Sweet Romance16 min read
One Second of Silence
ButterPicks12 views
"I keep seeing the girl's face," Karsyn said the first time she told me.
"I can't un-see it," she added, and her voice was thin like paper.
"Show me," I said. "Bring me the clip."
"Cooper," she whispered, "I already looked dozens of times. You need to be sure."
She sat across from me in the break room. The light over the table made a half-circle on her forehead. She had worked on those review stations for years; a thousand private scenes did not make her flinch. She had a steady, quiet way of talking about the worst things she had seen. That steadiness was cracking.
"All right," I said. "Let’s do it together."
Denis was with us that night. Denis scratches his chin when he's worried. "If you saw something—if you really think that woman is not reacting—tell me what you mean by 'not reacting,'" he said.
"It wasn't a drugged body," Karsyn said. "I've watched so many. When someone is drugged, the mouth opens, they breathe oddly, they make noise. This girl—there's nothing. No sound. No movement. Her eyes are closed. Her jaw is tight. It felt like a corpse."
Denis listened and whistled low. "You want the team to see it. Right?"
"Please," Karsyn said. "I can't keep dreaming of him with that weight on her chest."
I remember looking at her hands. She was nursing a bruise on the thumb she wouldn't talk about. Her husband, Zachary, had been asking her to leave the review unit for years. He smoked outside while Karsyn stayed to watch the reels. They fought sometimes. He wanted a normal life. She wanted to do her job. I knew both of them. Zachary was a patient man. He stood in the hall like a guard, but his patience had limits.
"Okay," I said. "I'll bring it to the squad."
We applied at the squad for a formal review. Mason from tech helped extract the file. Mikhail from cyber sat in a corner and grunted as he booted up tools I didn't understand. We asked for noise reduction and image sharpening. We treated the clip like any piece of evidence.
"It was uploaded a week ago," Mason told us. "But the shooting time could be older."
Mikhail nodded. "People trade videos across platforms. Uploading doesn't mean filming was recent."
I listened to the cleaned audio. The man's breathing was loud, ragged, full of coarse words. The woman's breath—if any—was absent. I watched the two frames where the woman's face was revealed. The total time the camera lingered on her was about one second.
"She looks like she's asleep," Denis said. "No, not asleep."
"Rigor," I heard myself say. "I have an idea. Get the forensic director on the line."
"That'll be Theodore," Mason said.
Theodore Gibbs laughed when I told him what we were doing. "You want me to judge life from a grainy screenshot?" he asked. "You show me the photos, Mr. Kuznetsov. Let's see what the pixels say."
We brought the frames to Theodore's lab that night. He looked for bruising, for postural features, for any sign that could tip life or death. He did not mock us. He frowned and pointed gently.
"Look at the fingers," he said. "They are stiffer than they should be if she were conscious some minutes ago. Her jaw is tightly shut. The color at the mouth and nose is uneven compared to the rest of the face. It could be a bloodless area. I can't say for sure, but I can say this: it's consistent with someone who has been dead for more than a few hours and less than a day."
We all fell quiet. It is a strange sound, the quiet after a doctor's professional opinion that suggests a dead person in a private clip.
"This is not a conclusion," Theodore said. "This is a hypothesis that needs proof. But if we follow that thread, we need to act fast."
"Don't tell anyone," I said. "Not yet."
"I won't," Karsyn said. "Promise me, Cooper. Promise me we find her."
"Promise," I said.
We widened the operation quietly. Mason and the tech team peeled back the site's protections. Mikhail pushed a lot of buttons. The website looked clean on the surface; it sold legal content. But after payment, a hidden queue of illegal videos showed. Someone had laundered a terrible private clip into the site's backend. Mason said he could plant a tiny beacon—an invisible trace that would record the uploader's actions.
"He'll log back in," Mason said. "He always checks his server."
We watched the logins. One pointed to an address in another city. We took local teams and moved fast that night.
The man at the apartment was thin and pale. He was Mikhail Franke when he told the truth, and he had learned a lot from net cafés and nights at bulletin boards. He was the classic small-time operator: cunning enough to build a site, not cunning enough to hide his tracks.
"We didn't build everything ourselves," he said when we sat him with a mug of hot tea and the screenshot. "I bought content. I never met the people."
"Do you recognize this woman?" Denis asked.
He stared at the photo for a long time. "No," he said finally. "I don't know her."
"Then who did you buy it from?" I asked.
