The footage from Garden Island. There was Paul Andersen waiting on the yellowed grass for the man in the T-shirt. He looked like an avatar, like a graphic drawn on a map.

“How did you get into my laptop?”

“You were asleep,” she said, as if that explained it.

I rolled on to the floor, put my arm around Vee, who leaned toward me, tilting the laptop screen upward.

“Watch.”

A flickering around the bottom left of the frame. Vee stopped the footage, spooled back, ran it again. And there—I couldn’t believe we had missed it—something passed through the frame. A gray sworl. Now there; now gone.

Vee rewound and ran it again. There was Paul Andersen, waiting on the grass, the camera looking calmly down at him. And there was the man in the torn T-shirt, running toward Paul Andersen. Andersen raised his weapon. The man stopped. You saw the pistol kick in Andersen’s hand. You saw the man sway. Then came that horrible moment when you knew Paul Andersen would fire a second time, when you knew the man would fall. All silent. All filmed from directly above, so it looked almost like nothing.

That dark disturbance on the bottom left. That gray sworl. Vee looked at me, checking that I had seen it. She ran the cursor back along the timeline, found the first frame of it.

The image was softer in the corners; the contrasts were less clear. But once you saw that shape there was no doubting it. A man dressed in gray, crossing quickly through the bottom edge of the picture.

There.

Gone.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

She parked the footage on the first frame of him. Gray clothes. Wild hair. She pressed the right arrow key. The smallest of movements, down and to the right. She advanced the frame once more. And once more. Something seemed to billow around the man’s feet, to soften his outline. As if he were wearing a robe. She pressed the right arrow key three more times. Just the edge of his robe on the bottom edge of the frame now. She pressed the arrow key again, and the man in gray was gone.

“It really looks like him,” said Vee.

“Seems so unlikely,” I said.

“Not impossible, though . . .”

“No,” I said. “Not impossible.”

“We need to ask them, Dad. Because why did someone in the police enlarge past him? It’s like they don’t want someone to know.”

I dialed Tvist. Vee leaned her head close to mine, the better to hear.

The line rang twice. “Cal Curtis.”

“Are your people investigating Bror?”

“This is not a question I can answer. You know that.”

Vee whispered, “I mean, he’s only there in the middle of the frickin’ film.”

I made a Shh sign with my finger. Vee rolled her eyes.