With no lights on behind them, the windows were black and reflective, and at first I thought that the image was just the lights from the mansion glimmering off the water and playing tricks on me. I paused the footage and zoomed in but wasn’t able to make out anything for certain until one of the techs in our digital forensics unit enhanced the footage, which I could then see reflected this side of the pool, including the glass sliding doors behind the camera.

And the outline of someone standing in the living room.

I rewound it.

Watched it again.

Yes, the figure first appeared twenty-two seconds after Jon left to get the chair from his dad’s office and finally disappeared only after the water in the pool was still and the young man was dead. Based on the broadness of the person’s shoulders, I started with the working hypothesis that we were looking at a male rather than a female.

So if this was a suicide, someone watched it occur. That person could’ve stopped Jon, helped him, maybe even saved him after he was in the water, but he didn’t. He didn’t even call 911.

There’s nothing illegal about watching someone die. In other words, although mental health officials must act if they feel someone is suicidal, the public has no legal obligation to stop a person from killing himself.

However, don’t assist with someone’s suicide or you might be in real trouble. Help her position the razor blade against her wrist and you could spend the rest of your life in prison, but stand aside and watch her do it and you’ll be able to go on your way without any care or concern. You can even film her doing it and face no legal consequences.

It was the law. It might not be perfect, but it was what it was.

So, even if we could identify who the person was, it wouldn’t make him guilty of homicide—unless he’d somehow coerced the young man into taking his own life or assisted him in some way. Maybe providing the handcuffs or helping Jon obtain that office chair? It was a stretch, but it was possible we could get a conviction based on that.

The senator had three security cameras positioned around his house, in addition to the ones monitoring the perimeter of his estate. Our team was analyzing the exterior feeds. I focused on the footage from the residence and saw no evidence that anyone else had been on the premises at the time of Jon’s death.

And yet, there was that person in the living room behind the camera.

It was hard to get a good feel for the route someone would’ve needed to take through the mansion to avoid appearing in any of the CCTV footage and yet also be present there by that poolside door when Jon died.