I had gotten straight to the point and showed him the cover of Pianelli’s book. He almost snatched it from my hands to examine it, acting as though he hadn’t seen it in years. “It was at the prom, wasn’t it?”

“More likely the winter dance, mid-December 1992.”

He nodded. “I was running the school photography club at the time. I popped in only to take a few snaps of Florence and Olivia, but once there, I got carried away and took photos of anything and everything. It was only weeks later, when people started talking about the girl who had run away with her teacher, that it occurred to me to develop the shots. This was part of the first contact sheet. I offered it to Nice-Matin, and they bought it immediately.”

“But it’s been cropped, hasn’t it?”

He peered at the picture. “You’re right—you’ve got a good eye. I obviously cropped it to focus on the two dancers, make it more dramatic.”

“Have you still got the original?”

“I’ve had all my photographs since 1974 converted to digital.”

I assumed that meant I was in luck, but then he frowned.

“They’re all stored on a server somewhere—in the cloud, as they say these days.”

Seeing my reaction, he offered to Skype his assistant in LA. A young Japanese woman appeared on his computer screen. She was not quite awake.

With her long turquoise pigtails, her immaculate white shirt, and her school tie, she looked like a cosplayer heading to a manga convention.

“Hey, Yuko, could you do me a favor?” Dalanegra explained exactly what he was looking for and Yuko promised to get back to us as quickly as possible. When he ended the call, he went around the granite kitchen counter, grabbed a blender, filled it with a handful of spinach, some slices of banana, and some coconut milk, and whizzed it into a greenish smoothie that he poured into two tall glasses.

“Taste that,” he said, coming back to join me. “Very good for your stomach lining.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a whiskey?”

“Sorry, I quit drinking about twenty years ago.” He took a long swig of the smoothie and then returned to the subject of Vinca. “The thing about that girl was you didn’t have to be a pro to take a decent photo of her,” he said, setting his glass down. “You just pushed the button and when you developed the shot, she looked even better than she had in real life. I’ve rarely seen someone with such extraordinary grace.”

I raised an eyebrow. Dalanegra was talking as though he had photographed Vinca on numerous occasions.

“Sure I did,” he said when I posed the question.

Seeing that I was confused, he related an incident I’d known nothing about.