“Is this what they wanted to do to me?” I trill at Quinn, pointing at the photo I’d purloined from the Benningtons’ nightstand. The camera is set at the end of a bed, almost giving a bird’s-eye view. Peri smiling so wide her gums are showing. I’ve looked at the photo a thousand times at this point, the unmistakable glee in Peri’s eyes, the terror on the face of Calypso Rogers, the girl Page recognized from Wyneck. And the absolute blankness on Tom’s. All their bodies lissome, Peri’s breasts like hardened cookie dough, so succulent, Tom’s chest lean and depilated, sprawled on top of this girl on a bed, their prized sacrificial lamb. Peri almost laughing as she carves a little triangle in the flesh near the girl’s mons pubis, a fang, a pair of small scissors glinting white light. Calypso’s head over the edge of the bed, upside down in the photo, her teeth gritted, her eyes glazed over with panic so primal, it seems to climb out of the photo and grip me in its claws, her mouth in a silent o. Tom mounted over her, about to thrust inside her as she lies on her back.

We thought for a moment that there was a fourth person in the room, capturing the photo, but if you look in a corner, you can see a tripod’s legs reflected in a mirror.

“Is this what they wanted to do to me? Odilie and Tom? Am I Calypso here?” I repeat and of course, Quinn can’t answer that. All he can do is try to explain the picture for us, get as much info as he can to create a narrative, a story that will exhume Tom from the grave, bring down anyone else who was in charge of keeping him safe.

There was a moment, a short-lived one after I’d spoken to Page, when we thought about going to the police. But Quinn, as he said, suspects something far more sinister is going on here, that the police could be implicated in some kind of a cover-up. He wants to get to the bottom of it alone.

I’ve never seen him so single-minded, all the work, all the research. He knows everything about SNAPea, about their IPO plans, the name of every founding member and investor. He knows the kinds of socks Mr. Bennington prefers, the dorm he lived in at Harvard. He plans to submit a draft of the piece to his boss soon. We’re both crazed, he with his research and I with my insane, derelict art.