On most mornings, Judy's alarm clock would barely get the opportunity to make any noise before she would shut it off. The morning following the assault of Holly Leaves, however, it took her several groggy and confused seconds of fumbling to silence the alarm. The initial investigation had stretched into the early hours of the morning, and she was feeling the cost of a lack of sleep. Still, in her mind, mere tiredness was not an excuse, and as she went through her normal morning exercise routine, she began to feel close to normal.

The weather outside seemed an almost perfect reflection of how she felt; the rain had stopped, but the day was sullenly overcast and gray. Dirty puddles of water had collected near some of the curbs, and the wind came in occasionally biting gusts. Despite the weather, when Nick finally met her at the coffee shop as usual, he was wearing his aviator shades. From the droop of his tail and ears, Judy guessed that he was at least as tired as she was, and the sunglasses were simply his ineffectual attempt at hiding it.

Her guess was confirmed when he took the aviators off as they entered the shop; his eyes were well below half-mast.

"Good morning, Mary. Not the usual today," Nick said to the barista before she had a chance to get their drinks started.

"Two large coffees. Extra strong, extra sweet. And whatever she wants," he said, gesturing to Judy.

The deer laughed. "You look like you need it. How about you, darling?" she asked of Judy.

Judy went with her regular order, but wondered if she should have gotten something stronger. Nick certainly seemed to perk up on their walk to the station as a result of his double-fisted drinking; considering the amount of caffeine and sugar he drank it would be more surprising if he didn't. When they got to the station, Judy immediately noticed that they weren't the only ones who looked tired. Behind the main desk in the lobby Clawhauser looked as though he was losing a battle against sleep despite the valiant effort he had taken, if the empty soda bottles were any indicator. Still, he immediately took notice of their arrival. "Judy! Nick! I did it!" he said proudly as he waved them over, "It took all night, but here you go!"

With that, he handed over a thick report that actually looked very professional except for a brightly colored smudge on the first page from what appeared to be a crushed sprinkle. Judy felt a stab of guilt as she remembered that Nick had asked Clawhauser to put together a report of all of Holly Leaves's past roles and any mammals who might be holding a grudge. Nick had pretty obviously only requested it to get Clawhauser to release his death grip, but she had gone along with it. "Wow, Clawhauser," Nick said, "This looks great! This is going to be a big help. You've really gone above and beyond."

Clawhauser glowed at the praise, "Anything to help."

As they walked away, Nick started flipping through the report. "He actually was very thorough," Nick said, "We can... Oh, don't look at me like that."

"Like what?" Judy asked innocently, as though she hadn't been non-verbally guilt-tripping him.

"Like I just swindled Clawhauser out of his pension. I wasn't expecting him to go this far. Look, I'll get him something nice. Like doughnuts. Or Holly Leaves's autograph."

Judy smiled, "I'm sure he'll appreciate her autograph."

Nick shook his head in mock despair, "You're a terrible influence on me, you know that?"

Judy chuckled, but she was proud of how far Nick had come. It made her happy to see him care about the feelings of others, even if he was still cagey about expressing it honestly.

The morning meeting had gone as it usually did, but Bogo had something more for Nick and Judy than merely confirming the case they were on. "The mayor is holding a press conference this morning," he explained, "The two of you will be back here at 11 AM. No excuses. Is that clear?"

When they had responded in the affirmative, he replied, "Good. Be careful out there," and went back to his office without a backwards glance.

"You know, Carrots, I think Bogo is actually warming up to me," Nick said cheerily as they walked to their cruiser, "That almost sounded like concern back there."

"Then why don't we find out what he'll think of you if we solve this case?" Judy asked as she started the car.

"Oh, I fully intend to," Nick said, flipping his aviator shades down over his eyes as they drove off.

Roger Cony, the superintendent of the apartment building, was a rabbit who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, his brown fur liberally shot through with gray. He walked with a slight limp, but he otherwise appeared to be in excellent shape. He was dressed in a somewhat grimy looking tank top and paint-stained jeans. "A pleasure to meet you, Officer Hopps," he said warmly, "I'm a big fan. Really appreciate what you've done to show the world what bunnies can do."

