VII

"Hey, Dave," Natalia said, walking into the AV lab. "Is that the security footage from our body dump this morning?"

The ponytailed tech didn't take his eyes from the screen. "Yeah, I just got it. It's pretty dark, though. Not sure what you're hoping to get off it."

"Can you fast forward to midnight?" she asked, standing next to him.

Dave pressed a few buttons and the video immediately began zooming forward. "Looking for anything in particular?"

"Time of death on our victim was somewhere around 2 o'clock in the morning," Natalia explained. "I figure our killer would want to dump the body as soon as possible."

Dave slowed down the fast-forwarding when they reached the recording of midnight. He scrolled through carefully, watching closely for any changes on the screen. When the timestamp at the bottom of the video read 3:45 a.m., a car pulled up to the curb. Dave quickly switched the video from fast-forward to real-time playback.

They both watched with narrowed eyes as a man in a black jacket climbed out of the car. They couldn't see his face, as he had a dark baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes.

"The video being in black and white doesn't help much," Dave remarked. "But I'd say you're looking for a middle-aged caucasian male, about 5-10, 5-11 maybe?"

The man in the video went back to the trunk of his car, opened it and began lifting out the body of the woman found in the dumpster. Natalia's stomach clenched at the sight. She and Dave stood silently as he carried her from his car back toward the alley.

"Freeze it," Natalia suddenly said.

Dave complied. He looked at the screen, but then at Natalia, confused.

"There's nothing really to see here..." he began hesitantly.

Natalia pointed to the top right corner of the screen. "Can you pull in tighter on this spot?"

Dave did as she asked, magnifying that portion of the screen. He still didn't see anything, just a blurry bit of light.

"What is that?" he asked her.

"It rained last night," Natalia said quickly, starting to get excited about possible catching a break in the case. "I found dark spots on the pavement where it was still a little damp. We're looking at a puddle."

Dave grinned, catching on. "You thinking we caught our guy's reflection on tape?"

Natalia looked at him excitedly. "Think you can get anything off it?"

Dave shrugged and started playing around with the image on the screen. "I might be able to move a couple pixels around and extrapolate an image, but it'll take some time. And I have to warn you, any image I get will be blurry at best. The ripples on the water's surface is gonna distort it."

"Would it be enough for the facial comparison software?" Natalia asked him, hoping upon hope for some good luck.

"I doubt it," he said disappointedly. He thought for a moment. "But I might be able to get enough to recreate his face in a digital composite."

"Like a sketch artist's rendition?" she asked, impressed and curious.

"Kind of," he answered, still tinkering with the image. "I have a program that draws out any prominent features that can be detected from the reflection. Then it adds its own digital components that fill in the missing stuff using biomechanics."

"Sounds fancy," Natalia commented.

Dave grinned. "It is very fancy. The final image might be too compromised to run through facial recognition software in, say, the driver's license database, but it could help put one of your suspects at the scene."

Natalia folded her arms in front of her. "At this point... I'll take whatever we can get. This guy in not going to stop until we make him."

Author's Note: So Nat thought to look for the guy's reflection in the puddle, she's so smart! :D Will it work? I dunno. ;P Please review? They've been dropping off recently. Is it the short chapters, do they annoy you guys or something? You're probably just all busy ;P. Hope to hear from you! Special thanks to Mel, Hobby-Writing, fergie, MrsGCallen and csimiamifreak for being my most consistent reviewers! :D