The crosswalk camera at the intersection I have been watching picks up the corner of the parking structure entrance from about thirty meters. I have been pulling stills manually because the automated export on the device I am using produces files with inconsistent timestamps, so I cannot trust the automated version. I pull them manually and I label them by hand and I keep two copies because of what happened with the map.

Between 14:09 and 14:12 there is nothing. Not corrupted frames, not motion-blur stills, not dark frames. Nothing. The export skips from 14:08:57 to 14:12:04 and the device log shows no interruption, no storage event, no thermal or power fluctuation. The camera was recording. The files for those three minutes do not exist. I have checked the storage card directly and the file allocation table does not show deleted entries in that window. The files were not written. Which means the recording happened and was not saved, or the recording did not happen, and there is no logging of why.

I want to be clear that 14:09 is the timestamp I associate with one of the sightings I have not fully written up yet. I have notes. I do not have the corresponding footage. The gap and the sighting timestamp overlap within a margin that I cannot call coincidence given everything else. If you came to this believing in coincidence you may continue to believe in it. I cannot afford to.

What I am keeping from this entry is the frame immediately before the gap and the frame immediately after. The before-frame shows the sidewalk clear. The after-frame shows the sidewalk clear. Whatever happened in between, the result is a cleared sidewalk, and that is not nothing. That is a result. Results do not happen without causes.