He found a way to level his phone on the rooftop and then stepped off the edge. Although you couldn’t see him die, you could see the downward sloping rope snap taut as it caught him when he fell.

A twenty-two-year-old woman sat cross-legged in a tire, drenched herself and the tire with gasoline, and then set herself on fire. A teenage girl stabbed herself in the brain with a foot-long screwdriver jammed in through her left nostril. A grandfather poured bleach into his eyes and then down his throat. A mother of two overdosed on sleeping pills. Although less viscerally disturbing, that was actually the hardest to watch because her four-year-old daughter showed up and must have thought her mother was asleep because she tried in vain shaking her to wake her up.

Then the girl turned and stared out the window momentarily before leaving to watch the cartoons that were playing on a television at the far side of the room.

I paused the video.

Rewound it to the spot where she looked out the window.

Zoomed in.

Yes, it was indistinct. Yes, it was tough to see.

But yes, someone was there.

Because of the faintness of the image, it was impossible to verify, but the person appeared to be of a similar build to the man who’d watched Jon Murray die. Without granting too much credence to speculation, I started with the premise that it was the same person.

Whoever it was, he’d waited out the woman’s death and stood by watching that little girl try to awaken her dead mother.

I felt a cable of rage tighten inside me.

I was going to find this man and I was going to make him answer for what he was doing.

But first, to track him down, I needed to discern how the young mother’s death and Jon’s suicide were related to each other.

Victimology was once again the vital artery that connected the different aspects of the case. I just needed to figure out what these people—who didn’t appear to have anything in common—had in common.

I went back over the previous videos and found that, yes, there was a window visible in the background in two more of them—the hanging and the death by bleach. And behind the glass, in each video, an observer stood. In the case of the man who hanged himself, the outline of the figure was evident in a house across the street.

DeYoung had asked me if the observer might have intended to get captured on the video of Jon’s death, and I’d expressed my doubt about that. Now, I realized that his intuition might have been correct.

I began pulling up everything I could on the suicide victims who’d died under the indurate eye of this nameless observer.

28

7:31 P.M.

“My mommy and daddy, they hurt people.”

“They hurt people?”

“Yes.”