Nick nodded, and his hands were already moving, copying, labeling, storing, building the archive the way he built everything, to code, to last. In a white room across town their son slept under his bandage with a nurse sitting in his mother's chair, and on Oakridge Drive the sun came up ordinary and gold over the lawns, as if a sentence typed three days before a brick had not just renamed everything it touched.
Chapter Nine
Pictures From the Sky
Nick had never been a man who asked for help easily, but grief, he was learning, rewires a person the way a surge rewires a house. By the second morning he had a list on the kitchen table, and the first name on it belonged to a friend from his college days, a quiet man who had gone into data and analytics for a satellite imaging firm and who owed Nick a decade of small favors he had never once collected. Nick called him from the hospital corridor with Logan's monitor beeping softly through the door behind him and explained, in the flat voice he used for facts, what he needed.
There was a silence on the line. Then his friend said, "Send me the address and the time window. And Nick. I am so sorry."
The images arrived within hours. Satellites passed over Fulton County on their patient rounds and photographed the earth without opinion, and some of those passes had crossed Oakridge Drive in the seventy two hours around the attack. Nick spread the overhead snapshots across the hospital tray table beside his son's bed, time stamped, angle marked, and there was his street from above, his own roof, his own yard, the pale ribbon of his driveway. And there, in the frame from the afternoon itself, sat a dark shape at the curb in front of the cream colored house. A black pickup, caught by a machine in the sky that did not know it was taking evidence.
"There you are," Nick whispered.
Satellite pictures could place the truck. They could not name it. For that he went to the county's own eyes. Traffic cameras watched the arterials and the intersections around the subdivision, and a records request put the footage on his laptop by evening. Frame by frame, the way a man steps across ice, Nick followed the black pickup through the geography of that afternoon. In at the subdivision entrance at a time he wrote down. Slow past the stop sign, in no hurry at all, a vehicle doing rounds rather than passing through. Out again minutes later at a pace that was no longer slow.
The license plate was covered. Of course it was covered; these were men who had thought about the obvious things. But men who think about the obvious things often miss the second thing, and in three frames at the last intersection, where the truck turned wide and the afternoon sun came in low and sideways, the cover sat crooked. A few digits showed. Enough. A partial plate is a thread, and Nick pulled it the way he had been trained to pull every thread, through registration records, through the databases his friend's firm could lawfully touch, through one long night of cross referencing until the matches narrowed and narrowed and then stood still.
The truck was registered to Dave Thompson.
Nick sat with the name for a while before he let himself learn the man. Dave Thompson, former security guard. Fired from the firm that employed him after a physical altercation with a teenager, a boy whose offense had been existing in the wrong parking lot with the wrong tone of voice. A record of misconduct filed and then, apparently, forgotten by everyone whose job it was to remember. A small house two towns over. And photographs from an HOA neighborhood event showed Thompson in a tactical vest, standing beside the black truck with one boot on the running board, smiling the smile of a man who has mistaken a costume for a calling.
Nick printed the registration. He printed the satellite frame with the dark shape at his curb. He printed the three traffic frames with the crooked cover and the digits showing like teeth. He laid them in a row on the tray table and looked at them for a long moment.
Allison watched him from her chair, Logan's fingers curled around one of hers, his breathing soft under the bandage. "Tell me," she said.
"His name is Dave Thompson," Nick said. "The truck is his. He used to be a security guard until he put his hands on a teenager and got fired for it. After that, the HOA gave him a vest and a title and a truck with no plates, and he drove it to our house."
"Dave Thompson," Allison repeated, slowly, the way she repeated the names of Logan's medicines so she would never forget them. "The tall one. The one who went to the tailgate."
"The tall one," Nick said. "The one who threw it."