Vanessa looked at the wall of monitors. One showed the fountain from above. Another showed shoppers moving past a bookstore. A third displayed the entrance to the jewelry store, live, bright, and ordinary. The cameras still worked. What had disappeared was the record of a specific period, during a specific incident, shortly after the security director accessed the archive.
"May I ask a question?" Vanessa said.
Torres nodded.
"If the storage system overwrote an afternoon recording after less than an hour, what did it overwrite it with?"
Sloan opened his mouth, then closed it.
"That's a fair question," Torres said. She turned to Eli. "Can you show me the storage status without making changes?"
Eli brought up a read-only diagnostic screen. The drive was not full. The system showed a manual administrative action at 3:15 and an abnormal deletion event afterward. Eli stared at the data, clearly uncomfortable.
"That doesn't prove the file can't be recovered," he said. "It means it isn't appearing in the ordinary archive. We'd need a forensic copy of the storage device."
Torres made another note. "Then we'll arrange one. Mr. Sloan, step away from this workstation. The mall's management needs to preserve the system in its present state."
Sloan's voice rose. "Are you accusing me of tampering?"
"I'm documenting what the access log shows. You're the one who used the word tampering."
Harlan struck the edge of the desk with his palm. "We're wasting time. She made a disturbance. The footage isn't here. Let her go if you want, but don't drag us through a conspiracy theory because she has fifteen friends who can stand in a line."
Vanessa watched him with an unexpected clarity. She no longer needed him to admit he was wrong. She needed the evidence to be kept safe, the records to be examined, and someone outside this room to be able to distinguish his version from the truth.
Her eyes moved toward the glass wall of the corridor. Beyond it, in the open atrium, the giant event screen displayed a rotating slideshow of scholarship recipients. For the first time in nearly an hour, Vanessa remembered the conversation she had had with Lena that morning: twenty-four hours, a different power circuit, its own local recorder.
She turned back toward Torres. "Lieutenant, there may be another recording."
Sloan stiffened. "There isn't."
"You don't know which one I mean," Vanessa said.
He looked at her. For several seconds, neither spoke. Then Torres set down her pen.
"Tell me about it, Ms. Cole."
Vanessa explained the event system in the same measured way she would have explained an unfamiliar piece of equipment to a new intelligence analyst. The mall's security cameras supplied a live feed to the audiovisual booth. During major events, that feed was recorded on a separate local unit alongside the sound captured by microphones installed for announcements and presentations. She had tested it that morning, and Lena had shown her how the twenty-four-hour recording folder worked.