She tapped one of the images and up came a record from IMDb. Turned out Mr. Bartok was an actor. He’d been at it for decades, struggling, it would seem from the list of parts he’d played. Coroner’s Assistant on CSI. Delivery Guy in Gone Baby Gone. Most recently, Desk Sergeant on an episode of Boston’s Finest. The high point of his career had been ten years back when he’d played a serial killer for three episodes on Bones. Low points included multiple credits, back in the 1990s and then again more recently, when his role in a movie had been behind the camera as “grip.”

Emily also found a photograph that was a whole lot less flattering than his headshot: a mug shot from a news story dated May 2017. Jaw set. Expression sullen. Hair tousled. Eyes watery. The text said Bartok, forty-five, a “local actor,” had been arrested for OUI outside a restaurant in East Hampton: “An employee called the police at about 9:45 on Tuesday to alert them to a possibly intoxicated driver who was attempting to leave the parking lot with his truck’s emergency brake engaged.” Sounded like a down-on-his-luck guy who’d be willing to take a sketchy gig if the price was right, though Frank had described him as “the son of a CEO.”

Emily hurried home and ran upstairs to her office. She logged on to her computer and found one of Bartok’s more recent headshots. She pasted it into Photoshop. Next, she captured a photograph of Walter Newell from the wedding announcement she’d found earlier and pasted it into Photoshop, too.

Side by side, you’d never have mistaken Rafe Bartok for Walter Newell. Bartok had a blocky face with deep-set eyes. Newell was more of a pretty boy with a devilish heart-shaped face, his hairline a widow’s peak. Newell’s face spoke of a Gaelic ancestry; Bartok’s sturdy Balkan. On the other hand, they had the same general build, dark hair, and dark features. Tweak the hair, add a few accessories . . . Emily set to work doctoring the photographs. She Photoshopped a beard and mustache onto Bartok’s face. Then gave both men yellow-tinted aviator glasses and baseball caps. Emily gazed with some satisfaction at the doppelgängers she’d created. She realized it was a whole lot easier to make two people look alike on a computer screen than in person, but she’d demonstrated, to herself at least, that it wouldn’t have taken much for Rafe Bartok to pass himself off to strangers as Walter Newell. He was, after all, a character actor.

She was so immersed in Photoshop that she was startled when she heard Frank’s voice. “I’m back.”