The investigators called it a family briefing, which made it sound more official than the folding chairs and bad coffee suggested. Six days after Ellis stopped answering his phone, Wade and I sat in a windowless room at the Bellwether Police Department while a detective queued up grainy footage on a laptop balanced on a cart.
"We want to be clear about what this does and doesn't tell us," the detective said, before he even pressed play, and I understood he was trying to manage my expectations before they could run away from him.
The footage showed the car pulling into the lot, and then a person getting out. Just that. A figure, indistinct, moving with the ordinary unhurried walk of someone who belonged exactly where they were, crossing out of frame toward the street. No face. No name. Nothing that told us whether this was Ellis himself or someone else entirely.
Wade leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying the posture the way he'd study a door that wouldn't sit right in its frame. "That's not how Ellis stands," he said quietly. "He's got a hitch in his left shoulder from the warehouse job."
I looked at the shoes instead, because shoes felt like something I could trust, and told myself the gait was wrong, too even, too confident, not Ellis's slight favoring of his right foot. The detective reminded us, gently, that the quality didn't support that kind of reading. We nodded like we understood. I'm not sure either of us believed it.
"Could be anybody," the detective said. "Could be someone who has nothing to do with this at all. We're not asking you to identify him. We're asking you to tell us if anything about the vehicle or the lot looks familiar." Nothing did. I'd never been to that complex in my life.
Driving home, Wade was quiet in a way that worried me more than talking would have. I asked what he was thinking. He said he kept picturing faces from the properties we'd serviced that year, men we'd met for an hour fixing a deadbolt and never thought about again, wondering if one of them might fit that outline on the screen.
That night I did something I never told the detective about, something I'm not proud of now. I pulled out old invoices and work orders, every job Dovell Corliss Door Service had done within a few miles of that lot, and laid them across my kitchen table next to whatever photographs I had of the men who'd worked alongside me and Wade over the years.
I studied those photographs the way I'd studied the shoes in that footage, looking for a walk, a build, anything that might match a figure I could barely see to begin with. I convinced myself, more than once, that I'd found something. I hadn't. I had a kitchen table covered in faces that owed nothing to the truth, and a certainty I had no right to feel.
I didn't share any of it with the detective, not that week. I told myself I was being careful, waiting until I was sure. What I was actually doing, though I wouldn't understand it for twenty years, was teaching myself to see a stranger's shape and believe, against all caution, that I already knew the man inside it.