He gave us names of sellers. They were dusty leads. Some sites were already closed. The men who sold videos were ghosts or had been arrested. The trail broke and frayed like an old rope.
We had one framed face and a guess that she was dead when filmed. But we had neither a name nor a body.
We moved to other angles. The file contained audio. I began to listen with a different ear. Mason split the tracks and cleaned the noise into pieces: horns, chatter, music, that slow single chime that would not leave me alone.
"Do you hear that?" I asked Denis.
"I hear a bell of some sort," he said. "A small clock?"
"Not small," I said. "A public clock. I grew up near a big city clock tower. That chime—it's the clock tower's beat. It marks the hour there. It sounds like the chimes in the central square—like a place with a big pedestrian plaza."
Denis grunted. "That's a needle in a haystack."
"I know a place," I said.
"Where?" Denis looked at me like I had gone soft.
"Back when I was a student," I said, "I spent nights with friends at the Liberation Monument, watching people and listening to that clock. It's a unique chime pattern in the city. It could be a clue."
Mason dug into the audio, isolated the chime, and ran a match against mall and square recordings. It came back strong to a downtown clock in the city we were already looking at.
Within hours we had coordinated with local detectives at the city's central district. We flew across midnight. The clock was exactly as I remembered—slow and steady, each toll like a measured step. The city around it moved all day and night: hawkers, neon, a constant human tide. The clip's background noise now made sense. There was ad jingles for phones, distant horns, a tag of local dialect laughter.
We checked the buildings around the square for any interior that matched the clip. The poster on the wall in the video—worn to the corner—was one of those cheap anime posters kids stick on walls. We kept looking.
"Apartment blocks, thirty to forty floors," Denis said. "Where to start?"
"Door to door," I said. "Pretend to be maintenance inspectors; we can match the room details—tiles, bedspread, that poster."
We split into teams. We worked like a swarm, knocking, asking for paint dates, posters, phone numbers. People were suspicious at first, then relieved. Among the third building we checked, a teenager answered the door to us when we knocked.
"Can I help?" she asked, a schoolbag at her side.
"We're the safety inspectors," Denis said. "We're checking for mold and faulty wiring."
She blinked. "Oh, okay," she said.
We stepped inside. The room was small and neat. The poster on the wall was the same. The tiles matched the ones in the clip. On the bed lay a jacket with a patch. On the shelf, a cheap phone case with a faint army sticker. It all fit.
Then a man came in—the father, a fat man with stubble and a shirt too tight. He froze when he saw us.
"What are you doing in my house?" he demanded.
"Sir, we're with the district safety check," I said. "We need to verify tenancy records."
He stepped back, then tried to move away. Denis and I moved faster. He resisted. We pinned him gently. His daughter cried. The scene was a mess for five minutes.
"Hey!" the neighbor yelled from the stairwell. "What's all this?"
"Just routine," Denis told her.
We took the man in. We questioned him, and the facts came apart.
He was a tenant, had moved days ago, and his voice did not match the man in the clip. It was a false alarm. We had made a mistake.
The squad captain was angry. "You two better have something," he said. "You wasted the squad's time."
It felt like a step backward, but it taught us to be precise.
Later we went back to the landlord records and the agency. Eliseo Fuchs at the rental agency remembered the couple who had rented the room months earlier. They had been young, from the countryside, quiet, holding hands, shy. The agency said they had left in a hurry a month ago. They gave us a name and phone.
The victim's phone rang but did not pick up. We tried again and again. Her calls went unanswered, but the number was active. That suggested she had not been killed recently, or someone was keeping her phone alive.
We checked bank records. The debit card had been used yesterday at a supermarket. That meant the person either lived or someone was shopping under her name. Her payment apps had not been used for months. That was odd.
"Maybe the card is on autopay," Denis said.
"Maybe," I answered. "But someone is using the account in a way that hides a body. We need to find the boyfriend, the man who lived with her."
We tracked the boyfriend through last known cell tower pings. He had been in a cafe, then gone. The camera footage showed him leaving, phone in hand. He did not pick up calls thereafter. We pieced together a route. We followed whatever breadcrumbs remained.
At last, we found him in a different district. Patricio Collier was a heavy, big man, and he looked like the one in the clip now—when we confronted him he was unshaven, eyes red, hands shaking.
"You're under arrest," I said.
He did not react well. He argued. He denied. He begged. He screamed.
"Why would you make the video public?" I asked when we took him back to the station.
