“I guess they didn’t know what to look for,” Emily said, playing along. “One of the security guards told me that he’d seen a woman coming and going from this unit. That’s when I planted that camera. We didn’t want to get accused of stealing anything.”

That sounded plausible. In fact, it would have been an excellent idea, if only she’d been that prescient.

“Did you catch anyone?” Frank reached for the camera.

“Hang on. Let me have a look.” Her heart was beating so hard she was surprised Frank couldn’t hear it. She turned away from him and carried the camera up the alleyway. She pressed PLAYBACK. The first image, a smeary exposure that looked like a close-up of Frank’s shirt, had been snapped as he’d taken the lid off the box.

“There you are,” she said. Frank looked startled. “Just now.”

“Let me see,” he said in a harsher tone.

She turned the LCD screen to face him for a moment and gave what she hoped sounded like an easy laugh. “Your shirt and . . . that looks like your thumb.” She pressed PLAYBACK again. The previous image came up: Frank putting one of the boxes of hardware on the shelf. The one before that was a completely black exposure—the dark interior of the closed storage unit, taken before they’d opened it up.

Emily scrolled back through a stream of pictures of the same dark nothingness, the time stamp pacing earlier in one-minute increments.

“What?” Frank said, coming up beside her.

She turned the screen away from him. “Still just shooting blanks.” She clicked back more until an image came up. “And . . . wait a minute.” There was a person in the image, a silhouette backlit against the partially open storage unit door. The time stamp placed it a few hours ago. “I can’t see who it is. Looks like someone’s closing the unit. A man.”

“Emily.” Beads of sweat had popped up on Frank’s forehead.

In the next image, taken a minute before, the door to the unit was fully raised. In the foreground, Emily recognized Mrs. Murphy. She was standing by the workbench, opening a document tube. Several other tubes were lying on the workbench.

When Emily saw the next earlier image, she almost dropped the camera. There was Mrs. Murphy again, but now a man stood beside her, in profile to the camera. He was taller than she, and the overhead light gleamed off his silver pompadour. His eyes were in shadow under wild dark eyebrows. He looked like the man in the framed photograph that Mrs. Murphy had on her piano—her supposedly deceased husband.

The image was focused enough to see that they had one . . . no, two documents laid out on the top of the workbench. Two maps, similar in size. Mr. Murphy was holding them down flat.