“You want to tell me why the fuck a cop would put up a surveillance camera three weeks before a murder?” she said.

“Jesus Christ. Why would he be sending shit pretending to be her?”

Lucy heard a woman’s voice in the background. Bacardi.

“Why don’t you ask him,” Lucy said. “He’s probably the one who gave Terri the brilliant idea to post something on the John Jay site about her needing to get in contact with my aunt. And Terri does, and then, miracle of miracles, guess who writes her? He obviously knew Terri or he wouldn’t have been emailing her. He’s probably the fucking vet tech, like I said, and she knew him because of the dermatologist.”

“He probably gave her the sick puppy. Thought it was funny.” Marino’s voice, muttering. “Then Eva Peebles gets it. The puppy dies. She dies. What’d she do to deserve any of this? Wonder if he’s the one who fixed things in Terri’s apartment. What the landlord was talking about. That would be like him to be a pal, a confidant, to someone who could use a big strong pissant like him. Be like him to get someone like Terri, a forensic psych grad student, to post something on a website, to fuck with everyone. But why the Doc?”

“Because he’s a failed doctor, and my aunt isn’t. I don’t know why. Why does anybody do anything?”

“You’re not going to remove the camera, right? We don’t want him knowing it’s down.”

“Of course not,” Lucy said as the wind ripped at her, as if trying to rip her off the roof. “He’d probably come up here to remove the damn thing, and last thing he expected was you climbing up the fire-escape ladder. Now he has to cover his ass. So he puts on the big act that he’s installing a surveillance camera in case the perp returns to the scene of the crime. Well, bullshit. I’ve got the log open right here on my laptop. This camera’s emailed over ten thousand images in the past three weeks and is still grinding away even as we speak. According to the tab status, the asshole’s accessing the network right now. You’ll be happy to know I’ve disabled the audio function. Not that you’d hear a damn thing up here but wind.”

“You absolutely sure about this?” Marino said.

“And I’m in. This is completely illegal,” Lucy said.

“Oh, God,” she said, shocked, as she scrolled through video files.

Video files in Mike Morales’s personal e-mail account. His username was Forenxxx.

She landed on a video file that had been recorded by an entirely different device than the rooftop camera. She opened it and clicked play.