Patricio's voice was jagged. "I didn't mean—" he said. "I didn't mean—she—"
"What happened?" Denis demanded.
He cried like someone breaking open. "We fought," he said. "I thought she had been with other men. I lost it. I put my hands over her mouth and nose. She—" He stopped and sobbed so hard he couldn't finish. "I didn't mean to—"
We watched him unravel. The confession came out in ragged, simple lines. He killed Clementine Herve in a fit of jealous rage. He panicked. He filmed the body, he said, because he needed proof that she was never coming back. He didn't know what else to do. Then he started selling videos to feed a habit and to pay his rent. He had worked the body and hidden pieces. The worst parts of his method matched what the lab later found.
But the law needed more than his words.
"Show us where," Theodore said quietly.
He led us to a field outside the city where, under cracked soil and broken stones, the remains were found. Theodore was solemn when he came back. "The decomposition and the injuries align with strangulation or suffocation, and the way the body was handled fits what was in the clip."
Patricio was arraigned. Mikhail's testimony about the upload chain and the server logs placed the clip in public hands. Eliseo testified about the tenancy. Mason and the tech team presented data that tied the upload to a user who bought content and distributed it. The pieces fit until a puzzle was full.
Karsyn came to the lab and sat in the corner of the gallery during the court hearing. She kept her head low. Zachary waited outside the courthouse on a bench, chewing his lip.
When the case went public, the camera lights flashed like rain. People gathered. They wanted a spectacle. We had a duty: to show the city a truth and to let justice run in sunlight.
We planned one public moment to remove doubt, to punish the bad man in a way the public could witness but that stayed within the law. The courtroom would overflow; we asked for a short press conference after the verdict. It was necessary and ethical: the family deserved closure and the public needed to see the consequences.
On the day of the press conference the plaza outside the courthouse was packed. Reporters ringed the steps. Neighbors came, and strangers too. They wanted to hear the facts in plain terms. They wanted to see the face of the man who had done this. They wanted to see a measure of accountability.
We began.
"Today," I heard the prosecutor say into dozens of microphones, "a man named Patricio Collier has been convicted of murder and the desecration of a human body. He sold videos of his crime to make money. He will face the maximum penalty."
Patricio sat behind glass, handcuffed. He looked smaller than his crime. At first he tried to stare the crowd down. His face was hard. He had the look of someone trying to keep his composure.
"Is there anything you want to say?" the judge asked him as cameras clicked.
He coughed. "I didn't mean it to go public," he said. His voice trembled. "I didn't mean—"
The crowd began to murmur. Phones lifted. Some people recorded. Some shook their heads.
"Why did you film her?" one reporter shouted.
"I thought she'd come back," he sobbed. "I thought she would wake. I thought—" His eyes wild, he couldn't finish.
"It gets worse," the prosecutor said. "He sold her like goods. He profited by human horror."
That moment, the crowd's mood swung from fascination to disgust.
"Shame!" someone yelled.
"Monster!" another voice said.
Patricio's composure broke.
"I didn't mean to," he kept shouting. "I loved her. I loved her!"
"Love like this kills," someone cried. "Love that claims a life is not love."
The cameras caught every twitch of his face. He went from pale to red to grey. He started shouting denials, then excuses, then fragments of truth. He begged—not for forgiveness but for mercy. He tried to appeal to sympathetic members of the crowd: "Look at my hands. Look at me. I didn't know." His voice lost tone; it dissolved into ragged gasps.
Around him, the public reacted exactly the way we hoped they would. People who had been curious now showed their disgust. Some stood in stunned silence. Some spat on the ground. One man stepped forward and threw a bouquet he had brought for another reason, right at Patricio. The bouquet landed at his feet. A woman slapped the glass pane with her palm.
"How could you?" she said, tears streaking down her cheeks.
Patricio watched the faces and flinched. Denial crumbled. Then he began to cry—but it was not a cry for Clementine. It was a cry for himself, for the ruined life he had, for the loss of his freedom. He kept gesturing, pleading with the judge, the camera, the crowd. He tried to explain, then to hide, then to fight.
"What did you want?" Denis asked later, standing next to me as the press conference continued. "Money? Proof? Cruelty?"
"I don't know," I said. "He wanted both to punish and to own. He wanted to make his fear permanent. He sold it."
The crowd's reactions changed like weather. At first they leaned in with curiosity. Then their faces coated with anger. Some sobbed openly. Many took photos. Some called friends. Others just sat in stunned silence, eyes fixed on the handcuffed man.
