“You told us about the phone,” she said. “You did not tell us she said numbers.”

“You didn’t ask about the last thing she said.” Claire’s voice was steady. “You asked me eleven times why I left.”

Nobody said anything for a bit.

Then Marisol Reyes uncapped a pen and got to work, and I watched a case get rebuilt in front of me in about ninety minutes.

The photograph. The forensics report on Emily’s cracked phone had been sitting in the file since February and said, in the flat language those reports use, that an MMS message had been composed and queued at 11:06:41 p.m. and transmitted at 12:11:47 a.m.

Nobody had made anything of it, because nobody had a reason to. Barrett explained it to me the way you explain something to a man who is sixty-eight: a dying battery, no signal in a residential dead zone, then a garage, then a moving car, then a plastic bag on a counter — and then a nurse who plugged it into a charger at the intake desk at ten past twelve, because a deputy had asked her to make sure it didn’t die before it could be downloaded.