I RETURNED TO MY DESK and observed the crew out of the corner of my eye until it was time to leave. I told them I’d be back at 3:30 p.m. Ray’s car was gone from the street, but I walked down the main strip, took a few turns, and heard a car pull up beside me. It was the gray sedan. We’d made plans for Ray to drive me home.

I hopped in, trying to appear confident and ready for my interview with Hollywood stardom.

“So?” he said.

I related everything I could remember from the morning, from Layla’s note to the conversation with Pearson to the conversations about the interviews.

“Quit now,” said Ray. “That’s what she wrote?”

I nodded. “I don’t know if she was being snide or if it was a real warning.”

“Hard to say,” Ray said in a pondering tone. “But she didn’t say anything else?”

“No.”

We were retracing the route I’d taken that morning, and passed the same palm frond I’d tripped on, its pink pelvis trailing a long wisp of beige. The walk seemed like a long time ago already. I felt tight and energized now, the loose dread of the early morning gone.

“Erik seems to want to talk with you,” I said.

Ray’s face was flushed from sitting in the warm car, but I could still see the keen look spread over his face.

“It’s obvious why, isn’t it?” he said. “Pretty sure he’s the guy in the video.”

I agreed. It didn’t matter if the head in the video was blurred. The upper back and shoulders, the way the man moved—it all matched Erik’s physique perfectly. On the chance it wasn’t him, we’d find out this afternoon when he watched the footage.

“We’ll see if he confirms it, but you gave me some good leverage,” Ray added. “I called the desert festival people and found out who shot Packing. It was Erik Reidl.”

“He also shot her undergraduate film Camping,” I told him, working to suppress any triumph in my voice.

Very late last night, after I’d written my mother, I’d found online archives through the USC library of their student campus newspaper, and a 2002 feature on Brenae that revealed more about her campout project. For her undergraduate thesis, Brenae had camped in a foreclosed home in South Central, pitching her tent inside its living room and bedrooms, tucking herself in her sleeping bag, cooking marshmallows and hot dogs over a gas camping stove. According to the article, on the last day, Brenae had had a tattoo artist ink the words This land is your land onto her bare shoulder. A slow take of the inking, set to Freddie Tavares on steel guitar, had concluded the movie. Erik was named in the article as her cinematographer. I told Ray all this, watching his squint deepen.