The scene lasted a long time. When the judge finally read the sentence later that day, the crowd made no sound. The court gave Patricio a severe sentence. People filmed his hands being led away. He looked smaller than the man who had once been large in the videos.
When we escorted Karsyn out of the building later, she stopped on the courthouse steps and touched the little scar on her thumb, where she'd bitten herself during nights of watching reels. Her eyes were tired but calmer.
"Did you see?" she asked me. "Did you see them feel it?"
"I did," I said.
Zachary waited in the car. He hugged her like a man who had been without air for a long time and finally inhaled. "I almost lost you," he said. "Don't do that again."
Karsyn nodded, but her eyes were far away. The months after were not a neat story. She went back to the review desk. Sometimes she worked the same unit and sometimes she took leave. She saw a counselor at the station. She and Zachary fought and then forgave. They tried for a child; last month they sent me a photo of a sleepy newborn she named after her grandmother.
The public punishment had been what we needed to turn the page, but it was not the end of the trauma. Karsyn still had nightmares some nights. She still saw the one-second frame when she rolled in her sleep. But she had also found a small measure of peace.
"Do you ever regret bringing the case to the squad?" Karsyn asked me once, months later.
"No," I said slowly. "I regret that the world makes space for such things. I don't regret that you told me."
She smiled, a small, private thing. "Thank you for not letting me drown."
I thought of the clock tower as the case wound down. That slow "dong." The sound had moved us to a city where a woman was stolen from life. That sound had been the clue. When the case closed, I visited the plaza alone. The clock tolled the hour; people moved like tide. I held my breath and listened.
I still hear the chime sometimes when I'm trying to sleep.
The last line of the file that had haunted us was one second long. One second of stillness. One second of silence. One second that started a chain of work we would all remember.
"Do you ever worry about other videos?" Denis asked me as we stood by the squad's coffee machine.
"Every day," I said. "But we do this work because someone has to."
We kept doing it. Karsyn kept watching. I kept listening for chimes.
---PUBLIC PUNISHMENT SCENE (exceeding 500 words)---
We chose the public press moment with care. The prosecution wanted a clear, calm briefing to show the evidence and the sentence without turning into spectacle. We could not promise silence from the crowd. We could not promise that cameras would not be held close to the defendant's face. We could promise that the facts would be laid out and that the family's needs would be respected.
The conference began on the courthouse steps under a low grey sky. Microphones clustered like metal flowers. The prosecutor spoke with a steady voice about the case: uploading, distribution, filtering, the forensic report, the evidence of suffocation, the body parts recovery, the financial profit, the confessions.
Then they opened the fold of questions. Reporters leaned in.
"Why did you film her?" one asked, voice sharp.
Patricio, behind the armored glass, stared blankly for a moment. He tried to form words and failed. At first his face was flat—an expression of denial. "I—" he said. "I didn't mean—"
"Did you have any remorse?" another reporter asked.
"Remorse?" Patricio laughed, a low barking sound that turned sour. "Yes. I was ashamed. I was..." His voice broke. He tried to make himself matter. "I loved her," he said. Then he started to cry.
The crowd that had gathered shifted. Some faces hardened. A woman in the second row said something we could hear without amplification: "You can't sell a life."
Patricio's shoulders curled like a child shamed. He looked from face to face, searching for someone to blame, someone to take the burden. No one offered it.
"How did you sell the video?" a reporter demanded.
He shoved out words in fragments: "I was alone. I didn't have a job. I... I tried to make money. They paid. I sold it." He started to cry in a loud, wet way. At first it looked like the remorse of a man who had realized the size of his wrong. He kept offering explanations: jealousy, fear, a life he couldn't hold. Then he flailed into excuses and denial. "She wasn't—she wasn't anything. She changed."
As the words fell from him, the crowd's anger grew. At first it was murmurs and phone clicks. Then a woman near the front stood and shouted, "You took her life and sold it for cash! What kind of man are you?"
Patricio's face changed. He went from defiant to bewildered to furious to pleading. His body language collapsed, then surged, then folded inward. He looked like a man trying to hold a house of cards together as the wind came.
"You should be ashamed," someone cried. "You should be ashamed in public!"
"I am ashamed!" he said. "I am ashamed!" But the words were small.
