flitted from one pull-down menu to another. As it did, I noticed slight changes in some of the images flickering past-dark images got brighter, washed-out images got toned down, and some colors seemed to fade while details got crisper in shades of gray. After a few minutes, the dark, nighttime shots gave way to sunlit images, and I noticed police vehicles and uniformed cops at the Body Farm. Thomas looked at Burt and asked, “We’re past the event sequence now?” Burt nodded. Thomas hit STOP and rewound the tape to the beginning, then hit PLAY again.
“How are we going to tell anything meaningful from that jumble of images?” I asked as they flashed past again. “It looks like they wired a whole bunch of cameras to one VCR.”
“That’s exactly what they did,” he said. “It’s called multiplexing. Saves a lot of money on recording decks and tape. In an ideal world, you’d have a separate tape for each camera, recording in real time, and you’d archive all the tapes. But if you did, you’d end up with seventy thousand tapes a year.”
“That’s a lot of tapes,” I conceded.
“A video camera records at thirty frames a second, and it looks like they have sixteen cameras, so in this setup, each camera grabs one frame of video about every half second. Not a bad compromise.”
“But everything’s all jumbled up,” I said.
“Patience, my friend,” he said. “There’s a tool in dTective called ‘Deplex’ that demultiplexes the feeds- separates them, like unraveling a rope into individual strands-so we can play the video from one camera at a time.”
After he’d recorded the entire nighttime sequence, he stopped and rewound the tape once more, then ejected it, tucked it back into its case, and handed it to the police officer. “Okay, we’re done,” he said. “Thanks very much.” The officer nodded; he hesitated, almost as if hoping to be asked to stay, then turned and left.
“You’re done?” I asked. “But we haven’t looked at anything yet.”
“I just meant I’m through digitizing the original,” Thomas said. “Now we’ll work with this digital copy. And if something terrible happens as we’re working with it, all we lose is a copy, not the original.”
“How come UT’s still recording on videotape,” I asked, “given that even home video cameras are starting to record on memory cards and hard drives?”
“Storage space and data quality,” he said. “One hour of images from these cameras would require seventy- two gigabytes of storage. Multiply that times twenty-four hours in a day, times thirty days in a month, and pretty soon you’d need a supercomputer to store it all. You can save space by compressing the images, but when you compress, you lose a lot of the details. To use a nontechnical analogy, the image quality goes from being more like a glossy photographic print to being more like a newspaper photo, which turns into a grainy collection of dots if you look at it closely. More and more surveillance systems are going to digital,” he acknowledged, “but nearly all the big Las Vegas casinos-which spend millions on security-still think tape is better.” He did more clicking, and sixteen postage-stamp-sized images came up on the monitor. “Okay, there are the sixteen camera angles, separated by the deplexer. Looks like it’s camera nine that we’re interested in.” He clicked on the thumbnail showing the Body Farm’s gate, illuminated by the streetlights in the parking lot, and that image enlarged until it filled about half the screen.
He scrolled forward, and as a few cars flitted past the edge of the picture, I saw that the deplexer had indeed plucked this one strand of footage from the multitude of others. “That’s amazing,” I said. “How does it do that?”
Owen looked over his shoulder at me. “There’s a nerdy technical term for it,” he said with a twitchy smile. “We call it ‘magic.’”
Suddenly a pickup entered the frame and nosed toward the Body Farm gate. He paused, and as I took in the truck’s profile-a bronze General Motors pickup with a matching camper shell-I felt the floor drop from beneath me. “Oh Jesus,” I breathed. “How in bloody hell…” Evers had told me the tape showed my truck, but until this moment, I had dared to hope he was wrong.
The driver’s door opened, and all three of us leaned toward the screen. The atmosphere in the room was as charged as the storm crackling outside the office tower, and my heart had crawled so far up my throat I could almost feel it on the back of my tongue. Was I about to see my own face on the camera? By this point, I halfway expected that.
Instead, I saw no one’s face. The man-at least, it appeared to be a man-was wearing a cap, pulled low over his eyes. Dark pants, a light-colored shirt. His head was bent down and turned at an odd angle. “Pause it,” I said, and I devoured the image. “He
This realization thrilled me. For the first time since Jess’s death, I felt something shift subtly; I felt I had something to work with; a tiny piece of the puzzle. I wasn’t completely powerless any longer. “You son of a bitch,” I said to this man who had killed Jess Carter and set me up. “You sorry son of a bitch. I am coming after you.”
I spun my index finger at Thomas and he started the footage again. The man walked up to the chain-link gate and fumbled with the lock. Then he swung the gate open a foot or two and stepped toward the inner, wooden gate. “He’s got keys,” I said. “That bastard has a set of keys. Who the hell is that?” In my mind, I began reviewing every male who had been issued keys to the facility over the past few years, since the last lock change. There were only a handful-a couple of faculty members and four or five grad students-and it seemed inconceivable that any of them could have killed Jess and laid the blame at my feet.
Suddenly an idea hit me with the force of an electric shock. “Go back, go back,” I said. “Let me see that again.” This time, I wasn’t looking for the face; this time, I was looking for breasts, for female hips, a female gait. Could we be seeing Miranda? She had keys to the facility and even to my truck, and she had once, on a case several months ago, seemed jealous of Jess. Had that jealousy festered into something more sinister? I couldn’t believe it, but neither could I ignore the possibility. As I studied the figure’s silhouette and gait, I was relieved and deeply ashamed to see that both were unambiguously male.
“What is it?” Burt asked. “Did you see something?”
“No,” I said. “I was afraid I might. I was wrong.”
The man climbed back into the truck and backed out of the frame. “Where’s he going?” Burt asked.
“He parked too close to the gate,” I said. “He had to back up so he could open it. I would never make that mistake.” Neither would Miranda, who drove into the gate more often than I did these days.
“Good,” said Burt. “I’ll be sure to ask you about that on the witness stand.”
“But won’t the DA say that I was just trying to look like I wasn’t me?”
“Maybe,” Burt said, “but if you were smart enough to act dumb about this, wouldn’t you be smart enough not to drive your own damn vehicle?”
“Wait a minute,” I laughed, “you’ve already got me confused.”
He smiled and took a bow. “Confusion, my friend, is only a hop, skip, and a vote away from reasonable doubt.”
The man walked back into the frame, again keeping his head down and turned slightly to the right, away from the camera. He swung the chain-link gate outward and the wooden gate inward, then walked back to the truck and idled through the gate. Then the wooden gate closed behind him. Burt pointed to the time code in the upper right corner of the screen; it read 5:03 A.M. “Pretty shrewd,” he said. “Early enough that nobody else is out and about yet.”
“The hospital shift change isn’t till seven,” I agreed.
“But it’s close enough to daybreak so the guy watching the camera feeds will figure that crazy Dr. Brockton is up really early today. Those guys all know what your truck looks like, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “They’ve seen me drive in there hundreds of times. Hell, I’ve given every campus cop and hospital security guard a tour of the place.”
“And this guy knows that somehow,” Burt said. “Knows they know your truck.”
Owen scrolled forward in the clip until the man opened the wooden gate and pulled out. This time, he pulled far enough forward to clear the chain-link gate. As he closed both gates behind him, I studied the truck more closely. This time it was angled slightly down the parking lot, slightly downhill, so more of its roof was exposed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Stop.”
“What?” Burt asked.
“Look at the roof of the cab.”
“What about it?”
