CHAPTER 38

I WAS LUNCHING ALFRESCO-wolfing down a drive-through deli sandwich at a picnic table in Tyson Park, a long strip of grass and trees near the UT campus-when the cellphone rang. The display read BURTON DeVRIESS, LLC. When I answered, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chloe instead of Burt on the other end. “Dr. Brockton?” My bubble was swiftly burst. “Mr. DeVriess would like to speak with you. Can you hold while I put him on the line?”

“Sure, Chloe,” I sighed, “though I’d rather talk to you.”

“But you need to talk to him. I hope you’re doing well.”

“I’m still a free man, so things could be worse.”

“That’s the spirit. Hold on for Mr. DeVriess.”

I held on. I’d been holding on a lot lately. Mostly by my fingernails. “Bill? It’s Burt. How are you?”

“Ask me at the end of the phone call. What’s up?”

“Can you come in this afternoon? I’d like to go over two pieces of evidence we’ve obtained in the course of discovery.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“It’s good-news and bad-news evidence. Which one you want first?”

“Hell. Give me the bad news first.”

“It’s an exhibit the prosecution will try to make hay with at trial. It’s the video from the surveillance camera on the roof of UT hospital.”

“The one that’s zoomed in on at the gate of the Body Farm.”

“Exactly. About three hours before you called 911, that camera shows what sure looks like your pickup truck driving through the gate and into the facility.”

“I’ll tell you what I told Evers. That’s impossible. I wasn’t there. I swear to you, I was not there.”

“Nevertheless. I’ve looked at a copy, and I have to say, if it’s not your truck, it’s a dead ringer for it. Any chance somebody could have borrowed it that night without you knowing?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “During the daytime I usually leave it in the driveway, but at night I lock it in the garage. And the garage door opener clatters pretty loud-I’m almost certain that would wake me up.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I’m not sure you need to volunteer that part on the witness stand. Anyhow, I’ve got a video and audio expert coming in to examine the original tape, see if he can find any basis for challenging it. Might be good if you were here, too.”

“I’d like to see it,” I said. “I can’t believe how thoroughly this deck is getting stacked against me. So what’s the good news? Instead of the death penalty, they’re only seeking life without parole?”

“Ha,” he said, followed by an actual laugh. “Glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor. No, it’s a little better than that. Something we can use to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s the voice mails Jess got after she was on the TV news sticking up for you and evolution.”

“The ones where some guy threatened to do nasty things to her? I’m surprised she didn’t erase those right away.”

“Maybe she figured she should hang on to them in case he kept harassing her,” he said. “So she could prove to the phone company that these weren’t just typical prank calls.”

“What ever the reason, I’m glad she saved them,” I said.

“Me too. This expert I’m bringing in should be able to compare your voice to the voice mails and establish that it’s not your voice making those threats.” He paused. “Bill, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get him to do that comparison, is there?”

It took a moment for me to grasp what he was implying. “Jesus, Burt, of course not. I did not make those phone calls to Jess.”

“Just making sure,” he said. “I’ve listened to the messages. The voice doesn’t sound like yours, and it’s not your style. They’re pretty strong stuff-sadistic sexual threats, and some pretty sick death threats. If I were a juror and I heard some creep threatening her like this, I’d wonder whether the killer might be this guy instead of the mild-mannered Dr. Brockton.”

“You think jurors think like you?”

“Hell no. Nobody thinks like me. But I’m able to think like jurors when I need to.”

“I hope your crystal ball is right about this.”

“Self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “I’ll plant those seeds of doubt and then fertilize like hell.”

I’d seen Grease in action enough times to know what he meant-and know he’d be good at it. “Fertilize how-with a couple truckloads of bullshit?”

“Doc, you cut me to the quick,” he said. “My bullshit’s so incredibly rich it won’t take but a shovelful.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “What time is your expert coming in?”

“Two o’clock. Can you make it?”

“What else have I got to do? I’ve been suspended from teaching, and the police haven’t exactly deluged me with forensic cases since they arrested me for murder.”

