“It probably isn’t okay.”

“It’s always polite to ask. I’m staying anyway.” She sits back on the couch, and I get the same sensation again.

There’s a calm about Janet that goes beyond her usual disposition. It’s as if she’s made up her mind about something and is simply going through the motions with us.

“Desi has a new talent,” she’s saying lightly and with a smile. “Throwing rocks. Marino is teaching him to skip them across the water.”

“If the FBI gets hold of this, it will undermine everything you’ve said in your statements to them, to the police.” Lucy is going to lecture me now. “Do you see that? Because it’s the most important point I’m making and the real reason for showing this to you.”

“Lucy’s right I’m afraid,” Donoghue agrees. “No matter how we got the recording or who might have had it first, what’s on it now is a problem for you, Kay. Let’s play through it again, paying close attention to the moment when you were attacked. Tell me everything you remember.”

“I saw her bleeding into the water.” I know I did. “I saw it after I swung the knife at her.”

“You saw your own blood,” Lucy replies. “When you swung at her, you jerked the spear in your thigh and you bled more.”

“It wasn’t my blood. I know what I saw.”

“I’m going to show you what happened,” she says. “Watch very closely.”

A SUDDEN MOVEMENT around the hulk of the wreck, and a shape becomes a sleek person in a hooded camouflage dive skin the tawny colors of a reef, moving aerodynamically like a squid.

That’s what I see in my mind but it’s not what’s in the video. Carrie Grethen isn’t recognizable in what I’m watching. It’s not possible to tell if the murky figure is male or female or what type of dive skin he or she has on. Lucy hits PAUSE.

“What do you see?” she asks me.

I stare for the longest time, touching the display to enlarge the image, then making it small again to sharpen the poor resolution. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, groping for the slightest additional detail of what I remember or thought I did.

“Admittedly it’s poor quality because there was so little light—so little that there was no color, just murky shades of brown and black. Admittedly I can’t tell who it is and it could be a male for that matter.” My face is turned up toward the ceiling, my eyes still shut.