Judy had gotten similar reactions plenty of times, but still found it awkward. Thankfully, the superintendent had spun to greet Nick as well without waiting for a response, so she didn't have to figure out what to say. "Are Holly and her boyfriend OK?" he asked once the round of introductions was done, "It's terrible what happened, just terrible."

"Holly's OK," Judy said, "And her boyfriend's still in the hospital."

"Terrible," Cony repeated, "I can't believe it happened."

"Then you can help us make sure that whoever did it doesn't get away with it," Nick said.

Judy took the lead from there, explaining that they wanted to view the footage from the cameras.

"Sure, sure. The security room's in the basement. We'll have to take the elevator, I'm afraid. I busted my ankle pretty bad skiing, hmm, eleven years ago now, and it still bothers me when it rains," Cony said.

As he spoke he pulled up on his left pant leg to show his ankle. There was a thick, twisted scar that overlapped with a perfectly straight and somewhat narrower surgical scar. "Taught me I was getting too old to be doing double black diamonds, though, so it's not a total waste!" he said with a laugh.

"Don't worry about it, the elevator's fine," Judy said, having no intention of forcing him to take the stairs.

It didn't take very long for the elevator to arrive once Cony hit the button to summon it. Once the three of them were inside, he hit the button labeled "B." "Can all of the residents access the basement?" Nick asked.

"Oh sure," Cony replied, "We've got storage down here for 'em. C'mon."

He waved them out of the elevator and into the basement. The basement was, like the building above it, L-shaped. The main area had been divided using chain-link fencing that rain from the floor to the ceiling to create a number of large storage units. Most of the cages were filled with cardboard boxes, and other odds and ends like bicycles and artificial Christmas trees. The area that the residents had access to wasn't as large as the entire building; at each of the ends of the L-shaped area were unlabeled doors. "We've got a furnace, water heater, and air-conditioner for each of the wings," Cony explained, "North wing that-a-way, and East wing this-a-way. The security room for the entire building is this way too."

He made his way towards what he had identified as the mechanical room for the East wing. "Is there anything on the side for the North wing that isn't on the side for the East wing?" Judy asked as they followed him, easily keeping up with the limping rabbit.

Cony shrugged. "An old staircase to ground level from when this building had a coal-fired furnace, but I don't even have the key for that door. Don't think anyone's opened it in years. Now let me show you the security room."

He unlocked the door with a key he pulled from the large ring of them at his waist, and led them through a space dominated by a furnace to a closet-sized room set off in one corner. There was nothing in the security room but a battered chair and a table with a computer on it. The computer connected to the cameras looked like it hadn't been state of the art twenty years ago, and the years that had passed since the cameras were installed had not been kind. It had a small CRT monitor connected to a boxy beige tower that had yellowed with age. Now that she had seen the computer itself, Judy was impressed that the technicians had been able to copy the data off of it even if they didn't have the ability to view the footage on their own systems. "There's three cameras on every floor, excepting the main floor, which has four, and the basement, which has just the one" the superintendent said, as he opened the viewing program.

The fans inside the computer wheezed into motion at an alarmingly high pitch, but Cony simply raised his voice and continued. "Each camera takes a picture every three seconds. The computer here keeps each picture for eight hours before recording over it."

Judy had been writing this all down. "Are they still recording?" she asked loudly to be heard over the ancient computer.

Cony nodded. "Ayuh. I switched cassettes, see?"

He indicated the computer tower. Looking at it more closely, Judy saw that it had two bays, each of which had been marked with a label. Age had made the labels start peeling, but the text was still perfectly clear; one indicated "WRITE ONLY" and the other "READ ONLY." Each bay had a large black plastic cassette in it. "We got three cassettes, so I rotate 'em every week, make sure they still work."

The third cassette was in a plastic container to the side of the computer. To Judy, it looked a bit like a VHS cassette, down to the magnetic tape that was visible through a clear window in the cassette. "So you never have more than twenty-four hours of footage?" Nick asked.

Cony shrugged. "Mr. Drove–he's the one who owned the building when I started working here, that was almost forty years ago, you know–went with the cheapest system that'd keep the insurance company happy. That was back in, oh, '94 he had the cameras put in. His son took over two years ago and is just as cheap, I'm afraid. Hope you won't tell him I said that though!"