“Damned shortsighted of them,” he said. “I’ll see you at two.”

The next two hours passed with excruciating slowness. Finally, at one-fifteen, unable to wait any longer, I headed for DeVriess’s office. Even taking the long way around the UT campus, I pulled into the parking garage beneath Riverview Tower a good twenty minutes early. Too bad, I thought. Worst case, I’ll have to sit in the waiting room for a while. No worse than sitting anywhere else. Maybe better-Chloe’s always nice to me.

As I stepped into the elevator and punched the button for DeVriess’s floor, I noticed a slight man pushing a large, wheeled case in my direction. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize he wouldn’t be using the stairs, so I held the elevator for him. The case-actually two cases, one atop the other-bumped over the sill and into the car. “Thanks,” said the man. He was breathing hard and had broken a sweat. He didn’t look muscular enough to be a deliveryman, and his shirt and tie suggested that he was a professional of some sort. The fact that the tie was a clip-on suggested that the sturdy black cases contained computer gear of some sort.

“That’s quite a load you’ve got there,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Weighs more than I do. Plane fare for it costs more than mine, too, time I pay all the excess baggage charges.”

“Computer hardware?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Video and audio equipment. Plus a computer.”

That would explain why he’d glanced at the elevator console and not pushed a button: he was bound for the same floor I was, and the same lawyer’s office. I was on the verge of introducing myself when it occurred to me that I didn’t know a graceful way to do it. “Hi, I’m Bill Brockton, accused murderer?” Or maybe, “God, I hope you’re good enough to save me from the electric chair?” So instead I decided to focus on him. “What do you use it for?”

“I do forensic video and audio analysis.”

“You mean like enhancing recordings?”

“I’m careful not to call it ‘enhancing’ in court,” he said. “The word ‘enhancing’ makes it sound like I’m adding something to it. What I’m really doing is subtracting-filtering out noise, static, and other interference-to extract the best possible images and sounds from what’s already recorded.”

“How much difference does that make?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Or maybe disappointed, if you watch CSI. On shows like that, video analysis is like magic-they take these really crappy, blurry images and zoom in by about a factor of ten, and hit a button and suddenly the image is razor-sharp. Doesn’t work that way in real life-if you start out with a crappy camera and a worn-out tape, you can’t end up with a great image. But TV makes people think you can.”

“I’ve heard that called ‘the CSI effect,’ I think,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “The public-and jurors-now expect miracles from people in law enforcement. They think all this razzle-dazzle, instant-answer technology that some scriptwriter has made up must really exist. And if a prosecutor can’t produce that sort of thing in court, they tend to discount the evidence.”

“What about the defense?”

“Funny thing,” he said. “On TV, it’s nearly always the cops and prosecutors pulling the rabbits out of the high-tech hats. So the jurors expect more bells and whistles from them than they do from the defense.”

This gave me some comfort.

The elevator stopped on Burt’s floor, and I held the door button again while the man levered and bumped his gear over the threshold. Then I squeezed past him so I could open the door to Burt’s suite of offices. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s very nice of you.”

“Maybe you can do me a favor sometime,” I said with a smile.

Chloe looked startled to see me coming in with the video consultant. “Well, hello, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “You’re here early.”

“I am,” I said, “and look who I found wandering around on Gay Street.” She looked confused. “I’m kidding, Chloe,” I said. “We just happened to ride up on the elevator together.”

Her relief was almost palpable. “Hi, you must be Mr. Thomas,” she said. “Welcome to Knoxville. I’m Chloe Matthews, Mr. DeVriess’s assistant. I hope your flight was good?”

“It was fine,” he said. “We circled Atlanta quite a while-a thunderstorm had blown through, and the planes were stacked up-so it was nice to be up in first class.” I raised my eyebrows at Chloe but she ignored me. “I had just enough time to make my connection to Knoxville,” Thomas was saying. “Fortunately, my gear made it, too. I wouldn’t be much good here without it.”

“And you’ve already met Dr. Brockton,” she said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “On the ride up, we just talked about TV and reality, and the difference between the two.”

