She looked over at Rodney. “You okay to help go through all those camera feeds?”
“Yeah, we need to.”
She nodded. “Yes, exactly.” After the meeting broke up, she refilled her coffee mug and headed back to her desk. Rodney was already logging in to see the camera footage. “I’ll take half of them,” she said.
He nodded.
And they spent the rest of the morning, right up until the lunch hour, checking out all the cameras in the area of the cyclist’s death, looking for anything that would pinpoint their redheaded victim, but every camera seemed to be angled the wrong way. Finally they did catch sight of the victim, riding her bike forward, but saw nothing untoward. She just plopped over, almost crashing with the car. Instead it seemed as if the young woman on the bike had a haphazard fall in front of the vehicle—a small black car, which they were currently running potential makes and models of to see if anyone could match it.
From this feed, Kate couldn’t confirm that the car had even made contact with the woman on the bike.
But, at the same time, it wasn’t clear enough to get a license plate or an image of the driver, who had most definitely backed up and driven away very quickly. The way the redhead had fallen had also been so slow that Kate wouldn’t have expected the woman to have been hurt by the sheer fall either.
So Kate didn’t really blame the driver for leaving, yet she did blame him for leaving a crime scene, leaving a potentially injured person down on the street. He should have stopped and reached out to see if the woman needed anything. That her accident didn’t appear to be something major didn’t mean that it wasn’t.
She pointed out this section of video to Rodney, and he agreed. “But now we know she’s fallen, as if it’s not a major bike-car crash at all. She just went down, and the driver didn’t stick around to see if she got up again.”
“Finding out she’s dead, if he has by now,” she murmured, “must have come as a shock, and now he probably doesn’t know what to do.”
Just then, Kate got a call from the in-take desk out in the front. “We have a man here saying that he killed your cyclist at the university.”
She stared at the phone in her hand, then turned toward Rodney. She bolted to her feet. “Take him into Interview A, please.”
At that, Rodney hopped up, and the two of them walked over. As they entered the interrogation room, a young man, maybe twenty years old, stood nervously.
“You’ve got something to tell us?” she asked quietly. “Please have a seat.”
He nodded. “I don’t know how it happened. I was so careful.”
“How what happened?” she asked, motioning at the chair. “Sit down, please, and identify yourself.”
“My name is Matt, Matt Powell. And I was just driving toward the university. I know I was distracted. I had a really bad exam, and I was struggling. I went by the pizza place but decided against pizza. I went to the corner store, but I couldn’t find anything to eat, so I ended up just going around the block and coming back up, thinking I would head back to the university. And thenboom!This woman was right there. I didn’t even think I’d hit her. Honestly, it just looked like she collapsed sideways. There was no braking. I mean, obviously I braked, but there was no speed. There was no need to brake. There was no—”
He stopped talking, completely overwhelmed, and then he burst into tears. “I heard later that I’d killed her.” He was shaking. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to have anything to do with it.”
Kate sighed, looked over Rodney, and he nodded. “First, the problem is, you took off. You should have waited to make sure that she was okay.”
He looked at her, tears in his eyes. “But she didn’t even look like,… like anything was wrong with her. It looked like she was just falling. I pulled around and left. I didn’t do anything to help her.”
“Did you look back through your rearview mirror?” Kate asked.
“No.” Matt shook his head. “I didn’t even think of it. I just thought she’d had an accident, and then I heard… No, I saw her arm hit the street, and I didn’t think anything of it.” He stopped, looked at her. “I should have though, shouldn’t I?”
Kate nodded. “Yeah, that would have been the right thing to do.”
“But I couldn’t have helped her, could I?”
“Probably not, though I can’t say what condition she was in when you were there at the accident.”
“What do you mean?” He was obviously a little confused.
“How did she appear before you hit her?”
“I didn’t hit her. That’s the thing. I don’t think she touched the car. I think she just fell in front of me, so I pulled around her.”
“You didn’t wonder when she didn’t get back up again?”
“I thought I saw her there, as I went around, but she was on the other side of my car. Vehicles were everywhere, and I was trying to get out of the way. People were behind me.” Running his hands through his hair, he said, “I waited for some people to go by, then I pulled out and left. I didn’t even think she was hurt.” He stopped, shook his head. “My parents will kill me.”