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guests, of course, are provided with a new card every morning so they’re not constrained in any way from coming and going. The cards open the doors to their bedrooms and most other doors in the house and around the grounds, including the front gate.”
    “But their comings and goings are recorded?” McGarr asked, mindful of the “transcripts” the priest had referred to earlier.
    “It’s one of the advantages of the system.” Father Fred moved to a narrow door at the back of the grand staircase. Yet again having to use his electronic passkey, he led McGarr into a low, darkened room that was lit by banks of small video display terminals.
    Each seemed to be monitoring some part of the estate—hallways and doors of the house, the main rooms, the kitchens, the front gate, garages, stables, greenhouse, even the pathways of the formal garden. McGarr could make out the shape of Mary-Jo Stanton’s corpse bowed down in death—her white hair, the glint of the gardening trowel.
    The small room was quite warm and stank of hot plastic and circuitry.
    “What good is all of this if you need somebody in here to watch the screens?” McGarr asked.
    “If somebody so much as touches one of the doors without using a pass card first, an alarm will sound both in here and on this.” From the pocket of his clerical jacket, the priest removed the same remote device that he had used to close the front gate.
    “As well, all of this is recorded.” He swept a hand to mean the monitors.
    “Recorded how?”
    “To disk with a tape backup.”
    “You mean you have a recording of what went on here?” McGarr pointed to the screen with the image of the woman’s corpse.
    The priest’s hand jumped to his jaw in a thoughtful pose. “You know, in the chaos of the…catastrophe, it slipped my mind. But yes! We should have it. What number is that?” He pointed to the screen that pictured the corpse.
    In the darkness, McGarr had to squint. “Forty-one.”
    At a keyboard, the priest tapped some keys on the control panel and then pointed to the larger screen that obviously serviced the computer. “We’ll see it here.”
    As the tape rewound quickly, McGarr and Father Fred appeared in the picture, then Mary-Jo Stanton’s corpse alone for a while, followed by the priest dressed in his bicycling togs and bending over her. They then watched a long sequence of just her lifeless body, then a dark gap, and finally Mary-Jo herself, gardening while the sun was fully out.
    “Shall I stop here?” Fred asked.
    “Yes. Run it forward, please. Slowly, if possible.”
    The priest struck the keys once more, and they watched as the pretty, elderly woman with her white mane bound in a ponytail pottered around her garden in slow motion. She pruned a bush here, transplanted a seedling there, and paused now and then to wipe her brow and glance around her.
    Once when a magpie kited down for a worm in a freshly dug section of garden, she paused and seemed to speak to the large, handsome black-and-white bird as it worried the ground, tossing bits of earth this way and that.
    “Shall I speed it up?” Father Fred asked.
    “Please.”
    The screen then showed Mary-Jo Stanton again moving from one spot to another and kneeling down to garden before the picture went dark.
    “Stop,” McGarr said. “Go back slowly from there.”
    Another series of taps backed up the tape, and they watched as suddenly the screen brightened again, and they saw her down on her knees exactly where she had been murdered, McGarr believed.
    In reverse, it appeared that Mary-Jo Stanton had turned her head and said something to somebody behind her, then reached for the water bottle, which she raised to her mouth, before resuming her work. After that the screen went blank.
    “Now roll it forward, please. Slowly.”
    Again they watched as she turned her head nearly to the camera and opened her mouth, saying something.
    In silhouette, as she spoke and then drank from thebottle, Mary-Jo Stanton