Page 19 of Dead Air
Cold spread through her chest. She sat motionless, fingers hovering above the keyboard. Someone else had been there that night. Someone who knew her name.
The official report listed only two people at the scene when shots were fired. Lawson and Monica. Backup arrived four minutes after her radio call. By then, Monica lay dead on concrete, and Lawson knelt beside her, hands pressed to the wound, blood soaking through her clothes.
She played it again. "Erin."
Who said her name? The voice triggered something deep in memory. Familiar but impossible to place. She closed her eyes, trying to remember faces from that night. The responding officers. Paramedics who pronounced Monica dead. Richardson arriving later, face grim in the flashing lights.
The bedroom clock read 2:17 a.m. when she started comparing audio samples. She'd recorded statements from dozens of officers over the years. Witness interviews. Suspect interrogations. She dug through her digital archives, pulling male voices, converting formats to match the podcast audio.
Nothing matched. Either the voice belonged to someone whose statement she'd never recorded, or the audio quality was too poor for accurate comparison.
She opened a new browser tab. Searched for audio forensics software. Professional versions cost thousands. Trial versions offered limited functionality. She downloaded three different programs, installing each before moving to the next.
Her fingers cramped from hours at the keyboard. Her eyes burned from staring at sound wave patterns. Still, she persisted, the voice haunting her like a ghost.
"Erin."
Not Monica calling out. Someone else. Someone who shouldn't have been there.
She played the full podcast segment again, focusing on Blackwell's commentary after the radio call. "That was Detective Erin Lawson, Monica Landry's partner, calling for help that would arrive too late."
Did Blackwell know about the male voice? Had she heard it during her investigation? The thought sent Lawson digging through the podcast website, searching for contact information, production credits, anything that might reveal Blackwell's audio engineer.
The website listed sound editing by Adam Hughes, audio restoration specialist. His profile mentioned work on historical recordings and forensic audio analysis. Professional equipment. Expert ear. If there was a voice on that recording, Hughes had heard it.
Which meant Blackwell knew someone else had been at the scene.
Lawson leaned back against the couch, her spine protesting the hours hunched over the laptop. The living room looked alien in the blue screen light. Shadow furniture. Empty coffee mugs. The framed photo of her academy graduation, face down on the side table where she'd knocked it during her search for headphones.
She played the isolated audio once more. "Erin."
The voice scratched at her memory. Someone she knew. Someone who had no business being at that warehouse the night Monica died. Someone who had never appeared in any official report.
Had she heard it that night? Five years of replaying those moments in nightmares, and she'd never remembered another voice. The floodlight blinding her. The gunshot. Monica falling. Blood spreading across her white shirt. Those memories remained vivid, technicolor trauma that visited her sleep.
But the voice? Nothing. A blank space where recognition should be.
Unless she'd blocked it out. Trauma did strange things to memory. Created gaps. Rearranged timelines. The department psychologist had explained this during mandatory sessions after the shooting. Parts of that night might never return clearly.
Or perhaps she'd been too focused on Monica to register someone else speaking. The human brain filtered sensory input during a crisis. Prioritized immediate threats. Maybe she'd heard her name but categorized it as unimportant compared to Monica bleeding out under her hands.
She opened another audio program. This one promised enhanced pattern recognition. Military grade algorithms. She highlighted the voice segment and initiated analysis. The software searched for matching patterns in her sample library. Names and faces scrolled past as it compared waveforms and frequency distributions.
No match found.
She tried again. Different parameters. Different voice samples. Same result.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She could enhance the audio further. Clean it more aggressively. Risk distorting it beyond recognition while hunting for clarity. Or she couldfind someone with professional equipment. Someone like Adam Hughes.
The wall clock ticked toward morning. Tomorrow's interview with Blackwell loomed closer with each passing minute. Questions multiplied faster than answers. Did Blackwell know about the voice? Was she withholding it for a dramatic reveal in a future episode? Or had she missed it completely?
Lawson typed a search string into the audio software. Male voices, age thirty-five to fifty-five, within specific frequency ranges. Narrowed the parameters to match what she heard on the recording.
The computer churned through possibilities. She stared at the progress bar, counting seconds with each blink.
A fragment of memory surfaced. Standing over Monica's body while paramedics worked. The warehouse lot filled with police cars, lights painting everything red and blue. Richardson's hand on her shoulder. His voice in her ear. "We'll find who did this."
She tensed. Richardson.
