Sweet Romance13 min read
"The Seven-Minute Video and the Clock That Told the City"
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"I saw a dead girl in a video."
"Ida," I said, "are you sure?"
"I've watched hundreds of these," she answered. "Brooks, I am sure."
"Show me."
Ida Gerard sat very still on the other side of the desk. The room smelled faintly of coffee and sanitizer. She had the look of someone who had slept badly for days.
"This was different," she said. "There was no breath."
"Maybe she was drugged," I offered.
"No," Ida said. "When they're drugged their mouths don't stay closed. When they're asleep or passed out, there's a softness. This girl—" She broke off, the words stuck.
"Show me the screenshot," I said.
"Seven minutes," she whispered. "Seven minutes filmed on a phone. Two seconds of her face. That's all."
We were at the municipal anti-cyber unit, but the place felt small and personal. Ida had been on the review desk for years. She was married, in her thirties, and she handled things most people could not watch. I trusted her call more than most pieces of paper.
"You want me to watch it?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "I'm asking you to apply to the bureau. I can't let this lie in my head forever."
"All right," I said. "Let's do it right."
Two days later we had permission to pull the file at the squad. The administrative levers moved, forms were signed. The video came to us as a file on a secured drive, flagged as illegal content uploaded to a hidden site. We all sat in a dim room and put on headsets.
"Play it," I told the technician.
The video started. Seven minutes exactly, shot on a rear camera. The room in the frame was small, clearly a rented bedroom, not a hotel. There was a One Piece poster on the wall. The man filming never showed his face but his moans and the rhythm of his breath were loud. The woman lay on the bed with long hair, pretty in a plain way. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were pressed together.
"Listen," Boyd Greene said, leaning forward. He was my partner on many nights, precise and impatient. His voice was low.
"I don't hear any breathing," Fabian Bogdanov said, fiddling with the waveform on his laptop. Fabian was our tech; he could pull a trumpet out of static.
Ida had been right. The file was noisy, but when we turned down background sound and dug into the track, we heard only the man's breath and the bed creak. No answer, no sigh, no inhalation from the woman.
"Could be microphone placement," Boyd said. "Could be anything."
"It could be a dead body," I said.
"You think so?" Boyd asked.
"We need a forensic opinion," I said.
We took screenshots of the girl's face. Two frames, only a second. Her eyelids compressed like pins, her lips sealed. Fabian ran a minor enhancement. The shot cleared but not enough to give us a name.
"I'll send it to the lab," I told Ida.
"Don't tell anyone else," she said. "Please."
"We'll be careful," I promised.
Vaughn Belyaev was head of forensics at the bureau. He had a gruff laugh and no patience for sensational talk. When I explained the file he was half amused, half curious.
"You want science, not fear," he said. "Bring me the frames. We'll see."
That night Vaughn called me in his deep voice.
"Brooks," he said, "the girl is probably dead."
I shut the door and sat down. "How can you say that without an autopsy?"
"Rigor mortis, the way the limbs are rigid, the pallor around the nose and mouth—" Vaughn's voice grew steady. "It's a probability. Twelve to twenty-four hours after death, the muscles stiffen like that. There's no visible trauma in the frames, no ligature marks, but the color around the mouth hints at asphyxia. He could have smothered her."
"Smothered?"
"Yes. Cover the mouth and nose with something soft. There may be no nail marks in the image. We can't be certain. Not yet."
"Do we open the case?" Boyd asked when I told him Vaughn's conclusion.
"We have to," I said. "But quietly. If we jump and the girl is alive, we've ruined her privacy. If she is dead, we have to treat it as homicide."
"Province wants us to find out the girl's identity first," Boyd said. "If we know who she is, we can get a family, see if they're missing someone."
"Okay," I said. "We'll follow the evidence."
Fabian worked on the audio the next day. The site had been uploaded seven days earlier. The tech department separated the tracks: traffic noise, people, street vendors, a radio advertisement. Fabian flagged a repetitive "dang-dang-dang" sound in the sixth minute.
"That's a bell," he said. "Like a clock tower."
"Clock tower?" I repeated.
"Yes," Fabian said. "Slow and steady. Not a car, not a machine. Something like a monument bell hitting the hour."
"I grew up in the southwest," I told Boyd. "I used to hear a bell like that in the city center—Jiefangbei. It sounds like 'dang... dang... dang.'"
Boyd grimaced. "We're not in the business of childhood memories, Brooks."
