Puhl clicked on it, and suddenly, the video viewer popped up, filling most of the screen. It was slightly grainy footage of the dog park and the sidewalk beside it. We watched it for a few moments, then I leaned forward and clicked the mouse a few times.

We saw something like a figure move by on the sidewalk, and I pushed the space bar to stop the video.

“There,” I said.

The video showed a man walking toward Emma’s apartment building. We both leaned close, but it was clear that the man in the picture was the one, the only…

Ryan Hooks.

“See,” I hissed.

Puhl had an expression of disbelief on her face. “He really was there, wasn’t he?” she said, rewinding the video a couple of times. There was no mistaking that it was him. She dragged the video to the end, but there were no signs of him walking back the same way.

“How long did this record for?” Puhl asked.

“It stopped at 4:00 a.m.”

“And we don’t see him leave…” Puhl muttered quietly. It was more of a statement than a question.

The video stopped on the screen, a still shot of the park in the wee hours of the night.

Puhl was tapping her pen against the table, and she seemed to be mulling something over.

She leaned over and wrote something in her notebook. As she wrote, I stared at the image on the screen, the video stopped on the final, grainy image, and I tried to quell the voice that was rising in my head.

Something is wrong.

I leaned closer to the screen, trying to figure out what it was that was bothering me. There wasn’t anything in the picture, nothing you could actually make out, but I stared anyway, pulled in by the image on the screen.

I was dragging my gaze back to Puhl when I stopped on one small piece of text on the screen and felt a chill run down my spine.

It was the time stamp for the video, which, since it was at the very end, showed the length of what we’d just seen.

3:58:48

I frowned when I saw that, instead of the solid four hours of every recorded session in the flowerpot camera, this video was just a little bit short.

There was a full minute and twelve seconds missing.

I decided not to say anything to Detective Puhl, not right away. I left the jump drive with her and walked out of the station. As I did, I saw that Emma was still sitting in her car. I walked up to her window.

“How’d it go?” she asked breathlessly. “Did they see him?”

I nodded.

“That was really tough,” she said. “Thanks for encouraging me to do it, though. As hard as it was, I know it was the right thing to do.”