"Teo says you're going to want to be sitting down," she said. "And he says it's got sound."
I didn't sleep. Of course I didn't. I sat at the kitchen table until three with the lights off and a mug of chamomile tea going cold, listening to the furnace kick on and off and Izzy's occasional footsteps overhead, so he wasn't sleeping either.
At eight the next morning I sat in a folding chair in Ruthanne's office with Teo Brask's laptop on the desk in front of me, between two banker's boxes, and watched the file.
The cabin camera has a wide lens, almost a fisheye, and in parking mode at night it switches to infrared, so everything is rendered in grainy silvers and blacks, like an old photograph of the moon. You can see the whole back seat from the driver's headrest to the rear window. You can see, on the floor behind the front passenger seat, the shape of Izzy's backpack, the orange panels showing up a pale gray, the Steel City Aquatics patch just a lighter blotch on the front pocket. The timestamp in the upper corner reads 11:52:07.
For the first three seconds nothing happens. Then a light swings across the rear window from outside, a flashlight beam, white and blown out in the infrared, and stops on the back seat. Holds there. You can see it settle on the backpack, the circle of it trembling very slightly, the way a flashlight does when someone is holding it with a hand that isn't quite steady.
Then the rear passenger door opens.
She doesn't get in. She leans in, at the waist. She's wearing a dark quilted vest over something pale, and a pair of thick gloves with a floral pattern that shows up in the infrared as a mottled gray, and she has a phone held flat in one gloved hand, screen up, the way people hold a phone when it's on speaker. The flashlight is in her other hand. She sets the flashlight down on the seat, pointing at the backpack, and in its spill you can see her face perfectly: the silver-blond bob, the reading glasses pushed up into it, the set of her mouth.
Bobbie Tillotson unzips my son's front pocket.
She takes something out of her vest. It's small and dark. She holds it for a second in the beam, turning it, and I knew what it was because I'd seen it in an evidence bag on a round table in an assistant principal's office: a zippered pouch, black with a red stripe. She pushes it into the front pocket, all the way to the bottom, and zips the pocket closed. Then she unzips it again and looks, and zips it closed again, and smooths the flap of the backpack with her gloved palm as if she's tucking in a child.
And the whole time, she's talking to the phone.
I won't tell you yet what she said. Not because I'm being coy. Because the sound in the cabin was low and some of it was muffled by her vest and the rustle of fabric, and the first time I heard it, in Ruthanne's office, I only caught pieces. I caught her voice, clear, saying something about gloves. I caught a man's voice, small and tinny out of the phone's speaker, saying something with the word pocket in it. I caught her saying, near the end, the word Cade, and the man's voice saying something sharp back. And I caught the last thing she said before she picked up her flashlight and straightened and pushed the door closed with her hip, gently, so it wouldn't slam, which was, clear as a bell: "Well, it's done now. Go to bed."
Then the door is closed. The flashlight beam swings away across the rear window. The back seat is gray and still, and the backpack is on the floor behind the passenger seat exactly where it was, and the clip runs another eleven seconds of nothing, and ends.