"Listen to the crowd later," Fabian said. "There's a voice in the last seconds, a dialect. I'm not good with accents, but it's southern. Daniel's unit can help with dialects."
"Do it," I said.
Fabian isolated the "dang" rhythm and enhanced the crowd murmur. There was a curse in the last moment, a southern profanity that sounded like the dialect of Chongqing's inner city. That voice, coupled with the bell, made me feel something I couldn't name—an old place from a younger life.
"I can contact Chongqing," I said. "If the clock is Jiefangbei, we have a location."
"Province'll want proof," Boyd said. "You sure about that?"
"I'm sure enough," I said.
We let the tech wing implant a quiet trace in the website's backend. Fabian built a parser that would hand us a login and then quietly return the server's real coordinates if the operator logged into the admin page. It was clever and illegal if anybody else than us ever knew.
"It won't ping if they never log in," Fabian warned. "We can only wait."
They logged in the next afternoon.
Fabian's screen lit with a location. "Another city," he said. "Exact coordinates. Residential high-rise."
"Grab a team," I told the duty officer. "We move."
We coordinated with the other city's squad, went in plainclothes, and arrested a thin man in a tired apartment complex. He called himself Cohen Vasquez. He claimed he only ran the site for money and that he bought most content in bulk. He looked ashamed when we showed him the frame of the girl.
"Do you know her?" Boyd demanded.
"No," Cohen said. "I buy from sources. I don't always meet the people."
"Where did you get this one?" I asked.
Cohen shrugged like a small animal. "From a private seller. I don't know names."
He let us copy records, and we tracked down other sites he'd named. Many were shut down already; others had been scrubbed. The line from seller to original uploader ran cold.
"Maybe it's older," Boyd said. "Some files get passed around for years."
"Maybe," I agreed.
We needed a lead on the room. The One Piece poster, the tile pattern, the small fan on the bedside table—those were the fingerprints of a place. We asked Canton squads to scour rental listings. We dug through landlords' leases. It was slow work, boring work that smells of coffee and paper. Then a tip: a local agent remembered two kids from the country who rented early in the year. Their names matched the numbers Cohen had in a list—a woman named Janiyah Rodrigues and a man the agent remembered as "big guy, always eating."
We called the numbers. Janiyah's mobile went unanswered. Her bank card had been used the day before in a supermarket.
"Maybe she left town to visit family," Boyd said.
"Maybe," I said. "Call her parents."
The parents answered. "She's fine," her mother said. "She told us she's not coming home this year."
Ida's pressure released like a held breath. "So she's alive," she said into her palm.
"Not so fast," I said. "We have to be sure."
One clue nagged: the mobile payments. Janiyah's credit card had been used yesterday, but her mobile wallet had not been used for months. Someone had clearly been keeping the financial illusion of her life.
I asked our colleagues in Chongqing to check CCTV around Jiefangbei. They found footage of a man in a coffee shop, phone in hand, looking nervous before he powered it off and left in a hurry. His face was heavy; he was the kind who hides calories in a shirt. The footage tracked him to a building where the bedroom with the One Piece poster once belonged to a couple. He had left in January.
The man in the footage was Noah Bell.
We had him brought in. Under lights and careful questioning, his story came out as a slow, ugly thing.
"Noah," I said in the interview room. "We have the video. Did you film it?"
He looked at the table. "Yes," he said.
"Why did you do it?" Boyd demanded.
"Noah," Ida said softly, "tell us."
He cracked. "She wouldn't stop going to work. I asked her. She said she had to. She said it's for us. She earned money for the both of us."
"You killed her?" I said.
Noah's face blanked. "I didn't mean to. She came home—she smelled like alcohol. I thought she was with someone. I got angry. I covered her face. She didn't wake up."
"Then you—" Boyd could not finish.
"I did things to her," Noah said, and his voice turned glassy. "I recorded it so I could keep her, in some stupid way. I sold the video because I lost my job and I needed money. I dismembered her. I don't know why. I was stupid, idiot, jealous."
"Where did you put the pieces?" I asked.
"Noah trembled. "I buried them around the city, at night. I thought they'd never be found."
We took him to the stations nearby the buried areas. He led us to places with an animal's knowledge—empty lots, the base of a roadside tree, the shadow by a roadside wall. The police pulled the pieces one by one. Forensics made charts and labels. Every time a piece came up from the ground, Noah's face lost more color.
"He confessed out of guilt or panic?" Boyd asked later.
