Guilty by Proximity

novelty to him. He logged it into evidence like it was any other object-bagged it, tagged it, wrote a case number on a sticker in handwriting that slanted the wrong way-and not, a

hough she couldn't have said what she thought m

e county line and would call later. Hazel stood there a second longer than she needed to, wondering wh

wait around

was on the phone in the other room, his voice low and even in the partic

" he asked, once he'd hung

afte

ing her for two days now, like he expected the shape of her

wil

he kitchen to make sure that actually happened. Milo didn't l

t the face

t fa

learly hadn't read. "You don't have to tell me. Just, you kn

ot

up everything, so by the time she got upstairs she already had a full set sitting in a folder labeled

tonight where she just let the police handle it and went to bed and let herself be seventeen f

ned it

rusted loading dock signage, one accidental shot of her own boot when she'd tripped over a root. Ordinary. Boring, even, in

g each one against her memory of the night, building the sequence back up shot by shot instead of just scrolling blindly. It

estamps star

rst, out of habit, that her camera's internal clock actually matched real time-she'd caught it drifting before, once, after a battery change,

p.m. She scrolled earlier. 10:41. 10:33. 10:20, when she'd first arrived and started setting up. Each frame logged

the officer had read back to her the night befo

ly been checking his watch while he was finding a body. The coroner's early estimate-unofficial, the kind of thing that

to before she fo

ime. If that held up, Liam physically could not have done

e laptop like the sc

She wanted to hate him. She'd spent years practicing it, or something close enough to it that it didn't matter what you called it, and now here she was with proof sitting right th

ana. She should c

ything go until she'd picked it apart from every angle first, Hazel kept scrolling. Earlier. Further back

when sh

nt while adjusting her aperture. At first it looked like nothing-a smudge in the far left edge of the fr

g made h

t to do. She zoomed out, then in again, slower this time, and the shape resolved just enough to stop being a shadow. Even blurred,

inside the co

he drop of a rollercoaster, that sick lag between your

anding in the trees at almost exactly the time Mr. Holloway was killed, close enough

hovering over the zoomed image, her own reflection fai

membered so

covered it near the body. She replayed the conversation in her head, piece by piece, trying to reconstruct exactly what he'd said while he filled out his repor

ess to phone records. But she did have one thing the officer had let slip

e whole number down.

the four digits scrawled in her own handwriting on the notepad beside her lapto

ber. She'd known