It was in exactly that capacity — as a forensic specialist who could later stand up in court and testify to precisely how the evidence was obtained — that I put him to work.

“They wiped the campus servers,” he told me, a few hours in.

“Professionally.

Somebody paid for a real job.” Then he almost smiled, grimly.

“But somebody paid for a rushed job.

The primary system’s gone.

What they forgot is that a system that size mirrors its footage to backups, on a delay, in more than one place — and one of those places, they didn’t touch.

It’s all documented.