Chapter 345: A Needle In A Haystack

Tracing the source of the leak about Keeley had taken Aiden less than an hour. There was a lot to sort through but it was easy once he did it by date. Investigating all of the posts from the first few hours after the news hit had been child's play.

Multiple posts had come from people working at this tiny research laboratory called PharmaGen. From there it was easy to deduce who had said something. The only person Keeley knew who worked there was that guy Ryan who used to hang out at her apartment sometimes.

historical

With that out of the way, Aiden resumed his task of watching the footage of Lacy Knighton being dragged away over and over. Something about her overall movements and actions seemed off. He had spent a lot of time watching her over the years and she never acted like that before.

What if she was acting so funny because she was drugged? If she wasn't of sound mind (but was she ever? let's be honest) it would be much easier for the murderer to get her to a secondary location without much fuss.

The problem here was that Graydon Meyer or Michael Gray or whoever he was had an alibi. Aaron's suspicions about people had never been wrong. Aiden believed Meyer had killed her too but how had he gotten away with it?

According to the police report, Lacy was killed sometime between 1-2 PM. There was security footage of her being thrown out of Appzoid around 12:50. Sophie had found the body just after three and it had already cooled somewhat though it was too soon for rigor mortis to set in so it had to have been there for a little while.

Graydon Meyer's employees swore up and down that he hadn't left his office but no one physically saw him in the room until his appointment at three. It was entirely possible that he had slipped out, killed her quickly, and come back. But how?

The how wouldn't even matter if there was concrete proof that he was outside his office or with Lacy after she was forcibly evicted from Appzoid. Aiden's next task was to check every single surveillance camera on the street in front of the building to see how exactly she ended up in the Bronx.

It was extremely difficult work because there were dozens if not hundreds of people swarming the streets in each shot. This was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. More likely than not, it would take him days to look through each individual camera to find what he was looking for from the best angle.

He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes until he could go home. He was supposed to meet up with Nova and some of their in-game buddies after dinner. He could make it that long.

===

Aiden didn't get so much as a glimpse of what he was looking for over the next three days. There was a lot of footage to sort through but he also had to go back again and again, zoom in, and try to enhance the images as best he could.

When he finally did see something, it was two seconds of footage involving a dark-haired man pulling an inebriated woman with long black hair in an elegant updo into a cab. Unfortunately, the camera caught them from behind. The heights, builds, and hair colors matched Meyer and Lacy but that wasn't enough to go off of.

He wouldn't have caught it at all if not for the fact that the cab driver hadn't pulled all the way up to the curb so they had to take a couple steps off of the sidewalk to enter the vehicle. Otherwise the crowd would have obscured them completely.

When the cab pulled away, there was a split second where the license plate was visible. Aiden paused the footage and wrote it down just in case. But first he needed to check to see if any cameras from other angles managed to catch their faces. He didn't want to waste unnecessary time looking into that cab if it wasn't the right one.

The good news was that the same two seconds had been recorded on a different camera. The bad news was that it was even further away and required more touching up to get a semi-clear image.

But after a bit of work he saw that the woman was definitely Lacy Knighton and the man's featured were largely obscured by a huge pair of sunglasses. That wasn't suspicious at all.

"Bingo," Aiden muttered under his breath.

It had to be Meyer—they got into a cab in front of the building right next to Appzoid's offices. Now all he had to do was look into that cab and see if he was stupid enough to pay with a credit card.

He used the license plate to find out what company the cab was registered to and who drove it. It belonged to a man named Harry Ramone who worked for a company called Taxi Star. A little bit of digging showed that whoever used the cab matching the timestamp on the surveillance footage paid cash and didn't give a name.

How disappointing. Aiden sighed and was about to consider it a dead end when he thought of something that might save the lead.

His brief search into Taxi Star revealed that they had been having some property damage issues from their clients while inside the cabs. Dashboard cameras, aka dash cams, had become more and more popular for taxi and rideshare services these days.

With all the problems they were having..was there a chance Harry Ramone's taxi had one installed? Aiden hastily typed away until he found what he was looking for. A crazy grin lit his face and he immediately locked his workstation computer so he could go tell his boss the good news.

'You're busted, Meyer!' he thought victoriously as he jumped up and practically sprinted to the elevator in excitement.