“Funny system,” Graham said.

“It probably makes sense for a security camera,” I said. “They’d be much more concerned about a single person on the floor than a crowd.”

As we watched, the night lights came on. The desks were all empty. Now the tape began to flicker rapidly, almost like a strobe.

“Something wrong with this tape?” Graham said, suspiciously. “They fucked around with it?”

“I don’t know. No, wait. It’s not that. Look at the clock.”

On the far wall, we could see the office clock. The minute hands were sweeping smoothly from seven-thirty toward eight o’clock.

“It’s time lapse,” I said.

“What is it, taking snapshots?”

I nodded. “Probably, when the system doesn’t detect anybody for a while, it begins to take single frames every ten or twenty seconds, until—“

“Hey. What’s that?”

The flickering had stopped. The camera had begun to pan to the right, across the deserted floor. But there was nobody in the frame. Just empty desks, and occasional night lights, which flared in the video.

“Maybe they have a wide sensor,” I said. “That looks beyond the borders of the image itself. Either that, or it’s being moved manually. By a guard, somewhere. Maybe down in the security room.”

The panning image came to rest on the elevator doors. The doors were at the far right, in deep shadow, beneath a kind of ceiling overhang that blocked our view.

“Jeez, dark under there. Is someone there?”

“I can’t see anything,” I said.

The image began to swim in and out of focus.

“What’s happening now?” Graham said.

“Looks like the automatic focus is having trouble. Maybe it can’t decide what to focus on. Maybe the overhang is bothering the logic circuits. My video camera at home does the same thing. The focus gets screwed up when it can’t tell what I am shooting.”

“So is the camera trying to focus on something? Because I can’t see anything. It just looks black under there.”

“No, look. There’s someone there. You can see pale legs. Very faint.”

“Christ,” Graham said, “that’s our girl. Standing by the elevator. No, wait. Now she’s moving.”

A moment later, Cheryl Austin stepped from beneath the ceiling overhang, and we saw her clearly for the first time.

She was beautiful and assured. She moved unhesitatingly into the room. She was direct, purposeful in her movements, with none of the awkward, shuffling sloppiness of the young.

“Jesus, she’s good-looking,” Graham said. Cheryl Austin was tall and slender; her short blond hair made her seem even taller. Her carriage was erect. She turned slowly, surveying the room as if she owned it.

“I can’t believe we’re seeing this,” Graham said.

I knew what he meant. This was a girl who had been killed just a few hours before. Now we were seeing her on a videotape, walking around just minutes before her death.

On the monitor, Cheryl picked up a paperweight on one of the desks, turned it in her hand, put it back. She opened her purse, closed it again. She glanced at her watch.

“Starting to fidget.”

“She doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” Graham said. “And I bet she doesn’t have much practice at it, either. Not a girl like that.”

She began to tap on the desk with her fingers in a distinct rhythm. It seemed familiar to me. She bobbed her head to the rhythm. Graham squinted at the screen, “Is she talking? Is she saying something?”

“It looks like it,” I said. We could barely see her mouth moving. And then I suddenly put it together, her movements, everything. I realized I could sync her lips. “I chew my nails and I twiddle my thumbs. I’m real nervous but it sure is fun. Oh baby, you drive me crazy…”

“Jesus,” Graham said. “You’re right. How’d you know that?”

“Goodness, gracious, great balls of—“

Cheryl stopped singing. She turned toward the elevators.

“Ah. Here we go.”

Cheryl walked toward the elevators. Just as she stepped beneath the overhang, she threw her arms around the man who had arrived. They embraced and kissed warmly. But the man remained beneath the overhang. We could see his arms around Cheryl, but we could not see his face.

“Shit,” Graham said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll see him in a minute. If not this camera, another camera. But I think we can say this is not somebody she just met. This is somebody she already knows.”

“Not unless she’s real friendly. Yeah, look. This guy isn’t wasting any time.”

The man’s hands slid up the black dress, raising her skirt. He squeezed her buttocks. Cheryl Austin pressed against his body. Their clinch was intense, passionate. Together they moved deeper into the room, turning slowly. Now the man’s back was to us. Her skirt was bunched around her waist. She reached down to rub his crotch. The couple half walked, half stumbled to the nearest desk. The man bent her back against the desk and suddenly she protested, pushing him away.

“Ah, ah. Not so fast,” Graham said. “Our girl has standards, after all.”

I wondered if that was it. Cheryl seemed to have led him on, then changed her mind. I noticed that she had changed moods almost instantaneously. It made me wonder if she had been acting all along, if her passion was faked. Certainly the man did not seem particularly surprised by her sudden change. Sitting up on the desk, she kept pushing at him, almost angrily. The man stepped away. His back was still to us. We couldn’t see his face. As soon as he had stepped back, she changed again: smiling, kittenish now. With slow movements, she got off the desk and adjusted her skirt, twisting her body provocatively as she looked around. We could see his ear and the side of his face, just enough to see that his jaw was moving. He was talking to her. She smiled at him, and came forward, slid her arms around his neck. Then they began kissing again, their hands moving over each other. Walking slowly through the office, toward the conference room.

“So. Did she choose the conference room?”

“Hard to say.”

“Shit, I still can’t see his face.”

By now they were near the center of the room; and the camera was shooting almost directly down. All we saw was the top of his head.

I said, “Does he look Japanese to you?”

“Fuck. Who can tell. How many other cameras were in that room?”

“Four others.”

“Well. His face can’t be blocked in all four. We’ll nail his ass.”

I said, “You know, Tom, this guy looks pretty big. He looks taller than she is. And she was a tall girl.”

“Who can tell, in this angle? I can’t tell anything except he has a suit on. Okay. There they go, toward the conference room.”

As they approached the room, she suddenly began to struggle.

“Oops,” Graham said. “She’s unhappy again. Moody young thing, isn’t she?”

The man gripped her tightly and she spun, trying to twist free. He half carried her, half dragged her to the room. At the doorway, she spun a final time, grabbed the door frame, struggling.

“She lose the purse there?”

“Probably. I can’t see clearly.”

The conference room was located directly opposite the camera, so we had a view of the entire room. But the interior of the conference room was very dark, so the two people were silhouetted against the lights of the skyscrapers through the outer glass windows. The man lifted her up in his arms and set her down on the table, rolled her onto her back. She became passive, liquid, as he slid her skirt up her hips. She seemed to be accepting, moving to meet him, and then he made a quick movement between their bodies, and suddenly something flew away.

“There go the panties.”

It looked as if they landed on the floor. But it was hard to tell for sure. If they were panties, they were black, or some other dark color. So much, I thought, for Senator Rowe.

“The panties were gone by the time we got there,” Graham said, staring at the monitor. “Fucking withholding of evidence, pure and simple.” He rubbed his hands together. “You got any Nakamoto stock, buddy, I’d sell it. ‘Cause it isn’t going to be worth shit by tomorrow afternoon.”