My guess was that Rick’s version of the events of the evening were not entirely as he’d related them. I believed he had gone to Stefanie’s house. And it was obvious that he had been to Stefanie’s mother’s house. But I didn’t believe that when he went to Stefanie’s house, she hadn’t been there. My guess was that he went there to get back this roll of film. That he had been waiting for her to get home. That would explain the second broken window. And when Stefanie finally showed up, probably on foot, and hadn’t been able to produce the film because she’d lost her purse, he ended up whacking her in the side of the head with a shovel. But he didn’t believe her story about a stolen purse, so he went looking places where he thought Stefanie might have been. Where she could have left that film. That led him to her mother’s house, and the slip of paper I’d left behind had led him to me.

It was hard not to feel that I had, as they say, blood on my hands.

I exposed one neg after another and started dipping the photographic paper into the various trays. As the images became less soft, as graininess gave way to definition, I could see that these pictures were all of the same two people, coupling away on what appeared to be a king-size bed in a well-lit bedroom. The camera had been mounted overhead somehow, perhaps behind a two-way mirror, so the shots in which these two were engaged in the traditional missionary style of lovemaking afforded few clues as to the man’s identity. I could see that he was overweight, and balding, but with enough hair on his back and butt that he should be considering some sort of transplant. (A comb-over was definitely out of the question.) It was not the kind of picture that would be useful in picking a guy out of a lineup.

But the woman’s identity was a different matter. With her hair splayed out across the pillow, it was clear that she was Stefanie Knight.

As I suspected would be the case, subsequent prints made identification of the man much simpler. It was as though Stefanie knew there had to be some shots on the roll in which the man’s face would be easy to see. “Let me get on top,” she must have said to him. “Let me dangle these in your face.” It would have been difficult for him to say no.

And it was a face that I recognized. It had accompanied the article in The Suburban about the death of Willow Creek’s best friend, Samuel Spender.

It was Roger Carpington, Oakwood town councilman.