“Okay, that leaves her in the clear,” Hannah said, putting a mental line through Frances’s name only seconds after she’d imagined writing it on the roster of suspects she kept in her head.

“This way,” Michelle said, leading Hannah down the center hallway of the trailer and opening the door to a room just beyond Dean’s office. “This is the screening room. Take a chair and I’ll put in the tape.”

While Hannah was waiting for her sister to ready the electronic equipment, she took note of her surroundings. The room was messy and that substantiated her belief that Dean had been a slob. There were paper plates on the coffee table from the cheesecake he’d served to whoever had screened footage with him, and no one had bothered to put them in the wastebasket. That wasn’t so bad, but Hannah spotted one of her distinctive bakery boxes and she was sure there was part of a cheesecake inside. By now it would be twenty-four hours old and it had been sitting out all this time. Hannah felt like putting it in Dean’s refrigerator, but it seemed silly since he was no longer around to eat it.

“Okay. We’re all set.” Michelle grabbed the remote control and took the chair next to Hannah. “Here we go.”

Hannah stared at the big-screen television as the tape began to run. She saw Mike check the gun—they’d even captured that on tape—and she saw Burke walk over to the desk. Burke pulled out the drawer, made sure the gun was inside, and walked away. Several other people milled around in that area, but as far as Hannah could see, no one else touched the drawer except Lloyd, the prop man, who came over to check it after Burke.

Hannah made a mental note to quiz Lloyd to see if he’d noticed anything unusual about the gun in the drawer. He hadn’t taken it out to check the firing pin, but there might have been something not quite right, something that hadn’t made him suspicious until now, in retrospect.

One other person was a possibility and that was Jared, the set decorator. He’d gone over to straighten the flowers that sat on the desk and stood in front of it, effectively blocking the camera’s view of the drawer. Perhaps he hadn’t touched the drawer. Hannah had no way of knowing, but he’d had the opportunity and that was enough to make him a suspect.