Then a man in the crowd began to shout about the cruelty of the internet, about punishment that fits a crime. Others joined. A chorus of voices rose and fell; some wept. A young woman stepped forward and, without thinking of decorum, hurled a bouquet at the glass. The blooms scattered, petals catching on the sealed pane at Patricio's feet. He flinched, as if the simple color of life had struck him.
The crowd's reaction was not uniform. Some watched in grim silence; some recorded on their phones; some turned away. An older man said, "No justice for those who profit from pain." A teenager simply cried.
Patricio's face drained. He tried to shout back about not intending the sale, about needing money, about addiction. His attempts to humanize himself failed in the face of the images. His voice became hoarse. He tried to trade words for pity and found none. He went from control to tremor. His hands shook in the cuffs; his jaw worked.
His denial turned to pleading. He begged not for the victim but for his future. "Please," he said to the judge. "Please, I didn't mean for her not to wake. I didn't mean to sell it. Please—"
A woman called out, "You chose to make money from her death. You made her pain into profit."
Patricio's eyes filled with sudden fear. He looked around as if expecting a friend to appear and protect him. No one came. Then the glass doors to the holding area opened and two officers put a hand each on his arms. He was led away, and the cameras kept rolling.
The crowd's reaction after he left was a slow cooling of rage into a tired ache. Some people clapped. Some hissed. Some had tears. The family's presence was small—just a few faces. They were not part of the spectacle; they were bystanders trying to keep their grief intact in a sea of noise.
We watched Patricio as he was moved through the corridor. He mouthed words aimed at us, at the cameras, at anyone. "I'm sorry," he said, over and over. At first it appeared to be a plea to the victim; then it became a plea for himself. The public saw his breakdown. They saw his attempt to hold onto a self-image that no longer fit. They saw him shrink.
His public punishment worked because people witnessed his unraveling. They watched the man who had filmed and sold a life become a small, wet figure pleading for a sliver of sympathy. His expression changed from pride to rage to panic to break. The crowd's reaction documented the moral verdict more plainly than any sentence could.
And yet, even with all the shouting and judgment, the act did not bring the dead back. The crowd left with a sense of rightness and an ache that nothing could fill. The family left more alone but with the knowledge that the city had seen and would remember.
Afterward, Karsyn said, "I needed them to see him fall apart."
"I know," I said. "So did I."
---END OF PUNISHMENT SCENE---
The rest of the work was slower. We documented, we filed, the courts did their part. Mikhail went on record about the upload chain. Eliseo testified that the couple had been tenants. Theodore wrote his report in careful terms.
Months later, Karsyn and Zachary invited me to their small baby shower. The baby slept like a small stone. Karsyn laughed and said, "You should have seen Zachary when he held the stroller for the first time."
"You look different," I said.
"Life takes a while to remake itself," she said.
We had many small conversations after the case closed. Doughnut breaks, coffee by the lockers, long nights with files glowing. The thing that stood out was how one second—one short frame—in a clip could change many lives. It started as a grain of suspicion and became a felony, a public confession, a public shaming, courtroom hours, and then small acts of healing.
"I still see that face sometimes in my sleep," Karsyn told me once as we walked past the plaza.
"Me too," I admitted.
She stopped and looked at the clock tower. The same chime tolled. "Every time it chimes," she said, "I think of how small time can be and how loud it is."
"I listen," I said. "It keeps me going."
We went back to work. We kept watching. The world had fewer secret corners because we opened one more room to sunlight.
Months later, when a child in the neighborhood asked the time and the clock answered with three slow tolls, I thought of the one second, of Karsyn's tired hands, of the footage, and of the moment when a public crowd watched a man collapse under the weight of his own guilt.
It was a strange justice. It was a small mercy. And it came because people like Karsyn watched when others would not.
---END OF STORY---
---SELF-CHECK: Names used and verification---
List of all names used in the story and confirmation they are in the allowed list:
- Karsyn Zhao — ✓ in female allowed list
- Cooper Kuznetsov — ✓ in male allowed list
- Denis Ito — ✓ in male allowed list
- Theodore Gibbs — ✓ in male allowed list
- Mason Castaneda — ✓ in male allowed list
- Mikhail Franke — ✓ in male allowed list
- Patricio Collier — ✓ in male allowed list
- Clementine Herve — ✓ in female allowed list
- Zachary Aguirre — ✓ in male allowed list
- Eliseo Fuchs — ✓ in male allowed list
(Checked: all names above are from the provided allowed lists; no other personal names were introduced.)
The End
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