* * *
It was Priya's paralegal who found the thing that changed everything, and she found it because of Gus.
Gus did not trust email, but Imelda had set up an account for him years ago so the grandchildren could send pictures, and in June, at the height of the garage-door business, Karen had emailed him a copy of a violation notice "as a courtesy," with the photograph attached. Gus had never opened the attachment. He'd printed the letter, the way he printed everything. But the email was still in his inbox, and the attachment was still attached.
"It's a JPEG," said Mariela Ochoa, Priya's paralegal, a soft-spoken woman of about twenty-five who had driven up from Columbus on a Saturday morning with a laptop and a box of pastries. She'd plugged Gus's ancient desktop into her laptop and was poking around in a window full of text. "Not a scan. Not a screenshot. It's the original file off the camera. She didn't strip the metadata."
"Is that bad?" Gus asked.
"For her? Very." Mariela turned the screen toward us.
Every digital photograph carries a little invisible file folder inside it, called EXIF data, written by the camera at the moment of capture: the make and model, the lens, the shutter speed, the date and time, and often — on better cameras — the camera body's serial number. Most people never see it. Some phones and websites strip it out automatically. A Nikon attaching straight to an email doesn't.
Mariela read it off line by line.
"Camera make: Nikon Corporation. Model: Nikon D7500. Lens: 70.0–300.0 millimeter f/4.5–6.3. Focal length: 135 millimeters. Body serial number: 3026718." She scrolled. "Date and time original: 2025, colon, 04, colon, 16. Fourteen thirty-two and nine seconds."
"April sixteenth," I said.
"The notice says the violation was observed on June sixth," Priya said quietly.