“Oh, then let me introduce you,” she said. “Dr. Brockton, this is Owen Thomas, our forensic audio and video expert. Mr. Thomas, this is Dr. Bill Brockton. He’s…” She floundered here.

“…the reason you’re here,” I said.

“He’s a famous forensic scientist,” she said. “That’s how I was going to describe you.”

I smiled. “Chloe, you’re not a very good liar. Mr. Thomas, I’ve been charged with a crime. A murder, in fact. The prosecution says a surveillance video shows me and my pickup truck delivering the body to the place where it was found. I’m hoping you can prove them wrong.”

Thomas looked uncomfortable, and I couldn’t say as I blamed him. “I’ll do my best to clarify the tape,” he said. “What ever it shows, it shows. Like I told Mr. DeVriess, I don’t really think of myself as working for the defense, or for the prosecution; I think of my role as clarifying the truth.”

“Good for you,” I said. “That’s my philosophy, too. You know, when I’m not on trial for murder. As a forensic anthropologist, I usually get called by the prosecution, but not long ago I testified for Gre-for Mr. DeVriess-and helped him clear an innocent man of murder charges. I’m hoping he can do that again this time.”

Burt DeVriess turned a corner of the hallway and strode into his reception area. “You guys having this meeting without me?” He shook my hand and then introduced himself to Thomas.

“Let’s go back to the conference room,” Burt said. “That’ll be better than my office. My office is too bright for looking at video.”

The conference room was on the opposite side of the hallway from Burt’s office; it was an interior room, with no windows except for a wall of Burt’s trademark frosted glass along the hallway. A fair amount of daylight bled through from Burt’s window and frosted-glass wall, but he lowered a set of blinds in the conference room, and the daylight vanished. “That dark enough?”

“Oh, plenty,” said Thomas. Burt flipped on a set of Art Deco wall sconces, and the room took on a high-design feel, with the light itself looking like something sculpted. Between the Bentley, the first-class airfare, and the décor, I began to suspect that my $20,000 retainer was likely to be merely the first of several installments.

“How long do you need to set up?” Burt asked.

“Seven minutes,” Thomas said. The clip-on tie was not just for effect.

“Okay, we’ll be right back. Bill, come across the hall with me and let’s talk trial strategy.” I followed him into his office, where the bank of windows revealed a rain squall moving up the river channel in a wall of solid gray. As it advanced, it enveloped the railroad bridge, the graceful arches of the Henley Street bridge, and the bright green trusswork of the Gay Street bridge, Knoxville’s favorite venue for suicidal jumpers.

I watched, mesmerized, as the storm seemed to obliterate the river itself, the banks, and Knoxville’s very downtown. It was as if the storm marked the edge of the earth-an edge that was drawing closer with every passing second. Suddenly sheets of rain began to lash the office tower; the force of the water and the gusts driving it made the plate glass tremble. I stepped back, close to the door. “You ever get nervous up here during a big storm?”

Burt looked out at the window just as a streak of lightning arced across the hills lining the river’s far bank. A smile creased his face, and I could hear him counting the seconds-“one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi”-until the thunder rattled the windows. “Naw,” he said, “I love the storms. Wish I could bottle some of that energy and carry it into court with me.”

“I think maybe you do,” I said. “You’ve pretty nearly fried my hair during a cross-examination or two.”

“Come on, Doc,” he said. “I have always handled you with kid gloves on the witness stand.”

“Then you’re the iron fist in the kid glove.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Just wait and see what I do to some of the witnesses in this case. Then you’ll appreciate how gentle I’ve been with you.”

“So who do you plan to tear into? Do you know who the prosecution will be calling yet?”

“Some; not all. They’ll use Evers pretty hard. He usually does a good job on the stand. He’s thorough, he looks good-that matters, believe it or not-and it’s hard to get him rattled. They’ll call a couple of hair and fiber people to talk about finding your hair in Dr. Carter’s house, in her bed. Finding her blood and hair on the sheets from your house.” The sheets still seemed like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. “Probably the thing that will do the most damage, though, is Dr. Garland’s testimony about the autopsy. She suffered a lot before she died, and the jury will want to make somebody pay for that.”

