Page 87 of The Five Year Lie

I blink. “From the live network? Isn’t that going to leave a trail?”

Zain flicks his bloodshot eyes in my direction. “I’ve been doing that all along, Ariel. But I’m careful. I always expunge my activity from the log.”

“Will anybody notice?”

He gives a guilty shrug. “Probably not. In the first place, I’m the one who’d notice. But I also know some tricks. Anyway, it took Drew two weeks to open the files one by one and find the right warrant. But I’ve found it already.”

“How?”

“Optical Character Recognition.” He flashes me a rare smile. “I ran all the pdfs through a scanner script, withShawmutas the search term. And I found it. See?”

He stands up and plops his computer onto my lap, and then I’m blinking at a pdf of a judge’s warrant. The Lowden Police Department requested video of Andrew Ernest Miller’s home covering a four-hour period in the early morning hours of an April date in 2016.

The probable cause listed on it is “the sale of narcotics,” and the suspect is Omar Isak.

Omar.Of course. “And are there drugs on the video?”

He pushes a thumb drive toward me on the coffee table. “I didn’t play it. I thought you should do it.”

“Good idea,” I say immediately. “I don’t want you to break the law for me.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not scared, Ariel. But if this video badly violates a young woman’s privacy, it should only be viewed once. And probably not by me.”

“Oh.”

Oh.

“I’m gonna go now,” he says, taking his laptop back and closing it. “There’s a folder for all the warrants on the thumb drive, too. Disconnect your computer from the internet before you look at anything, yeah? Just being paranoid.”

“Okay.” I close my hand around the drive. “You’re sure Drew found this?”

“I’m sure,” he says, zipping his pack closed. Then he grabs his granola bar wrappers and shoves them in his pocket. He crosses to the door and pauses with his hand on the knob. “Let me know what you find?”

“You know I will. Go home and take a nap.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he says. And then he goes out into the predawn gray, closing the door behind him.

It’s four thirty now. I lock the door and turn off the lights. I tiptoe upstairs with the thumb drive in my hand.

After changing into a sleep shirt and brushing my sticky teeth, I bring my laptop into bed with me and shut off its Wi-Fi connection. I plug Zain’s drive into the port and open it up.

He’s given me the warrant document. There’s also a file with basic metadata that shows when the warrant was processed by Chime Co.

And then there’s the video file itself. I mute the volume on my laptop and double-click on the video.

Doorbell videos have a certain look to them, and it’s a little creepy. The lens is curved into a fish-eye shape for breadth of field, which causes visual distortions. The straight lines of the Shawmut Street porch railing are rendered as curves, like a fun-house mirror. And since it’s nighttime, the camera’s straining light sensors wash the color out of the scene, rendering it in shades of gray.

The frame contains a back porch, lit by a fixture on its woodenceiling. The corners darken into shadows, and there’s a small lawn beyond. That’s where the young people gather—on the grass. There are probably a dozen teenagers milling about, most of them holding beer cans. One kid has a soccer ball under his foot that he keeps kicking into his friends’ shins.

If there are drugs at this party, I can’t see where. Nobody is even smoking.

I advance the video with a nudge of the mouse. And then I do it several more times. Nothing much changes, but eventually the crowd drifts into the house, one by one.

A skinny guy in baggy shorts—probably Omar—gathers up all the beer cans in a trash bag and then disappears around the side of the house.

Just when I think the whole show is over, the back door opens. Two young people emerge from the house—a boy and a girl. He’s tall and lanky, with a basketball player’s build and a Celtics jersey. She has a heart-shaped face, beautiful big eyes, and closely cropped hair.

The two of them linger on the porch talking. It’s like they can’t quite stand to separate, until eventually the young man puts his hands on the girl’s hips.