Henry was tempted to say nothing. Johnson probably meant to return the camcorder to him; Henry could almost certainly walk out of here with whatever was recorded on the drive. But though he disliked the DA, he believed in the rule of law. If there was something on that hard drive, it might be evidence of a crime. And if he walked out of this office without telling the DA about it, he would probably be committing a crime himself. Woodward and Bernstein wouldn’t think twice about filching evidence like that, but Henry couldn’t do it. That was probably why he worked at a weekly paper with only five thousand paid subscribers.

“The camcorder might have recorded something,” he said in a monotone.

“So what?” Johnson said. “The tape’s gone.”

Henry almost held his silence, but his sense of fair play pushed him on. “There may be a recording attached to the camera. Now.”

Johnson’s head snapped up. “What do you mean?”

Henry explained about the hard drive. The DA was clearly no computer whiz, but eventually he understood. At Johnson’s instruction—which he barked out like a military order—Henry dismounted the Superstream from the Sony and laid it on the mammoth desk. Then he opened his briefcase and took out his PowerBook.

“Can’t you just plug the drive into my computer?” Johnson asked.

“No. You have a PC. This drive takes a special program to view, and I only have the Mac version. If you have a FireWire port and cable, I can set things up so that a converted copy will be sent to your computer while we watch the original on mine. You’ll be able to watch that copy on your PC afterward.”

“There’s no ‘we,’” Johnson said firmly. “I’m viewing the tape alone.”

“It’s not a tape,” Henry said patiently. “It’s a digital file on a hard drive. And that hard drive belongs to my newspaper.” This was not strictly true. Henry had purchased the Superstream with his own money; the Beacon didn’t have the budget for that kind of equipment, and if he weren’t divorced with a grown child, he wouldn’t, either.

“That drive may contain evidence in a murder case,” Johnson argued. “I’ll make the decision about what’s going to happen to it after I’ve seen what’s on it.”

Henry thought about this. “I don’t think you can legally keep me from seeing what’s on my newspaper’s hard drive. But whatever you decide now, I’m taking my computer with me. It’s not evidence in a trial, and all my work is on it. So you’d better let me make you a copy you can watch on your computer.”