“And I’m the only option they’ve got.”

“Unfortunately,” he said, “for this particular office, you’re running unopposed. Unless that wasn’t your semen.”

“So how do we counter all that? Hell, at this point, if I were on the jury, I’d probably vote to convict me.”

“We stipulate to the things we can’t fight, and we whittle away at everything else. We stipulate to your hair and fibers in her bed. We stipulate to your semen in her vagina.”

“But that wasn’t related to her death,” I protested. “That was a night of pure…” I stopped; the words would have made it sound cheesy or corny, like the mass-produced sentiment on a Valentine’s card.

“All they need to do is make it look related,” he said. “Their theory of the crime is a three-act play: Act one, you have a fling with her. Act two, she dumps you for her ex. Act three, you kill her in a jealous rage. It’s very simple, and it plays well with juries. The DA will drive home any evidence that appears to support that version of events. By not contesting some of that evidence during the prosecution’s case, we give it less airtime in the courtroom, so it carries less weight with the jurors.”

“And what about when it’s our turn?”

“When it’s our turn,” he said, “we’ll offer up a multitude of other explanations, other people who could have wanted to kill Dr. Carter. Her ex. Relatives of people she helped send up for murder. Whoever was leaving her nasty voice mails. Hell, by the time it’s over, I’ll have the jurors wondering if the DA or the judge might have done her in. Remember, we don’t have to prove who actually did it; all we’ve got to do is create reasonable doubt that you did.” He checked his watch-a European-looking thing that probably cost half my retainer-and said, “Let’s go see if this video guy is worth his three thousand a day.”

“Three thousand a day? That’s a lot,” I squawked. “Hell, that’s twice what I charged you to clear Eddie Meacham.”

He smiled. “And half what I’m charging you. You’re right-it is pretty high.” DeVriess’s phone intercom beeped. “Yes, Chloe?”

“There’s a police officer here.” I must have looked panicky, because I noticed Grease making soothing motions at me with one hand.

“Ask him to have a seat; tell him we’ll be with him as soon as we finish double-checking the video equipment.” After Chloe clicked off, he answered my unspoken question. “He brought over the tape from the surveillance camera. Can you believe it? KPD wouldn’t trust me with the tape.”

I laughed. “That elevates my opinion of KPD’s judgment quite a bit.”

He stuck out his tongue at me-not the sort of gesture one expects from a high-priced attorney in pinstripes-and led me across the hall to the conference room.

Half the tabletop was now covered with equipment. I recognized a Panasonic VCR and a computer keyboard, but the keyboard appeared connected to a clunky television set. Also connected to that was a slim vertical gizmo, about the size of a hardback book, whose brushed-silver housing sprouted a thicket of cables from the back. It was labeled AVID MOJO. There was also a microphone on a stand.

“Before we look at the video,” said DeVriess, “let’s get the doctor’s voiceprint.” Thomas nodded.

“What voiceprint?” I asked.

“We’ve obtained the threatening messages that were left on Dr. Carter’s voice mail,” said Grease. “We’ll want to suggest that whoever left those messages could be the one who killed her. We need a sample of your voice, saying the same things, in the same way, so we can rule you out. This should carry a fair amount of weight with the jury.”

Burt nodded at Thomas, and Thomas played the first message, one sickening phrase at a time. Jess had said they were graphic, but she had spared me the details. “I can’t say that,” I said.

“You have to,” said Burt. “We need an apples-to-apples comparison-your voice saying the exact same words, same inflections, same pacing. Don’t worry, we won’t play this in court.”

“Is there any chance the prosecution could play it?”

“I’d object strenuously to that,” said DeVriess. “I think I could block that. It would be irrelevant and prejudicial.”

“I’m really not comfortable doing this,” I said.

“You’ll be a hell of a lot less comfortable if the jury votes to convict you, Doc,” he said. “Besides, these messages could point to whoever really killed Dr. Carter. By proving you didn’t leave the messages, maybe we encourage the police to investigate other possibilities.”