Judy waved off his concern. "Of course we won't. When do you normally swap the cassettes out?"

"Saturdays," Cony replied.

That meant that the footage on the cassette in the "READ ONLY" bay of the computer was the only footage from the day of the crime. While they had been talking, the viewing program had finally loaded and the computer's fans had settled down to a low droning hum. "OK, lessee..." Cony muttered to himself, "Floor six, East wing, that'll be camera... eighteen."

He pulled up the footage of the camera feed. There was a time stamp at the bottom of the grainy image that showed it to be from 12:02 PM of the previous day. The camera was positioned above the window to the fire escape so that it had a view down to the end of the hall but not of the fire escape itself. The doors of Holly Leaves's apartment and the one opposite it were clearly visible. As Cony went through the footage at an accelerated clip, there wasn't much in the way of noticeable changes. Some of Holly's neighbors were caught on the tape coming and going, and Holly herself arrived back at her apartment at around a quarter to 6. At 6:18 PM, the criminal appeared in the footage, entering the frame from the side of the hallway closest to the camera. "Could you stop the playback?" Judy asked.

Cony complied, leaving the still image of the perpetrator on the screen. The image was black and white, which meant that what Holly had said about the color of the criminal's raincoat could not be confirmed. Otherwise, the details matched exactly; the mammal was wearing a large raincoat with the hood up that obscured the lines of their body and was holding a large bouquet of flowers. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything that would help confirm species. The mammal was wearing dark, baggy pants, large boots, and gloves. There was simply no fur or skin visible, but the image wasn't totally useless. Judging from the height of the mammal compared to the height of the door, the criminal couldn't be any shorter than about two-and-a-half feet. From how baggy the raincoat was, it was possible that the criminal had hunched over to disguise their true height, but even then Judy didn't think that they could be more than about four-and-a-half feet tall. There was a huge range of mammals living in the city between two-and-a-half and four-and-a-half feet tall, but it was a start. All they had to do, Judy thought, was to keep eliminating possibilities until they were down to one. "Start the playback again, please," Judy said.

The events that transpired in the low frame rate video continued to match Holly's testimony. The mammal in the raincoat knocked on the door to Holly's apartment, and when the door opened a crack, the mammal jammed their bouquet into the door and shortly after pushed the door open. The camera couldn't capture what had gone on in the apartment, but at 6:21 PM, per the time stamp, Jacques Lapin entered the frame from the other end of the hallway as he exited the stairwell. When he got to the open apartment door Jacques had entered, and at 6:22 PM the mammal in the raincoat left and hurried back down the hallway to the same side he had entered from.

As the playback continued, nothing of any particular interest happened. The first responders and paramedics arrived at 6:43 PM and carried Jacques out of the apartment on a stretcher, and the police moved around until the video abruptly stopped at 7:16 PM. "That's when I pulled the cassette," Cony explained.

"How are the cameras laid out on the first floor?" Nick asked, "Why are there four instead of three?"

"There are cameras at the end of each hall, like all the other floors, and one with a view of the elevator and stairs. The last camera is for the emergency exit," Cony said.

Judy recalled that when they had first arrived at the apartment complex the previous night, they had seen the ground level emergency exit at the back of the building. All of the other floors just had the fire escapes at the ends of the halls.

"Could you show us the feed from the lobby?" Nick asked.

Cony pulled it up, and went through the footage. Unlike the camera from the sixth floor hallway, the camera in the lobby had a fish eye lens that captured the entire room in somewhat distorted form. From where the camera was positioned above the main entrance, however, it couldn't capture what was directly outside the building. Jacques Lapin entered the lobby's vestibule and used the intercom at 6:16 PM. Struggling slightly with his own enormous bouquet of flowers, he had entered the main lobby and went through the door to the stairwell. Judy frowned thoughtfully and looked at her notes. There had only been about a two minute gap between when Holly had buzzed Jacques into the building, and would consequently be expecting a visitor with flowers, and when the criminal had entered the sixth floor through the fire exit. "Thanks, Mr. Cony." Judy said, "We might be back in a bit, but there's something that I want to check out first."

