Chapter 10 - The Missing Minute
I didn't touch the blue star. I called the nurse and asked her to place it in a container. Leo told us he'd kept it in his pocket because it matched his dinosaur's eyes.
"Who gave them to you?" I asked gently.
"Lady with silver bracelets. She said I was a good boy."
I remembered a woman behind the diner counter, dressed too elegantly to be a waitress. She'd been smiling at families and handing children little prizes. I hadn't noticed her bracelets. My phone held a blurry picture of Leo taken five minutes before everything happened. Behind his shoulder stood a woman in white with three silver bands on one wrist.
Her name, Lena said when I showed her, was Dana Dorsey. Calvin's wife. She had designed the Lucky Stars promotion herself.
Detective Grant took the original videos from Walter and Lena, logged the two recovered stars, and requested the diner's full camera archive.
"We'll need to establish who handed what to whom," she warned me. "A memory and a photograph are leads, not a verdict."
That was the first thing anyone had said in days that made me feel safer. She wanted the truth, not a dramatic headline.
The diner produced a video file. It began thirty seconds before Jax approached our booth. It ended as he moved Leo toward the table. A minute was missing. No expulsion of the star. No ambulance. No owner lifting the jar.
"System failure," Malcolm told the detective in an email. "Old equipment."
Grant showed me the file properties. "The export date is yesterday. That's not the same thing as the date the footage was recorded."
"Can you get the original?"
"We're asking."
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That evening, someone slipped an envelope under my apartment door. Inside was a restaurant receipt stamped 6:14 P.M., the exact minute Leo collapsed. Across the back, in hurried black pen, someone had written:
THE BACK CAMERA DIDN'T FAIL. CHECK THE FREEZER OFFICE.