I still didn’t like it, but I cooperated. Each of the messages took me several tries-I stumbled over some of the words and phrases, they were so repugnant-but I got through it. The messages began as litanies of sexual perversions; by the last couple, they were vicious, misogynistic death threats. “Yuck,” I said when it was over. “I feel like I need to bathe in Lysol now. I hate to think how Jess must have felt when she heard these.”

Owen had watched his computer screen impassively as I read the threats, but he, too, looked relieved to have put the distasteful task behind us. He closed the computer program he’d used to record my voice, unplugged the microphone, and coiled the cable neatly. “Okay, that’s out of the way,” he said. “Now let’s see what we can see on the video.”

DeVriess punched the intercom button on a phone that had been shoved precariously close to one edge of the table. “Chloe, would you mind showing the officer back to the conference room? Thank you.” He turned to Thomas. “Tell us a little about the system,” he said. He eyed Thomas’s clip-on tie. “But only a little.”

If he felt insulted, Thomas didn’t show it. “This is a turnkey system called dTective,” he said, “from a company called Ocean Systems. They start with an Avid video editing system-the thing most TV shows are cut together on-and they develop hardware and software tools to customize it for forensic work. They’ve sold well over a thousand of these to police departments all over North America, including KPD, here in Knoxville. Most of those are desktop or rack-mounted systems. They call this version the ‘Luggable’; I call it the ‘Hernia-Maker.’” So he had a sense of humor. I liked that.

Chloe appeared in the doorway and ushered in a uniformed officer who was carry ing a videotape case in one hand. Thomas reached out a hand for the tape case; the officer frowned, then handed it over grudgingly.

Thomas opened the case and studied it. “And this is the original tape, right?”

“Right,” said Burt, as if the police officer weren’t even there. “You wouldn’t believe how hard I had to fight to get this. The DA’s office and KDP insisted you could work with a copy. I told them the original was the best evidence, and reminded them we’re legally entitled to the best evidence.”

He nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll show you why in a minute.” He clicked the computer’s mouse, and the screen lit up. I had expected it to show a TV-like image from the UT surveillance camera, but instead it was a normal Windows screen, just like on my computer, except that it had a lot more program icons on it than my machine’s handful, and most of these looked unfamiliar. He clicked on one of the icons, and the screen filled with several horizontal bands, and a pair of dark circles that looked a bit like maps of the night sky, and a rectangle several inches square. He reached out a hand and Burt gave him the tape case, which he flipped open. He looked at one edge of the tape and frowned, then used a thumbnail to pry out a small tab of black plastic.

“Hey,” barked the officer, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“That’s the RECORD tab,” Thomas said. “If you want to make sure the tape doesn’t accidentally get erased or recorded over, you have to remove that tab. Your video guy should have done that the moment he got the tape.” He popped the tape into the machine, then hit PLAY. The small rectangle on his screen turned blue, with numerals, just like my television at home did when I put a tape into the VCR. Then the images began, a series of seemingly unrelated images, each on-screen for a fraction of a second, like a visual burst of machine-gun fire. After a few seconds, though, I detected a pattern. The images cycled past in a regular sequence, which I gradually recognized as hospital entrances, parking garages, and-the one that most caught my eye-the Body Farm’s gate. It was as if the pages of a dozen different books had been shuffled together at the book bindery, and to follow one story, you’d have to read one page, then flip forward ten or twelve pages to pick up the thread again. Suddenly my truck flashed past a couple of times, and I lunged toward the VCR’s controls to hit PAUSE. Thomas reached over and batted away my hand.

“Don’t touch that,” he snapped. “Do not touch that.” The officer grabbed my arm and pulled me back several feet.

“I just wanted to pause it on the truck,” I said.

“Do not touch the controls,” Thomas said. “Every time you start or stop or pause a tape, you damage it. Do it enough times, all you’re left with is snow.” He glanced in Burt’s direction. “This is one reason I hate having clients in the room,” he said. “It always complicates things.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again. Promise. I just didn’t know.”

