I briefly wondered how long he would go before replacing the rolling chair. Maybe never—it might be too emotionally difficult. We often act inexplicably in our grief, and survivor’s guilt, if that was at play at all here, can make us do strange things for penance.

When he turned on the wall-mounted television, it was preset to Cable Broadcast News. I recognized the anchors from the instances when they brought on my mentor, Dr. Calvin Werjonic, as a guest criminology expert. He was in the city now, as a matter of fact, lecturing at Columbia University, and we were planning to meet for lunch on Monday.

The network mostly interviewed him during high-profile serial crime sprees—rape, arson, murder—to analyze the geospatial aspects of the crimes. Dr. Werjonic was nearly twice my age, and although he was still going strong, he’d recommended my name to the producers to replace him. However, I wasn’t interested in a job like that. To put it mildly, working with the media did not thrill me. More often than not, they just get in the way and make it harder for law enforcement to do its job. I’d seen it happen all too often.

Senator Murray clicked through a password prompt and brought up his home security system’s feed.

The live footage from eight surveillance cameras appeared in a grid on the television screen.

Five of them covered the estate’s periphery. The first of the three monitoring the house was positioned at the front door above the porch and targeted the circular drive. On the footage from the night of Jon’s death, there hadn’t been any indication that another car had been on the drive or that anyone had left the house. The guard saw no one and hadn’t opened the gate for any cars, except for Jon’s.

The second residential camera covered most of the elegantly furnished living room and part of the kitchen.

The third was located out back and actually rotated to span both the pool area and the entrance to the guest house. From studying its footage earlier, I knew that from its vantage point you could see Jon positioning the chair, but no one else was visible outside, and the camera rotated before we could see exactly how Jon died.

“Senator,” I said, “may I ask why you only have three cameras on the house itself and five around the edge of the property?”

“My wife’s idea, before she passed. She didn’t like cameras in the home and figured that if there was an intruder, he’d be picked up on the other footage before getting to the house, and the home’s security system would take over from there.”

“Tell me more about that. The security system.”

He gave me the rundown—upon intrusion, the alarm would go off, the guard out front would be notified, and a 911 call would automatically be placed.