"He confessed because the evidence pushed him," Ida said. "And because he wanted the story recorded. People like him want to be preserved."
Cohen Vasquez had sold the video and many others. He watched Noah's confession on a screen as detectives confronted him with transactions. His face was slack with the same mix of greed and fear as many people who profit from others' decay.
"Did you think you'd get away with it?" I asked him in the interim cell.
"I thought no one would find out," Cohen said. "I thought it was anonymous."
"You made a business of other people's pain," Ida said, voice flat.
Cohen flinched. "I needed the money."
"You needed the money enough to trade human life?" Boyd's voice was sharp.
Cohen had no good answer.
We had to do two things at once: follow law and give the public the truth. The prosecutor wanted a record and a solid case. The victim's family deserved the truth. The community needed reassurance that the monster would be contained.
"We need to bring it to light," I said. "But we also need a public reckoning."
"Why public?" Boyd asked.
"Because this was traded for money," I said. "This needs to be seen, so people who profit like Cohen feel the weight, and so Noah knows the city remembers."
The prosecutor agreed—within legal constraints. We arranged two public scenes: one in the precinct public hall, one at a community center near the market where Cohen had told buyers to meet.
The first was a press conference with the family present. We had asked Janiyah's parents to come. Their faces were older than their years. They had driven overnight. When they stepped into the hall, the room seemed to hold its breath.
"Noah," I heard one reporter ask. "Why did you kill her?"
Noah sat at the evidence table, hands cuffed, looking like a small boy who had broken a neighbor's window and found it would not call him back. He avoided the camera.
On the screen we played careful frames: the bedroom, the One Piece poster, the girl's face. We blurred the most explicit parts. We played only what had to be seen.
"Why show this?" one of Janiyah's aunts asked, voice shaking. "Won't it hurt her more?"
"We show this because this is the truth," Ida said. "This is how she was taken. If we hide it, we give the killers anonymity."
Noah's reaction changed as the video lingered on his gloved hands and the wall with the poster. At first he looked like a man with a problem to manage. Then his jaw twitched. After the third repeat, his face crumpled.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this," he said suddenly, low. "I didn't mean—"
"Noah," Janiyah's mother stood. Her voice stayed small, but every syllable cut through the hall. "You took my daughter. How could you have been so cruel?"
Noah's breath hitched. "I thought she was with other men. I thought—"
"You thought?" Janiyah's father shouted. "You buried her like an animal!"
Crowds behind the barriers began to make sound—some mutters, some curses. A reporter shouted questions. Phones recorded, fingers jabbed at social feeds. The room became a hive.
Noah began to change as the people watched. He had at first tried to hold the old arrogance—he had tried to make bargains in his head: if he confessed, maybe they'd cut something. But when the world pressed like a tide, he first denied, then argued, then finally broke.
"Noah, you filmed her for how long?" one officer asked, leaning forward.
"Noah couldn't look up. "Seven minutes," he whispered.
"Seven minutes," Janiyah's aunt repeated. "Seven minutes of what you did."
He tried to plead. "I loved her," he said. "I loved her so much."
"You loved her?" a neighbor scoffed from the back. "You buried her and sold the film!"
Noah's face went through stages: shame, anger, bargaining, then collapse. He began to sob, loud and ragged. "Please," he said. "Please, don't—"
"Don't what?" Janiyah's mother asked. "Don't let me look at you?"
The crowd watched. A woman in the third row turned her phone and began to film the man's breakdown. Another woman openly spat. The press circled, their lenses hungry. The judge later would call it a reconstruction; the town called it a reckoning.
Cohen's scene was different but no less public. We moved him to a square near the cyber-seminar center where local activists and tech firms had gathered to discuss online safety. We had the prosecutor's okay to hold a public exposition about illegal content. We invited local web companies, victims' groups, parents, teachers. We had the screen set up in the open, but we also had lawyers and social workers present to help the families.
Cohen arrived in handcuffs. He was pale and twitchy. Children watched from their parents' shoulders. People who had used his site, perhaps never knowing the origins of the content, sat uneasy.
"We're going to show you what profit looked like," Ida said into the mic. "We're going to show you what a market of suffering does."
We played a redacted edit: no explicit visuals, but the seller's transactions, messages, bank transfers, and the faces of buyers' comments—calls for more, offers of cash. The screen cut to a ledger: dozens of small sums, the way a life was portioned into sellable bytes.