“Okay,” he said grudgingly, then-less grudgingly-“Okay, but you’re on probation.” It sounded like maybe I wouldn’t get kicked out after all.

“Well,” I said, “that sure beats death row.”

He snorted, and Burt laughed; the cop frowned. “We’ll look at everything a frame at a time in a minute,” Thomas said. “This pass, I’m just reviewing the tape, and optimizing the levels. Then we’ll digitize it-load it into the computer’s hard drive-and once we’ve done that, we can pause, or stop and start, as many times as we want without hurting anything. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I am sorry.”

“If it makes you feel any better, cops make that mistake all the time,” he said with an apologetic glance at the officer. “They get to the spot on a tape where an incident occurs-a convenience store shooting or a bank robbery-and they stop and start and rewind and slo-mo, and by the time the case comes to trial, the tape’s useless. I make two passes, three at the most, without ever stopping the tape anywhere in the event sequence.”

As he talked and the images strobed by, he slid and clicked the mouse rapidly, and the computer’s cursor flitted from one pull-down menu to another. As it did, I noticed slight changes in some of the images flickering past-dark images got brighter, washed-out images got toned down, and some colors seemed to fade while details got crisper in shades of gray. After a few minutes, the dark, nighttime shots gave way to sunlit images, and I noticed police vehicles and uniformed cops at the Body Farm. Thomas looked at Burt and asked, “We’re past the event sequence now?” Burt nodded. Thomas hit STOP and rewound the tape to the beginning, then hit PLAY again.

“How are we going to tell anything meaningful from that jumble of images?” I asked as they flashed past again. “It looks like they wired a whole bunch of cameras to one VCR.”

“That’s exactly what they did,” he said. “It’s called multiplexing. Saves a lot of money on recording decks and tape. In an ideal world, you’d have a separate tape for each camera, recording in real time, and you’d archive all the tapes. But if you did, you’d end up with seventy thousand tapes a year.”

“That’s a lot of tapes,” I conceded.

“A video camera records at thirty frames a second, and it looks like they have sixteen cameras, so in this setup, each camera grabs one frame of video about every half second. Not a bad compromise.”

“But everything’s all jumbled up,” I said.

“Patience, my friend,” he said. “There’s a tool in dTective called ‘Deplex’ that demultiplexes the feeds-separates them, like unraveling a rope into individual strands-so we can play the video from one camera at a time.”

After he’d recorded the entire nighttime sequence, he stopped and rewound the tape once more, then ejected it, tucked it back into its case, and handed it to the police officer. “Okay, we’re done,” he said. “Thanks very much.” The officer nodded; he hesitated, almost as if hoping to be asked to stay, then turned and left.

“You’re done?” I asked. “But we haven’t looked at anything yet.”

“I just meant I’m through digitizing the original,” Thomas said. “Now we’ll work with this digital copy. And if something terrible happens as we’re working with it, all we lose is a copy, not the original.”

“How come UT’s still recording on videotape,” I asked, “given that even home video cameras are starting to record on memory cards and hard drives?”

“Storage space and data quality,” he said. “One hour of images from these cameras would require seventy-two gigabytes of storage. Multiply that times twenty-four hours in a day, times thirty days in a month, and pretty soon you’d need a supercomputer to store it all. You can save space by compressing the images, but when you compress, you lose a lot of the details. To use a nontechnical analogy, the image quality goes from being more like a glossy photographic print to being more like a newspaper photo, which turns into a grainy collection of dots if you look at it closely. More and more surveillance systems are going to digital,” he acknowledged, “but nearly all the big Las Vegas casinos-which spend millions on security-still think tape is better.” He did more clicking, and sixteen postage-stamp-sized images came up on the monitor. “Okay, there are the sixteen camera angles, separated by the deplexer. Looks like it’s camera nine that we’re interested in.” He clicked on the thumbnail showing the Body Farm’s gate, illuminated by the streetlights in the parking lot, and that image enlarged until it filled about half the screen.

