The video they were watching was the same link that Pollard had sent to the Closure email address. He’d sent it in response to a call for information Summer had posted on an Inland Empire Killers message board and it was a three-month-old clip of Robin Diamond, the film columnist for the popular website DailyCulture.com, discussing feel-good movies with her mom, Renee, in honor of this past Mother’s Day.

It was Renee they were all focused on—soft-spoken, ash blond, sixtyish Renee. Renee, who had cried over Bambi when she was pregnant, who loved Easter Parade “above all other movies” and had watched it with her grown daughter “at least a dozen times,” and who Pollard swore up and down was a very-much-alive April Cooper. “She couldn’t wait to be a mother,” he was saying now. “She wanted kids, a house, and a husband. In that order.” His eyes clouded for a moment and he smiled. A dreamy, lost, young boy’s smile. “Actually, the husband part she said she could take or leave.”

Great quote, thought Quentin, who was recording the conversation on his phone. He always did this, even with deep-background and off-the-record and completely unwilling sources. With some of the particularly distrustful ones, he even kept a mini voice recorder running as backup. (He’d bought it from a spy store, and it looked exactly like a pen.) Summer found it unethical, but he didn’t. He’d never air the interview without permission. And if he never got permission, he’d destroy the recording. Eventually. What was the harm in that?

“It’s strange,” George Pollard said as the video ended. “I never go to the Daily Culture website. I so rarely go to any of those sites. But I saw the link to the video on my home page—‘Mother’s Day Means Movies,’ I think it was called. And for some reason I had to click through. It was like someone was guiding me there.”

Summer said, “How soon into the video did you start thinking Renee was April?”

“Immediately,” he said. “And it was more than thinking. It was knowing.”

“Really?”

“It was her voice. It sounds exactly the same.”

Quentin studied Pollard’s face—a tanned and gently worn version of the teenager’s in the photograph, the dark hair gone silver and expensively cut, fine lines around the eyes and lips that looked as though they’d come from years of smiling. Hard to believe that George Pollard was two years older than Quentin’s mother would have been. He’d aged well—the way people of health, privilege, and happiness tend to do. Kate had none of those things in her life, and it had shown all over her.

“You’re positive it was April’s same voice,” Summer said.