franks don’t go together. What’re you looking at?”

“Something weird is going on. I feel like there are gaps in the security camera footage but there aren’t.” Archer had already pulled every file showing Franks, and there was video of him for nearly the whole event. “This is too clean.”

Grant looked down at the blood on the carpet. “I don’t—”

“All the visual evidence fits too well. This is what I do. My background was communications. My first job at MCB was dicking around with records, doctoring videos, altering logs, all to hide monster events. I know what the video from chaotic events looks like. This is too smooth. This is like a movie about crazy shit, not how crazy shit really looks.”

“It fits the forensics and eyewitness reports we’ve got so far. Doctoring this much evidence takes way too much time. It would take all of Media Control days to make something like this.”