“This reminds me of something,” Doris said. “I can’t place it, and it’s stuck in here pretty good. We’ll make a note where it is and see if we can come back in the daytime. Emerald, it’s next to where we tagged the fourth sample.”

The clip ended there. The next segment started about ten minutes after Doris had demanded a light. We were still in the field, but the camera was focused on a distant point. The predawn light was making it possible to see in the distance; I could tell that a person was there, someone whose pale skin was faintly visible.

It wasn’t possible to discern the person’s sex, let alone age, creed, or place of national origin. The camera followed as the figure raised and lowered its arms, moving about in a clumsy mimicry of a ballet dancer. It looked as though the dancer was flinging things, but in the miserable light I couldn’t be sure. August must have worked some magic with his mike, because the distant voice came hoarsely to life.

“‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance, and pansies for thoughts, and columbines and rue, that’s for memory. I remember you, I do, I do, you will not come again, no, no, he is dead.’”

“Ophelia,” Emerald muttered. “Sort of Ophelia. She’s left out a section. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. There is pansies—’”

Doris urged her to keep her voice lowered. The clip ended there.

Ophelia? I looked up Ophelia’s lament over Hamlet, right before she drowns herself. She’s strewing herbs around, rosemary and fennel and rue—whatever that might be.

Sonia Kiel, it had to be, dancing where she believed her truelove was buried. Perhaps this was an old cemetery, where wheat or corn or just weeds had grown up around grave markers too old to be visible in the grainy footage.

The camera shifted. Sonia was on the ground, rocking back and forth, crooning, “Hey, nonny, nonny, hey, daddy, daddy.”

My skin crawled. She hadn’t known she was being filmed, poor thing. It was physically painful to watch her expose herself.

Headlights suddenly swept the field, the light breaking into halos in the camera lens. A pickup or an SUV.

The headlights picked up Sonia, who cried out and started running away from them, straight at the camera, yelling, “Fire, fire!” and then, as she caught sight of the photographer and his entourage, “What are you doing here? This land is sacred! Get off, go away, go away, go away!”

The drive didn’t hold anything else. The date stamp on the videos meant August must have shot it two days after he and Ferring had been at Fort Riley.