It was very dark, very still, very somber. A lifeless cityscape of drawn shades and brick facades. Trees were nude of leaves. Grass was sparse. The occasional splash of colorful mums was muted in shadow. Her postage-stamp front yard was mostly ivy. She’d always wanted to plant flowers, but time had a way of escaping her. At least there was the azalea, but now that she and Elsie had squashed it, she wasn’t sure if it would survive the winter.

Poor dead azalea, she thought, looking down at it from her second-floor window. A piece of plastic lodged deep in the middle of the bush reflected moonlight back to her. She stared at it dully before turning from the window and padding back to bed. She punched her pillow into shape, pulled the quilt over herself, and froze. “Son of a gun.”

Kate jumped out of bed, ran down the stairs and out her front door. Dave was still at his window when Kate appeared like an apparition, gliding ghostly white down the porch steps in her long flannel nightgown. She was barefoot, moving quickly over the little boxwood hedge that lined her front walk, into the black ivy. She stooped over the azalea, picked up something, straightened, and looked directly up at him, as if she’d sensed his eyes on her. She had a video camera in her hand!

Five minutes later she sat wrapped in a wool blanket on Dave’s couch sipping hot cocoa, waiting for Dave to rewind the tape that had been lodged in the mangled camera.

He draped an arm around Kate and pressed the play button on the remote. A number appeared on the TV screen. Six digits. There were several seconds of blank tape, then an aerial view of A Street materialized. The field of vision narrowed as the image was focused. The lens swept across Kate’s backyard, her roof, the empty road, and ran across a house on the opposite side of the street. The exact same route was repeated three times.

On the fourth pass a voice broke in above the chopper noise. “Get the blue sedan.”

The picture danced with vibration but held fast to the car as a man emerged, glanced up at the helicopter, and returned to the car. The vibration grew worse, and the picture lost clarity. There was the voice again. “One of the mounts is loose. See if you can—” The screen filled with blue sky, then abrupt blackness.

Dave hit the remote button to rewind the cassette. “He was right. The mount was loose.”

“Do you have any idea what this was all about?”

“No. But I know where to get the answer.” He reached for the cordless phone on the coffee table and dialed. “Howard? This is Dave. I have your tape.”

Kate’s eyes got wide. “Howard Berk? How do you know?”