Chapter 6

Ledbetter Towing sat behind a chain-link fence on the south end of Marlow, and the man in the office charged Sadie forty-five dollars for each of four days and slid a clipboard at her to sign.

"Truck's in row three," he said. "You've got until five. After that it's another day."

The yard was mud and crushed rock and rows of cars with their windows down. Her grandfather's pickup sat at the end of the third row with a yellow sticker on the windshield and the doors still unlocked, the way the tow driver had left it.

Tommy went around to the passenger side before she could stop him. He was eleven and fast and he had been quiet for four days.

"Don't climb in yet -"

He opened the door and froze.

Sadie came around the bed. "Tommy. What?"

He was looking at the headrest. Not the seat - the headrest, the back of it, where it met the post.

Then he reached in and pulled it off.

A camera. Small, black, cheap. The kind that came in a plastic blister pack with a strap, the kind she had bought him at the Dollar General in August with money from a can on the counter. A clip-on. The lens was scratched across one corner.

"I forgot this," he said.

Sadie looked at it in his hand. She looked at the headrest. She looked at the angle - clipped behind the passenger headrest, facing forward and slightly down, exactly where a kid would put it to film something out the windshield.

"Tommy," she said, very carefully. "When did you leave this in the truck?"

"That day." He was still looking at it. "I was filming the dog behind the dumpster. And then I couldn't find it and you said we had to go."

"Which day."

"Tuesday." He said it like it was obvious. "When you picked me up from Deb's to take me to school."

Sadie sat down on the tailgate because her legs had gone strange.

They didn't wait. Deb plugged it in at the kitchen table with the laptop open and Tommy leaning on her shoulder, and the file came up as one long clip with a number for a name.

The first three minutes were the dog.

Then the cab. Then the windshield. Then the road going gray-blue, fog in the fields, Tommy's own voice from the back seat saying something about a test he hadn't studied for, and Sadie's voice saying, "Eat your toast."

Then the blue lights in the mirror.

The camera kept running, tilted up and forward, and it caught everything: the cruiser parked behind, the deputy walking up, the flashlight through the window, her door opening.

At 5:52 by the camera's own clock, Deputy Royce Vance walked away from her truck and back to his cruiser. He stood with his back to the camera for four seconds. Then he straightened, and he came back, and his left hand was closed.

He leaned through her open door. On the laptop speakers, thin and small, his voice said: "Well, well. What do we have here?"

Then the picture showed the rest of it - the part Sadie had never seen and Royce Vance had never once worried about.

His right hand came up with the bag.

His left hand went down past the seat, and his fingers opened, and his hand came back empty.

Sadie reached over and dragged the little bar backward with her finger and watched it again. Then again. On the third pass she stopped it on the crouch beside the cruiser, and she looked at what his hand was doing down by his own boot, and she understood exactly where the bag had been for the last four minutes.

Deb said, "Oh, Lord."

Tommy said, "Is that the man?"

Sadie pulled the thumb drive out of the laptop and put it in her pocket, and then she put the camera in her other pocket, and then she sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets.

"Copy it," she said. "Copy it to three different places. Right now."