"She can stay," I said. "Doug too, if he wants. Everybody should see it."
Sheryl's chin came up. She took one of the folding chairs, the one closest to the screen, and sat in it with her back very straight. Doug stood behind her with his hands in his windbreaker pockets. Moreland took a position by the open garage door, half in the sunlight, where he could see the screen and also all of us. Quist didn't sit. She stood at the workbench beside me with a notepad.
"Before we look at anything," she said, "walk me through the system."
So I did. I showed her the recorder through the laundry room door, its blue lights blinking. I showed her the system's time settings, which synced automatically to an internet time server every hour, and the logs, which showed that the last time anyone had logged into the recorder before Rhoda and Pascal's visit was the night of the incident, at 9:14 p.m., which was me, and that between that login and Pascal's visit no files had been exported, deleted, or changed. I walked her out into the backyard and showed her each camera's position and angle, and she stood under the owl post and looked up at the dome for a long time, and then she walked over to the fence and looked at Sheryl's clothesline and back at the dome again, like a surveyor.
When we came back into the garage, Sheryl hadn't moved.
"All right," Quist said. "Start with the overview. The owl camera. Start at ten p.m. the night before."
I pulled it up.
On a forty-three-inch screen, a 4K camera at night is a different animal from the little gray smudge on a phone. Infrared gives you black and white and every gray in between, but at that resolution it gives you texture. You could see the individual blades of grass on my lawn, silvered with dew. You could see the grain of the shed shingles and the rust bloom on the hasp. On the right side of the frame you could see Sheryl's backyard: the black rectangles of the privacy mask over her windows and patio, as neat as redactions in a government document, and in front of them her lawn and her clothesline, a T-shaped metal pole with four lines strung across it.
The lines were empty.
"Mrs. Kinsella," Quist said, without looking around, "your statement says you hung the garments on the line at approximately ten p.m."
"That's right."
I let the recording play at sixteen times speed. The timestamp in the corner spun. Ten fifteen. Ten forty. The clothesline stayed empty. At 11:14 the Admiral dropped out of the top of the frame, landed on the crossbar of Sheryl's clothesline pole with something small and limp in his talons, sat there for forty seconds looking pleased with himself, and flew to the owl box.