The Missing Ten Minutes

Detective Reeve Halston hadn't thought about the Voss case in months. He remembered it, though, the way he remembered every file that had closed faster than his gut wanted it to.

Single-vehicle accident. Wet road, worn tires, a hairpin curve with three prior near-misses on record. Ruled mechanical failure and closed within eleven days — fast, even by the department's stretched standards.

"I need you to pull it," Marlowe said, sitting across his desk with a folder of printed emails and a voice memo of a seven-year-old's shaking testimony. "Please."

Halston listened to the whole thing twice before he said anything. Then he pulled the old file.

The brake-line report was thinner than he remembered. A single paragraph: consistent with wear-related failure. No photographs of the actual brake components. No secondary review. Signed off by a technician who, Halston now recalled with a sour taste, had left the department under a cloud eighteen months later for cutting corners on three other cases.

"This should've gone deeper," he muttered.

"There's more." Marlowe slid the emails across. "And a witness who says another car was at the scene. A car that isn't in your report anywhere."

Halston rubbed his jaw. A living witness changed everything, even one small enough to still believe in the tooth fairy — especially with corroborating documents.

"I'll request the traffic cam footage from that stretch," he said. "There's a camera near the gas station a quarter mile up. If a second vehicle was tailing that closely, it might've clipped the frame."

It took two days for the request to come back.

Halston read the response twice, then a third time, sure he was misreading it.

The ten-minute window covering the time of the crash — and only that window — had been logged as corrupted. Overwritten. Gone.

Someone had already thought of the camera. Months ago, back when the case was still fresh enough for someone to think that far ahead.