He scrolled forward, and as a few cars flitted past the edge of the picture, I saw that the deplexer had indeed plucked this one strand of footage from the multitude of others. “That’s amazing,” I said. “How does it do that?”

Owen looked over his shoulder at me. “There’s a nerdy technical term for it,” he said with a twitchy smile. “We call it ‘magic.’”

Suddenly a pickup entered the frame and nosed toward the Body Farm gate. He paused, and as I took in the truck’s profile-a bronze General Motors pickup with a matching camper shell-I felt the floor drop from beneath me. “Oh Jesus,” I breathed. “How in bloody hell…” Evers had told me the tape showed my truck, but until this moment, I had dared to hope he was wrong.

The driver’s door opened, and all three of us leaned toward the screen. The atmosphere in the room was as charged as the storm crackling outside the office tower, and my heart had crawled so far up my throat I could almost feel it on the back of my tongue. Was I about to see my own face on the camera? By this point, I halfway expected that.

Instead, I saw no one’s face. The man-at least, it appeared to be a man-was wearing a cap, pulled low over his eyes. Dark pants, a light-colored shirt. His head was bent down and turned at an odd angle. “Pause it,” I said, and I devoured the image. “He knows,” I said. “He knows there’s a camera. He even knows where it is. Look how he’s careful to keep from turning his face toward us.”

This realization thrilled me. For the first time since Jess’s death, I felt something shift subtly; I felt I had something to work with; a tiny piece of the puzzle. I wasn’t completely powerless any longer. “You son of a bitch,” I said to this man who had killed Jess Carter and set me up. “You sorry son of a bitch. I am coming after you.”

I spun my index finger at Thomas and he started the footage again. The man walked up to the chain-link gate and fumbled with the lock. Then he swung the gate open a foot or two and stepped toward the inner, wooden gate. “He’s got keys,” I said. “That bastard has a set of keys. Who the hell is that?” In my mind, I began reviewing every male who had been issued keys to the facility over the past few years, since the last lock change. There were only a handful-a couple of faculty members and four or five grad students-and it seemed inconceivable that any of them could have killed Jess and laid the blame at my feet.

Suddenly an idea hit me with the force of an electric shock. “Go back, go back,” I said. “Let me see that again.” This time, I wasn’t looking for the face; this time, I was looking for breasts, for female hips, a female gait. Could we be seeing Miranda? She had keys to the facility and even to my truck, and she had once, on a case several months ago, seemed jealous of Jess. Had that jealousy festered into something more sinister? I couldn’t believe it, but neither could I ignore the possibility. As I studied the figure’s silhouette and gait, I was relieved and deeply ashamed to see that both were unambiguously male.

“What is it?” Burt asked. “Did you see something?”

“No,” I said. “I was afraid I might. I was wrong.”

The man climbed back into the truck and backed out of the frame. “Where’s he going?” Burt asked.

“He parked too close to the gate,” I said. “He had to back up so he could open it. I would never make that mistake.” Neither would Miranda, who drove into the gate more often than I did these days.

“Good,” said Burt. “I’ll be sure to ask you about that on the witness stand.”

“But won’t the DA say that I was just trying to look like I wasn’t me?”

“Maybe,” Burt said, “but if you were smart enough to act dumb about this, wouldn’t you be smart enough not to drive your own damn vehicle?”

“Wait a minute,” I laughed, “you’ve already got me confused.”

He smiled and took a bow. “Confusion, my friend, is only a hop, skip, and a vote away from reasonable doubt.”

The man walked back into the frame, again keeping his head down and turned slightly to the right, away from the camera. He swung the chain-link gate outward and the wooden gate inward, then walked back to the truck and idled through the gate. Then the wooden gate closed behind him. Burt pointed to the time code in the upper right corner of the screen; it read 5:03 A.M. “Pretty shrewd,” he said. “Early enough that nobody else is out and about yet.”

“The hospital shift change isn’t till seven,” I agreed.

