clever.”
“They’ve got a pinhole camera and a microphone built in,” Marino offers as he drives. “Which is why I think the dead guy was the one doing the spying. How could he not know he had an audiovisual recording system built into his headphones?”
“He might not have known. It’s possible someone was spying on him and he had no idea,” Lucy says to me, and I sense she and Marino have been arguing about it. “The pinhole is on top of the headband but in the edge of it and hard to see. Even if you noticed, it wouldn’t necessarily cross your mind that built inside is a wireless camera smaller than a grain of rice, an audio transmitter that’s no bigger, and a motion sensor that goes to sleep after ninety seconds if nothing’s moving. This guy was walking around with a micro-webcam that was recording onto the radio’s hard drive and an additional eight-gig SD card. It’s too soon for me to tell you if he knew it—in other words, if he rigged this up himself. I know that’s what Marino thinks, but I’m not at all sure.”
“Does the SD card come with the radio, or was it added after-market?” I inquire.
“Added. A lot of storage space, in other words. What I’m curious about is if the files were periodically downloaded elsewhere, like onto his home computers. If we can get hold of them, we might know what this is about.”
Lucy is saying that the video files she has looked at so far don’t tell us much. She has reason to suspect the dead man has a home computer, possibly more than one of them, but she hasn’t found anything that might tell us where he lived or who he is.
“What’s stored on the hard drive and SD card go back only as far as February fifth, this past Friday,” she continues. “I don’t know if that means the surveillance just started, or more likely, these video files are large and take up a lot of space on the hard drive. They probably get downloaded somewhere, and what’s on the hard drive and SD card gets recorded over. So what’s here may be just the most recent recordings, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others.”
“Then these video clips were probably downloaded remotely.”
“That’s what I would do if it were me doing the spying,” Lucy says. “I’d log in to the webcam remotely and download what I wanted.”
“What about watching in real time?” I then ask.
“Of course. If he was being spied on, whoever’s doing it could log on to the webcam and watch him as it’s happening.”
“To stalk him, to follow him?”
“That would be a logical reason. Or to gather intelligence, to spy. Like some people do when they suspect their person is cheating on them. Whatever you can imagine, it’s possible.”
“Then it’s possible he inadvertently recorded his own death.” I feel a glint of hope and at the same time am deeply disturbed by the thought. “I say ‘inadvertently’ because we don’t know what we’re dealing with. For example, we don’t know if he intentionally recorded his own death, if he’s therefore a suicide, and I’m not ready to rule out anything.”
“No way he’s a suicide,” Marino says.
“At this point, we shouldn’t rule out anything,” I repeat.
“Like a suicide bomber,” Lucy says. “Like Columbine and Fort Hood. Maybe he was going to take out as many people as he could in Norton’s Woods and then kill himself, but something happened and he never got the chance.”
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I say again.
“The Glock had seventeen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber,” Lucy tells me. “A lot of firepower. You could certainly ruin someone’s wedding. We need to know who got married and who attended.”
“Most of these people have extra magazines,” I reply, and I know all about the shootings at Fort Hood, at Virginia Tech, at far too many places, where assailants open fire without necessarily caring who they kill. “Usually these people have an abundance of