“This visit is nice,” she says. “But I get the feeling you’re looking for something.”

“I was. But let’s just forget it. You have enough going on.”

“Let me decide how much I have going on. What if I want the distraction? Maybe it would make me feel better to help someone.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“I am.”

“Okay, I did come over to ask for something,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“I was hoping I could look at some of Daniel’s files,” I say. “Detective Haley told me that everything was backed up.”

“You can look at whatever you want,” she says. “What’re you looking for?”

“It’s kind of a long shot,” I say.

“Most good things are.”

“I’m just wondering if there’s something Daniel filmed that I might understand. And if I could just look at it…well, maybe we could all know what the hell is going on around here.”

Elizabeth appears to think this over, nodding her head. “Well, I’d love for someone to find out what’s going on around here. But my mind can’t really imagine what that might be.”

Sixty-Eight

“Do you have a laptop with you?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

Whoever killed Daniel took his. They took every piece of computer and film equipment he had.

So Elizabeth gets out her laptop and logs onto the cloud. She explains that she and Daniel shared a storage account. “And,” Elizabeth says, “I was the one paying for all of it. So here are his files.”

Elizabeth sets me up at the dining room table. There are a lot of files on the screen. A lot. It hits me like my physics homework. Overwhelming.

I take a deep breath and start looking.

Daniel’s folders are all labeled, and it looks like he was working on a ton of different projects. There are folders labeled “Cop Show,” “Sci-Fi,” “Epic,” “War,” “Pilots,” and on and on.

One is labeled “True Crime.” Within that folder there are hundreds of files: videos, word documents, images, designs. Unfortunately, those files aren’t labeled individually. They just say “scene” over and over. I have to click on each file to see what it holds.

When my neck feels stiff like an old man’s, my phone buzzes. It’s Dad asking me where I am. I tell him the truth. Dad writes back a simple: Okay.

Then a moment later: Please tell her how sorry I am.

Elizabeth appears at my side. “Tired?”

“He shot a lot of stuff,” I say.

“You know Daniel. He always had his camera going.” Elizabeth yawns and stretches. “Maybe you need a break.”

“I should go. I’m keeping you up.”

“It’s okay,” she says.

But I’m not sure.

“Can I show you one thing I found?” I ask, clicking a file on her desktop.

A handwritten sign appears: “Monster Wars”