Cohen's expression went from stolid to stunned. He had always treated his business as numbers. Now the numbers were people.
"Why did you do it?" a former buyer asked from the crowd, voice lowered with shame.
"I needed the money," Cohen said at first. "I sold things because it was easy."
"Easy for you," said a teacher in the front row. "Not for the girl."
Cohen's defense faltered. He tried to reason: "I didn't make it. Others made it. I just put it up."
"You made it available," Ida shot back. "You turned screams into profit."
The crowd began to respond. Some shouted for legal justice. A man took a megaphone and denounced Cohen as a parasite. Another woman slapped the table so hard it rattled the microphone.
Cohen's face showed stages: denial ("I never knew"), anger ("You don't understand"), attempt at bargaining ("I will repay"), then a last, raw panic when people around him, including families of other victims, walked up and pointed at him. "Shame," someone said. "This is shame."
One young woman—herself a survivor of an illegal clip—stepped to the fore. Her voice was small but steady. "You sold pieces of me," she said. "You don't get to hide in files."
Cohen's legs started to tremble. "Please," he said. "I was desperate."
The crowd was not ready to forgive. They chanted, a low rhythm. Cameras flashed. People filmed him and posted. Activists called for the sites to be blacklisted and for buyers to be pursued.
Cohen's reaction became frantic. He spat words, then silence. He begged for legal mercy. He pleaded for a plea bargain. He begged for a life back. None of it returned the bodies he had sold. The public shaming was a different kind of punishment than the isolation of a cell, but it hit him where he had once lived: the marketplace of his choices. The ledger he had once loved now burned like acid.
Both scenes—Noah's breakdown and Cohen's public exposure—left marks. The crowds' reactions were not neatly scripted. Some clapped for justice. Some simply stared; some photographed; some offered tissues to the family. The press plastered faces across feeds. For Janiyah's parents, the world had opened and shown them what had happened. For the perpetrators, the world had closed in.
We still had to complete the legal work. Forensics closed a clean file: time-of-death, cause-of-death probable as asphyxia, evidence of post-mortem handling. The court would later hand down sentences. But the scenes we created had a different function: they let the public see the economy of abuse, and they allowed the victims' family to witness the acknowledgment they deserved.
After the arrests, people asked Ida if she would leave the desk. "You saw the worst," a reporter asked her.
"No," she said. "I will stay. This is why I'm here."
Her husband had threatened to leave earlier in the weeks when the nightmares began. There were nights she would come home and not touch him. He worried that the work had hollowed her. But Ida went back to the desk after a few months of counseling. He stayed. They had a child later, a quiet boy who listened to bedtime stories about brave women and clocks that dinged at the center of cities.
I kept thinking about the "dang-dang" bell. It pulled the scene out of anonymity and planted it in a real place. That sound was a geography of memory. It was also a key. If anyone ever asks me why we dug through a heap of remnant files to chase a seven-minute clip, I'll say: because a tiny rhythm of a bell told us where the world had gone wrong.
"You did what needed to be done," Boyd told me one rain-slick night after the trial. We stood outside the precinct and watched the neon drip.
"I did my job," I said. "But Ida saw it first. Her gut kept coming back to the image."
"She was right," Boyd said. "You listened."
"That matters," I said.
Several months later we attended the sentencing. The court called Noah Bell to account. He cried and his voice broke. "I thought I could keep her in a box," he said. "I thought I could make her mine forever." He was sentenced to a long term. Cohen Vasquez received years for organizing and trafficking. The law took its turn.
But the community's punishment had already been served in the public square. People remembered the man's face; they knew the ledger of transactions. In the neighborhood where Janiyah had once worked, the small night-club owners began to screen clients more carefully. Tech firms tightened safeguards. Parents spoke with their children about consent and the black economy of images.
Ida recovered slowly. She saw a counselor, went to a few retreats, and eventually, on a mild weekday, she held a newborn at the police station's corridor and laughed like someone who had slept. She kept the One Piece poster photo in a drawer at home—not as a trophy, but as a reminder of how fragile dignity can be.
"Do you ever think about the girl?" Ida asked me on a late afternoon months after the case closed.
"Every day," I said.
"Then don't let her vanish," she said. "Every time you walk past a clock tower or hear a bell, say her name."
I remember the sound even now, when the city slips into night. The clock tower dings, slow and steady—dang, dang, dang—and for a moment the world is not anonymous. For that girl, for Janiyah Rodrigues, we made the city stop and listen.
The End
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