Chapter Five

The stakes rise as law enforcement keep Griffin and Monica in custody. Meanwhile, the team unveils some damning evidence.

Cooper’s wrinkled index fingers are far away from his thumbs, a thick stack of papers held between them. With thick rimmed reading glasses sitting lowly on his nose, he peers down at the files before him.

            “Coop, I think I got something!” A thirty-something year old male says as he rushes over with a white iPad in hand.

            “What’d we find?” Cooper sets his stack of papers neatly on his desk before leaning back in his seat and craning his neck to look at the screen.

            “Okay, so I couldn’t get directly into the FBI database but I was able to sneak into Agent Carson’s computer and his recently viewed files.” He taps a few times on the screen, pulling up a list of picture and video files. “He has surveillance footage of Monica and Griffin at the gun range.”

            Cooper takes the iPad cautiously with a single hand. His eyes scan over the file names, clicking the most recently dated one. In the video, a compilation of still shots with ten second intervals playing like a choppy film, Monica is seen coaching Griffin on his stance while aiming his gun. “So that’s why they’re holding her.”

“There’s more,” the guy says as he reclaims his electronic device. He presses the round button at the bottom of his iPad, swiping his finger over the screen as if he’s drawing a picture before finally lifting his finger and handing the device back to Cooper. “Purchase history from local gun shops. Look at the highlighted one.”

Cooper, standing firm on his anti-technological ideologies, struggles to zoom in on the highlighted name. With a reverse-pinch of his fingers, the man behind him offers assistance. The older man’s eyes widen as the highlighted name becomes clearer. “D****t.”

“Not good, huh?”

Cooper shakes his head. “No, Greg. Not good at all.” He sets the iPad down on top of the stack of papers and hurries to his feet, walking over towards another desk where women are working together, sifting through news footage from the day’s events. “Please have good news.”

The dirty blonde with a bob cut looks up with sad eyes, offering a weak shake of her head. “Sorry, Coop. There’s no shots of that building before the shot was fired. Only after.”

Cooper sighs as he scratches at the wrinkles in his forehead. “Keep looking. Were any foreign news sources there? They sometimes like to show the skyline so people in their country know what the cities here look like.”

“I doubt it, but we’ll check,” the platinum blonde beside her says before typing away on her keyboard, her fake nails making a loud clicking sound with each press of a key.

Cooper tucks his hands into the deep pockets of his black slacks, thumbing over the ridges in his keys as if it’s comforting to him. In a way, it is. The ridges on the keys are as unique as a thumbprint. They match with one lock and one lock only. A perfect puzzle piece.

It’s the one thing in Cooper’s life that he doesn’t have to figure out. While he enjoys the chase, the mystery and the ultimate resolution; it’s also a root cause of his hidden anxiety. The very sensation of not knowing that gives him a reason to get up in the morning is also the reason he has trouble falling asleep at night.

But he’d never admit that to anyone. Not Griffin, not Greg, not Monica. Not even his wife.

“Hey, coop!” Greg calls out from behind him.

Cooper quickly withdraws his hands from his pockets as if he’s self-conscious that his habit has been discovered. “Yeah?!” He raises his voice as he spins to face the younger man.

Greg was practically running, stopping just a foot away from him. “Check this out. So I know blonde and blonder over here couldn’t find what you needed.”

The platinum blonde raises her fist and lifts her middle finger away from the rest, the matte nail polish reflected the florescent lights.

“So I tapped into the security footage from the building. It’s under construction so obviously they had cameras.”

“Okay, so what’d you see?” Cooper moves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Greg as they both look at the iPad.

“So at 7:49 someone dressed as a construction worker enters the building. Then watch,” Greg scrubs his finger over a small dot, dragging it across a gray line to move the video forward. “At 8:14 the construction worker leaves. Now what could a sole construction worker possibly accomplish in twenty-five minutes?”

“Rewind. Can you rewind on this thing?” Cooper says, a tone in his voice suggesting he notices something that his coworker is missing.

“Yeah, of course. It’s an iPad, not a record player.” He swipes his finger to the left, bringing the video back until the time stamp says 7:49:50.

“Look,” Cooper presses his finger down on the screen right over the worker’s shoes. “Brown work boots. Fast forward.” As Greg brings the video forward, Cooper points to the screen again. “Black combat boots.”

Greg stares at the screen as the information he’s been provided with I sorted out by his overworked brain. “Two different people?”

“Someone prepped. Someone else shot. When doe Griffin come in?”

“Well, he doesn’t.”

Cooper’s eyes narrow as he c***s his head to look at Greg. “What do you mean he doesn’t?”

Greg fast forwards up until the footage shows Abby, Monica and Cooper running into the building. Griffin is never seen on camera. “Coop… I don’t want to jump to conclusions but based solely on this footage, Griffin had to be one of those two people.”

“That’s impossible,” Cooper says as he rubs his palms over his eyes before slapping his hands loudly against his hips. “I need a bigger screen. I can’t focus. Can you get this up on the TV?”

“You got it,” the younger man walks away, balancing his iPad in the bend of his arm as he presses various spots on his screen until the image appears on the television mounted to the wall.

Cooper lifts his head, the muscles in his neck straining as he looks up at the screen above the break table. “Alright, everyone stop what you’re doing and look at this.”

The typing from the two blondes is immediately silenced, the sound of plastic wheels rolling over tiled flooring entering Cooper’s ears before they appear right behind him, one adjacent to each shoulder. “What are we looking for?” The dirty blonde asks.

“Anything that might tell us why Griffin doesn’t appear on this tape.”

Greg plays and replays the footage multiple times, the four team members that are present watching the same twenty-five minutes’ worth of footage sped up over-and-over again. Greg keeping pointing out what he thinks to be inconsistencies, but to no avail. It’s just his eyes playing tricks, or his ego making him think that he’s better at detecting clues than he actually is.

“Stop!” The platinum blonde screams out during the fifth play-through. Greg stops it instantly.

“This should be good.”

“F**k you,” she purposefully bumps into him with her shoulder as she passes him on her walk up to the television. She points to the plastic tarp in the top right corner of the screen, the one that covered the opening to the stairwell. “It’s straight, right?” She states the obvious, but she’s not wrong. The plastic tarp is neatly placed over the opening. “Now move it forward just a few seconds.” Greg does so reluctantly, and his jaw drops when the tarp suddenly changes positions without any on screen disruptions.

“Son of a b***h,” Greg’s jaw drops as the girl turns and smirks.

“Now accepting apologies, a*****e.”

“He’ll apologize later,” Cooper says as he takes a step forward. “Well done, Kimberly.”

“I still don’t get it,” the dirty blonde says. “I mean there’s a ten second gap between these images, right? So anything or anyone could’ve moved that plastic.

“You see, Lisa,” Cooper begins as he moves even closer to the TV. He reaches up and points to the bottom of the screen before indicating the top where the stairwell is. “That’s a good hundred yards at least. No one, especially not Griffin, could’ve run clear across that stretch of space in that time.”

“So someone tampered with the footage? Why? If they had their fall guy on camera, why delete the evidence of him?”

“Oh my God,” Kimberly says. Cooper nods to her, giving her approval to state the motive before he can. “Because a guy that’s going to shoot the President of the United States is going to cover his tracks. And if he’s working with a team, let’s say a team of private investigators, they’d all work to cover their tracks in the event one of them got caught. Griffin’s not the fall guy. We’re the fall guys.”