The older rabbit shrugged. "Sure, suit yourself. Just give me a call if you need to get back in."

Once they were outside and at the side of the building with the fire escape, Judy turned to Nick. "I want you to time how long it takes me to get to the sixth floor, OK?"

Nick nodded and pulled out his phone. "Ready whenever you are," he said as he pulled up the stopwatch app.

"I'm ready," Judy said.

"Go!" Nick shouted as he started the timer.

Judy leaped from the street to the ladder to the second floor fire escape, and rapidly pulled herself up. She continued climbing up the fire escapes as quickly as she could until she reached the sixth floor. Once there, she yelled down at Nick, "Did you get it?"

He nodded and gave her the thumbs up. Once she was back down to ground level, Nick showed her the screen of the phone. "Not bad at all, Carrots. Forty-eight seconds."

"I looked around from the top. About the only way you'd be able to see the main entrance from the fire escape is if you were a giraffe," Judy said, thinking out loud, "They must have come from the street level."

"Whatever mammal that was on the video, it definitely wasn't a giraffe," Nick replied, "And I see where you're going with this. How did they know that Holly had buzzed her boyfriend up?"

"Right?" Judy said excitedly, "Look! You can only see into the lobby if you're standing right in front of the main entrance!"

It was true. The front door was glass reinforced with vertical metal bars, but there were no other windows into the lobby on the exterior of the building. The distance between the front door and the door out of the vestibule was such that there was a very narrow viewing angle for seeing if somebody entered the lobby itself. "You think one of the buildings across the street has a camera that looks at the front of this one?" Nick asked, stepping away from the apartment building to survey the businesses across the street from the curb.

He turned in place, taking in the various businesses that might have a view of it. "Maybe," Judy said distractedly, turning back to the building to imagine how it had gone.

She imagined the criminal watching the main entrance, maybe standing near the entrance to the building or from across the street. Maybe they were already wearing the raincoat, or maybe they had stashed it on the sixth floor fire escape. Once they saw Jacques get buzzed in, they would have had to hurry. Judy was in excellent shape and a good climber, and it had taken her nearly a minute to go from ground level to the sixth floor using the fire escape. The criminal would have had to have made it from where they had been watching to the base of the fire escape, made the climb, and then broken in. To do all of that in about two minutes was very fast. As she thinking about the crime, she wasn't paying any real attention to the sound of a car accelerating past on the street until she heard an enormous splash of water and a yelp of surprise.

She quickly spun around to see that Nick had apparently been splashed by a car driving through one of the puddles near the curb. His uniform was soaked through, and the normally cream colored patch of fur from the bottom of his muzzle to the collar of his shirt was stained a light brown. Droplets of the dirty water dripped from his body in an undignified manner, and his tail, usually incredibly fluffy looking, had lost most of its volume as the wet fur clung to his skin. "Nick," Judy gasped, "They did that on purpose! Did you catch the plate? Can you describe the-"

Nick cut her off with an airy wave of his paw. "It's my fault, Carrots. I know better than to stand next to the curb after it rains. See, this is why I need my sleep," he said lightly, brushing off her concern and giving every outward appearance that it didn't bother him at all.

Judy knew better than to believe that it didn't affect him, and wasn't about to let it slide. "I heard them speeding up, Nick! It's not your fault."

"I didn't see the car, so there's nothing we can do anyway. Besides, it's not like driving through a puddle is a crime, either. Just let it go, OK?"

"Nick–"

"Please, Judy. It's not worth it."

His use of her actual name tripped her up. Even though they had known each other for months, he called her by name very rarely, and only when he was being serious. She sighed. "Alright, fine. But Nick, you're soaked. Come on, let's get back to the station so you can change."

"My place is closer than the station," Nick said, "It'll be faster and my shower is better."

"Are you sure?" Judy asked, blinking in surprise.

She had never seen his place before, and she couldn't deny to herself that she was curious. "Positive," he said as he retrieved a blanket from the trunk of the police car and did his best to dry off.

"I'll even let you drive," Nick said as he put the blanket over the passenger seat of the car to keep it dry, "Come on, I'll navigate."