Free The Case of the Drowning Men by Eponymous Rox

alone.
    Szostak seems all right , though . Displaying no problems as yet , although why he originally left the bar is still not discernible . Perhaps the place felt stuffy and he just needed a breath of fresh air , or maybe he decided to go home . Perhaps he just wanted to call somebody and it was too loud inside to talk on the phone .
    We do see him suddenly rummaging through his clothes , presumably for his cellphone , and possibly removing an object that size from one of his pocket s .
    In the meantime, cars cruise past him coming from both directions , an assortment of marked vehicles mingled among them including a couple of taxi s. Other bar patrons are also mill ing about , standing around and behind him in pairs or in groups as pedestrians cross the street to and from the bar . S ome couples , some trios, some individual s as well .
    Frankly, i t’s not very exciting footage so far, and n othing looks too terribly out of the ordinary either . Not for a Saturday night in the city . Until Szostak suddenly lurche s forward and doubles over as if in pain, stagger s to his feet once more, and b egins struggling inexpertly to pull his coat off.
    Here we can see some sign s of physical dis comfort , but we can’t tell what’s causing it . He acts confused now , too, stumbling slightly as he begins to gravitate away from the front of the bar, moving in the video tape from the left side of the screen slowly toward the right and hesitating on the sidewalk for a few seconds to once more wrestle with his coat ( which for a split second almost looks like he has on backwards) . Finally , with the coat adjusted proper ly , he exits the screen to the right.
    Reportedly, h is car was parked only about a block or two from the Bayou Café that night , so it is safe to assume that’s where Szostak was going next. For him to end up at the Hudson River in the exact spot where his cellphone was found later ― on the ground at the Port of Albany ― he would have had to change direction to get to the river bank and then continue walking in his groggy condition south along the river , for at least another two miles .
    We know for certain he didn’t do that because h is im age was caught on a second surveillance camera only a couple of minutes later at the intersection of North Pearl and State Street , just where and when he ’d have been expected to arrive if everything was normal .
    However, shortly after this sighting , something clearly must have gone wrong for Szostak , because where he should have been taped by other cameras along th at trek, he wasn’t . N or did the Albany police find any further document ary evidence showing he continued on down Pearl Street beyond the State Street intersection , or that he took an alternate route on foot to some other destination .
    As a matter of fact , Joshua Szostak never even made it as far as to his own car in the early morning hours of December 23rd 2007 , and, from his last videotaped location, was never seen alive again.
    But this story gets even stranger…
    Around th e same time Szostak was leaving the Bayou Cafe , a few miles outside the city limits , near the Port of Albany on the Hudson River , a surveillance camera at the S tate Department of Environmental Conservation facility videotaped someone stealing a DEC vehicle from the parking lot .
    T hereafter, tw o more cameras at that same location tracked the thi e f or thieves driving it to a nearby desolate d spot directly on the water front , and where , oddly enough, police claim no other cameras we re position ed .

    There , the driver ramm ed down a locked gate to enter a restricted zone and, o nce inside , quietly parked the stolen SUV and abandoned it , apparently leaving no clue s as to th e ir motive for the theft or whether they immediately walked away or were rendezvous ing with another automobile.
    Soon after this event , a ccording to police reports , at approximately 1:40 AM on December 23, 2007, the stolen DEC vehicle