Mike said, “The cops glanced at all of these. There’s really nothing to see prior to the blast. For some reason, the light in our parking lot was out. That’s the only way the video picks up anything at night.”

He walked me out to the parking lot and showed me the camera and the light.

I borrowed a ladder and carefully set it against the eighteen-foot-tall light post. It only took me a moment of examination to realize someone had shot the light out with a BB gun. A single, tiny hole showed me that someone knew what they were doing. And it gave them a way to enter the apartment building unseen.

Mike let me look through seven days of security video. Most of it was mind-numbing. I recognized many of the tenants as they came and went, including Mrs. Siddiqui, the woman I helped from the building after the blast.

I noticed something at the edges of the parking lot where the camera caught a bit of the street. I watched the video three different times. At approximately two in the afternoon, three days prior to the blast, a blue SUV drove past on the street. It almost looked like surveillance.

I watched the video of the night before the explosion. At the far corners of the dark video, I saw a person moving about five a.m. That would’ve been just after Alicia left for work.

It was just a smudge. Almost like a ghost in a horror movie. From the size of the person, I guessed it was a man. That made me think as well.

Then I started to put it all together. Surveillance of the area. They probably saw me coming over to watch TV with Alicia. The light knocked out by a well-placed shot from a BB gun. It could be kids fooling around. But what if it wasn’t?

The marks on the deadbolt made it appear to me that someone had entered the apartment. If they were just trying to cover their tracks from a burglary, it seemed like a huge amount of effort. Especially to burglarize a nursing student. And what criminal in their right mind would elevate a simple burglary to a possible murder?

The final piece of the puzzle was the tape at the bottom of the door. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I recalled an easy, old-school way to ignite a booby trap. In the training scenario I went through, it had to do with gasoline on the ground. And securing an easily ignited match, like a giant kitchen match, on the bottom of the door would be a good flashpoint.

If there was enough natural gas in an enclosed space, a match would be an easy way to ignite it. And putting it on the door meant it would be ignited by the person with the key.