“Well, we can slow the recording down if we need to.”

“How?”

“A number of different ways. First off we put the camera on a clock. Turn it off, say, midnight to eight. We can also stagger the FPS and lengthen —”

“FPS?”

“The recorded frames per second. It makes the image jump, though.”

“What about sound? Does that jump, too?”

“No, sound is separate. You’d get full sound.”

I nodded but wasn’t sure I wanted to lose any of the visual recording.

“We can also put it on a motion sensor. This guy you say is in a wheelchair, does he move around a lot?”

“No, he can’t. He’s paralyzed. Most of the time I think he just sits there staring at the TV.”

“Any pets?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So the only time there is real movement in the room is when the caregiver comes in, and that’s who you want to watch. Am I right?”

“Right.”

“No problem then. This will work. We put a motion sensor on it and a two-gig memory card and you’ll probably stretch it out a couple days.”

“That’ll work.”

I nodded and looked at Burnett. I was impressed with his son. Andre looked like he should be out breaking quarterbacks in half. But he had found a specialty in life dealing with circuits and microprocessors. I could see the pride in Burnett’s eyes.

“Give me fifteen minutes to put it together and then I’ll come show you how to install it and how to switch out the memory card.”

“Sounds good.”

I sat with Burnett in his office and we talked about the department and a couple of the cases that we had worked together. One case had involved a hired killer who had murdered both the intended target in South L.A. and then his employer in Hollywood when the employer failed to pay the second half of the agreed-upon fee. We had worked it together for a month, my team and Biggar and his partner, who was named Miles Manley. We broke it when Big and Manley, as the pair were called, came up with a witness in the target victim’s neighborhood who remembered seeing a white man on the day of the shooting and could describe his car, a black Corvette with red leather interior. The car matched the vehicle used by the second victim’s next-door neighbor. He confessed after a lengthy interrogation conducted alternately by Biggar and me.

“It’s always something small like that,” Biggar said while leaning back behind his desk. “That’s what I loved best about it. Not knowing where that little break was going to come from.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So you miss it?”

“Yeah. But I’ll get it back. I’m starting to now.”

“You mean the feeling, not the job.”

“Right. How about you, you still missing it?”

“I’m making more money than I need here but, yeah, I miss the juice. The job gave me the juice and I don’t get it shuffling rent-a-cops around and setting up cameras. Be careful what you do, Harry. You might end up successful like me and then you sit around remembering the old days, thinking they were a lot better than they were.”