My knees cracked in the silent room.

The digital recorder was wired straight into a small square monitor that sat next to the desk lamp.

I pushed the power switch on the monitor’s frame.

The screen flickered on and showed a grid of four camera channels, though only channel one was live.

The unit held four hundred gigabytes of automatic security footage on an internal hard drive.

I opened the search index and set the start date to October fifteenth, three weeks before I caught the flight to Dublin for my sister Margaret’s burial.