Under The Tape

Part 1, Chapter 1: Empty Case

The incident room's dark when Ross shoulders the door. It's late. No one's here. His desk lamp's the only light.

A USB sits on his keyboard with a yellow note in Owen's neat hand: "Hotel cams. Street cams. No faces."

"Good man," Ross says. He plugs it in, wakes the PC, and throws the first file up on the wall.

Grainy corridor. Two hooded figures in gloves. No faces. No skin. They move past the lens. That's it.

Next clip: the function hall. The rig. The victim tied to a chair. Then it turns ugly. Close, clear, and brutal. Blood. The block forced in. Tape. The lift. The body jerks. More blood. Nothing helpful. No face. No voice. No distinctive anything. Just gore.

The door opens. Cara walks in with two coffees, sets one by his hand, and stares at the screen.

"You're welcome," she says.

"I was about to beg," he says, eyes on the wall.

They watch. It gets worse, not smarter. Every shot's framed too tight or too wide. Every angle hides a face. Both suspects keep their hoods up. Gloves never come off. No logos. No plates. Just horror in high resolution.

Cara exhales. "Anything?"

"Nothing," Ross says. "Just pain."

She nods, jaw tight. "Alright. We log it, we store it, we don't run it again unless we have to. No point burning our heads for zero return."

"Agreed." He kills that clip and tries another. Same story. Hood. Gloves. Blood. No tells.

They stand there a while without talking, letting the ugly play out and end. The room feels smaller when the screen goes black.

"This case is big," Cara says. "But we've handled big cases before."

"We have," Ross says. "Different faces. Same grind."

She looks at him. "We've solved dozens like this. Not the same flair, sure. But we've had no-face, no-plate, nothing-but-a-timetable cases. We got them. We'll get this."

"We will," he says. "We know what to do when a video gives us nothing. We build from everything else."

She moves to the whiteboard and clicks a pen. "I'll ensure some officers do the basics again. Hotel guest list. Rota. Contractor badges. Door-to-door for any doorbell cams the hotel didn't give us. Re-run ANPR within a tighter window."

"Pull patrol notebooks for the nights in question," Ross adds. "Any 'nothing to report' near the sites. People write small things that matter later."

"I'll make sure they check nearby tills for cash withdrawals that match the timeframe," she says. "ATMs, corner shops. It's tedious, but it works."

"It always does," he says. "We've built bigger cases on less."

She gives him a small look. "We have. Remember the warehouse strangler? First week was a ghost. We got him on a torn glove behind a rack and a receipt for rope. Took time. We still closed it."

"Or the canal pushes," Ross says. "Everyone said 'random' until the bus pass pings lined up. Took three months. We still put cuffs on him."

Cara's shoulders drop a notch. "Good. Say it out loud. It helps."

"It does," he says. "This footage is noise. We don't let it get in our heads."

"Right." She knocks her knuckles against the desk. "We don't need a magic frame. We need ten small things that point the same way."

He nods. "Owen's already on street cams. He'll squeeze another batch before morning. Digital will enhance this anyway, but we both know it won't grow a face under a hood."