Page 40 of The System

“You ran?” Kieran laughed a little.

“Basically, yes. I ran up my stairs and into my bedroom to change and then kind of moved very quietly and slowly back down the stairs and out to my car. I thought I’d grab dinner somewhere, but I saw this place and decided to have popcorn and a movie instead. What made you want to see this particular movie?”

“I didn’t, really. It was this or the horror film that starts in about twenty minutes.”

“Not a fan of horror?”

“No, I am, but it’s two hours long and starts in twenty minutes. I’m too exhausted to wait it out. This one seemed okay. I like Kenzie Smyth, so I just bought the ticket.”

“You know it’s a movie about her falling in love with another woman, right?”

“Her wife in real life. Yeah, I looked it up when I first sat down. I’d never heard of it, but I guess it was a passion project of theirs. They produced it together, too. The article I saw said it’s not exactly the story of how they met and fell in love, but they took some parts of that and put it in here.”

“You read up on it, huh?”

“I had nothing else to do,” Kieran replied. “I answered all the trivia questions they ran on the screen, so I thought, ‘Why not look it up and read about it until it starts?’”

Carina smiled at her and asked, “How did it go with your sister?”

“She still wants to do the interview. But do you think we can talk about something else? I came here to escape all that.”

“Sure. Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. It’s not really about her doing the interview. It was me trying to ask how it was, seeing her again.”

Kieran ate some popcorn and said, “Fine, I guess. I mean, it’s hard still, but it might always be, huh? She’s in jail and doesn’t want to listen to me because she hates that I’m out here, and she’s in there.”

“She said that to you?”

“Not in those words, but I got that vibe, yeah. Diego is going to talk to her about the interview thing. She’s pretty insistent because she says she’s innocent and wants to tell people that.”

“Most people in her position say they’re innocent, though,” Carina pointed out.

“She knows that. I reminded her, too. She insisted that she was on a bus when it happened, on her way out of town, and that she didn’t even know anything had happened to Nick until a few days later. It’s the same thing she told me when we first met, no deviations, and she even had the bus number that she took to get to the main station.”

Carina turned to the screen to see a trivia question about an old movie appear. She knew the answer but didn’t say it out loud. She knew they shouldn’t be talking about this. She should just say the answer out loud to sound smart to Kieran, and they could change the topic and talk about anything other than this case, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“I know about the bus story. She gave her alibi to Dylan.”

“And?” Kieran turned to her a little.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about this,” Carina pointed out.

“I don’t, really, but you seem to have something to say about it.”

Carina swallowed and said, “We looked into it, Kieran. It doesn’t seem like she’s telling the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s in discovery, so Diego will see it, if he hasn’t had an investigator find it already.”

“Find what?” Kieran asked.

“The video. Buses all have cameras in them. Even then. The mayor back then was smart when he got elected because there had been a lot of petty crimes in and around bus stops and on buses before the election. He ran on a reducing-crime platform, and the first thing he did was put cameras into the buses and at all the major bus stops, too.”

“And, what? You found the footage from eight years ago? How did you–”

“He was smart, like I said. He didn’t just get cameras; he has the footage uploaded to a remote server at the end of every day. The footage is archived.”

Kieran turned to her more fully and asked, “You’ve seen it?”

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