Chapter 5 - What The Camera Saw
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Mrs. Kowalski arrived on Thursday morning with soup in a container that leaked slightly at the lid.
She wore her bakery coat under her winter jacket.
She smelled of yeast and sugar and cold air.
She told the nurse at the desk that she was Sophia's aunt.
The nurse, who had met Sophia's actual circumstances in the chart, chose not to argue.
She set the soup down and took Sophia's left hand in both of hers.
She said the shop looked wrong with its lights off.
She said the street looked wrong too.
Then she looked at Declan, who had risen when she entered.
She said she had not come only with soup.
Jamie was sent for at Declan's quiet instruction.
He arrived within the hour with a laptop and a young man from his team who said very little.
Mrs. Kowalski explained about the camera above the bakery door.
It was old.
It was pointed at her own entrance because teenagers had stolen tip money the previous spring.
It also caught, at the edge of its frame, the corner of Wexford Street and the roofline of the building opposite Sophia's shop.
Her nephew had helped her save the recording before it overwrote itself.
She said she had watched it three times.
She said she did not like what watching it a fourth time would make her certain of.
The young man opened the file.
The picture was grainy and washed with streetlight.
Sophia saw herself lock the shop door.
She saw Declan take her bag.
She saw them walk, herself on the building side and Declan toward the street, as they always walked.
She heard herself make a small sound and asked Jamie to pause it.
He paused it.
She said she did not want to watch the next part yet.
Declan asked if she wanted them to stop entirely.
She shook her head.
She said she wanted a minute, not mercy.
Mrs. Kowalski held her hand tighter.
When Sophia nodded, the recording resumed.
The sedan swung around the corner with its headlights high.
Sophia's image lurched as her boot went.
At the same instant, in the upper corner of the frame, something moved on the rooftop across the street.
Jamie froze the picture.
He enlarged it until the grain broke into blocks.
A man lay prone near the edge of the roof with something long braced in front of him.
The muzzle flash, when Jamie advanced the frames one by one, did not come from the sedan at all.
It came from the roof.
The sedan had not carried the shooter.
The sedan had carried the light.
It had been timed to blind them, to turn their heads, to make every witness look in the wrong direction.
Sophia stared at the frozen rooftop figure.
She asked whether the sedan driver had even known about the man above him.
Jamie said they did not know yet.
He said the driver had abandoned the car and vanished before any police unit reached the block.
He said a shooter on a roof changed the work entirely.
A street shooting could be impulse.
A rooftop position had to be chosen in advance.
Someone had known Declan's route that night.
Someone had known he would walk those three blocks on foot, on the street side, at that hour.
Declan stood behind the laptop with his face unreadable.
He asked Jamie about the silver rook pin from the traffic camera.
Jamie hesitated.
He said the young man had cleaned that footage too.
He turned to a second file.
The man leaving the sedan wore a jacket with something bright at the lapel.
Enlarged, the bright shape was not a pin at all.
It was a paper bakery sticker, the kind Mrs. Kowalski's staff pressed onto delivery coats in winter to advertise a holiday loaf.
Mrs. Kowalski leaned closer and then sat back hard.
She said every shop on the block had received a bundle of those stickers that week.
She said anyone could have taken one from a counter.
Declan asked about the shell casing.
Jamie said the caliber was common to half the crews in the city if a man knew where to buy.
He said it was exactly the kind of detail a person would plant if he wanted investigators to stop looking once they saw it.
No one in the room said Anton Sorin's name for several seconds.
Sophia said it for them.
She asked whether the Thursday meeting was the reason someone had needed Declan dead on Monday.
Declan looked at her with surprise she was too tired to enjoy.
She said tailors hear more than men think while they are being measured.
She said she knew the meeting was meant to end a war.
She said she knew it would make some of his income legitimate and cut off other income entirely.
She said men did not usually arrange peace unless peace cost somebody money.
Jamie glanced at Declan.
Declan nodded once, granting permission no one had formally requested.
He told her Sorin had as much to gain from the meeting as he did.
He told her Sorin had buried two nephews in the last three years.
He told her Sorin had asked for the meeting himself.
Sophia considered that with the part of her mind that had always been good at fitting pieces that did not appear to belong together.
Then someone wanted it to look like Sorin, she said.
Declan said that was now the most likely truth.
She asked who profited if the meeting failed.
He did not answer quickly enough to pretend the list was short.
That afternoon, Sophia was discharged into instructions printed on three sheets of paper.
No lifting with her right arm.
No work for at least two weeks.
Follow up in ten days.
She signed with her left hand in a signature that looked like a stranger's.
A hospital clerk brought the final packet to the door as Declan was helping her, very carefully, into a coat Jamie had brought from her apartment.
Sophia opened the packet because paperwork was a language she trusted more than reassurance.
The balance page said zero.
She read it twice.
She turned to the itemized sheet behind it.
Paid in full, the sheet said, by a third party.
The shop's rent for the next three months was not in the packet, but the landlord's receipt was.
Jamie had left it in her bag that morning without comment, folded inside her book where the chalk mark had been.
She understood all of it at once.
The hospital.
The rent.
The wool merchant, whose payment she had worried over the day before, would no doubt discover his account settled as well.
She looked up at Declan with an anger so clean it steadied her voice.
You bought it, she said.
He said he had paid what needed paying.
She said that was the same sentence with better tailoring.
He said she would have lost the shop.
She said it was her shop to lose.
The clerk retreated discreetly.
Jamie suddenly found the window fascinating.
Sophia held the packet in her left hand and felt it shake, which made her angrier than the payment itself.
She told Declan she was not a debt he could settle to make himself feel absolved.
She told him she was not a building he could purchase around herself while she was too injured to stand in the doorway.
She told him if he wanted to help, he could carry her bag and drive her home and ask before he spent a single cent in her name again.
Declan received each sentence without defense.
Color had risen in his face, not from embarrassment but from restraint.
He said she was right that he should have asked.
He said he was not sorry it was paid.
She said that was not an apology.
He said he knew.
She said men who knew rarely stopped at knowing.
He picked up her bag.
He said he would drive her home.
He said he would ask next time, if she permitted a next time to exist.
She permitted nothing out loud.
But she let him support her right side, where she could not support herself, all the way to the car.
The apartment above Reyes Tailoring was small and cold from two days without heat at full strength.
Jamie went ahead to turn the radiators up and to check every room in the unobtrusive way of a man who had checked rooms for a living.
Sophia climbed the narrow stairs slowly, refusing to be carried.
Declan stayed one step below her with his hand ready and not touching.
On the landing, she stopped.
The shop door below was shut.
Something had been slipped beneath it that morning after Jamie locked up, or pushed through the mail slot and fallen just inside where she could see it through the glass panel beside the stairs.
It was an envelope.
It was long and black, with no stamp and no name.
Jamie saw it at the same moment she did.
His expression changed before he could hide the change.
He went down the stairs alone and picked it up with two fingers, as if the paper itself might be listening.
He brought it up without opening it.
Declan took it from him.
Inside was a single tailor's measuring tape, cut cleanly in half.
Beneath it was a card with four words printed in plain block capitals.
NEXT TIME, AIM HIGHER.
Sophia read the card over Declan's arm.
The cold that went through her had nothing to do with the apartment.
Declan folded the card back into the envelope with terrible calm.
He looked at Jamie.
Jamie was already on his phone.
May you like
Sophia understood, standing on her own landing in her own home, that the threat had not been left for Declan at all.
It had been left where she would be the one to find it.