“But it’s close enough to daybreak so the guy watching the camera feeds will figure that crazy Dr. Brockton is up really early today. Those guys all know what your truck looks like, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “They’ve seen me drive in there hundreds of times. Hell, I’ve given every campus cop and hospital security guard a tour of the place.”

“And this guy knows that somehow,” Burt said. “Knows they know your truck.”

Owen scrolled forward in the clip until the man opened the wooden gate and pulled out. This time, he pulled far enough forward to clear the chain-link gate. As he closed both gates behind him, I studied the truck more closely. This time it was angled slightly down the parking lot, slightly downhill, so more of its roof was exposed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Stop.”

“What?” Burt asked.

“Look at the roof of the cab.”

“What about it?”

“What’s that dark patch?”

Owen worked his mouse, cranking up the brightness and doubling the size of the image. “It’s a moonroof,” he said.

I laughed. Wildly. Hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” asked Burt.

“My truck…doesn’t have…a roonmoof,” I gasped. “A moonroof.”

“You’re sure?” said Burt.

“Sure I’m sure. It was an option, but it cost an extra five hundred bucks, and I was too damn cheap.”

Burt, Thomas, and I exchanged high fives.

“Oh God, I feel better,” I said.

“Me too,” said Burt. “I actually believe you now.”

“You didn’t before? You acted like you did.”

“It’s a courtesy thing,” he said. “My clients always claim they’re innocent. I aways pretend to believe them. It’s more convenient all the way around. Not many of them are telling the truth.” He looked me in the eye. “Doc, I’m really glad you’re one of the exceptions.”

Owen cleared his throat. “Are we through bonding? Shall we look at the rest of this?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s see what else we can see.” I could feel excitement stirring, the same excitement I often felt at death scenes whenever I began finding clues in decaying flesh and damaged bones.

What we saw was another handful of details that would clearly refute the prosecution’s claim that this was my truck. The wheels had five spokes; mine, I knew-I had recently had to replace one-had six spokes. One headlight angled crazily down and toward the right. “That’s good,” said Thomas. “Headlight spray patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. Unless yours are misaligned in that same way, that’s very persuasive. And if we can find a truck like this, with a headlight spray like this, we’ve nailed it.”

“Even if we can’t,” said Burt, “we can get footage of the Doc’s truck in that same spot at night and show how his headlights differ, right? And show he’s got no moonroof?”

“Right,” said Thomas. “This will blow the jurors away. Jurors love this shit. This is nearly as good as CSI.

I no longer begrudged Thomas his $3,000 a day. He had earned it just now, I figured, and then some. In fact, he’d earned every damn cent I had forked over to Burt DeVriess so far. “Will you tell all this to Evers and the DA, or wait and spring it at the trial?” I asked Burt.

“Actually, I’ll file a motion to dismiss as soon as I get Owen’s report,” he said. “We’ll get some good press. But the judge won’t dismiss the case. Too much other evidence. No judge in his right mind would dismiss a case against a guy whose bed is drenched in his dead lover’s blood.” He shook his head. “A shame those sheets didn’t just disappear.”

“I play by the rules,” I said. And then I thought of something else. “This guy knows that, too. He was counting on that. Counting on the fact that I’d call the cops when I found the sheets. Giving me the rope he knew I’d use to hang myself.”

“Then that tells us even more about him,” Burt said. “Maybe a name will pop into your head in the wee small hours. Maybe Evers will have another, friendlier chat with us. Maybe he’ll start asking and thinking about who else might have done this. Start casting his net a little wider.”

Burt clapped Thomas on the shoulder; Thomas flinched, either from the force of it or from the violation of his boundaries. “Okay, I think we’re done for now,” Burt said. “How soon can you send me that report?”

“I’ll write it on the plane and e-mail it to you to night. That soon enough?”

“Yeah, that’ll do; thanks. Chloe will be in touch once we have a trial date. I’m gonna go start drafting that motion.” As he left the conference room, Burt yanked up the blinds, flooding the room with light. It was that scrubbed version of sunlight that follows a hard spring storm. I took it as a good omen.

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