Somewhere on that journey, another program had interfered with Blomstein’s original search query. We called the new program a Bogie. The Bogie was like a scavenging predator, a vulture, or a hyena. It hid in the shadows and waited until a search was made, and then it pounced just when results were filtering in.

The Bogie then did two things. First it called foul, and blocked certain search results from getting out. Then, it notified primary stakeholders. People who had set up the Bogie in the first place. People who were permanently worried about information getting into the wrong hands.

The most obvious reason for the Bogie was the dead Iraqi guy. Abd al-Karim Qadduri, ex-Ba’ath party guy, Iraqi military intelligence. All kinds of stuff was still happening in Iraq, most of it with our involvement. There were a couple different possibilities that came to mind. For starters, Qadduri could be working for the new Iraqi intelligence service. While we’d booted the Ba’ath guys out of power in ’03, we hadn’t exactly found competent allies to replace them. So, from what I’d heard, the CIA were taking some of them back. Although what Qadduri was doing in France was anyone’s guess.

Another reason for a Bogie could be because the dead guy had worked for US military intelligence against his old friends, either in the Iraqi Ba’ath party, or the insurgency that came after. He could be under some kind of protection program. That would throw up a Bogie for sure.

I rolled back my memory of the photographs Nazari had taken of the dead guy, like hitting rewind on a movie. She’d tried to cover all the angles and produce a collection of images that would work for an investigator. I figured she’d done that for practice, because of her exam. Because she was into it, hoping to pass and get into the BRI. Not because it was her job as a municipal police officer, or for kicks.

She’d accomplished that goal in spades. But she’d done something else that she might not have intended. Nazari had taken pictures on her phone. So when I’d flipped through them, they had appeared in the same order that they’d been taken. Which is pretty obvious, because that’s how all cameras and phones work. But in this case it was different because the order of the photos told a story of the crime scene, a chronological report of the body’s discovery by her and Bonnet, and then of the subsequent takeover of the crime scene by the BRI investigators.