And there were two senior agents from the Texas Department of Public Safety, present because the moment a memory card timestamped to a murder night appears the night of an execution, it stops being a prison matter and becomes a state one.

No one spoke as the security officer navigated to the files.

The card contained a small number of video files, and every one of them bore the same date in its metadata: the fourteenth of November, the night Marcus Vance had died.

Sarah Jenkins felt her own heartbeat in her throat.

The prosecutor folded his arms across his chest, a man braced to be unimpressed, a man who had already decided, on the drive over, that this would turn out to be nothing, a hoax, a coincidence, the sad grasping of a condemned woman and a confused child.

His skepticism was not cruelty, and it is worth being fair to him, because his position at that moment was in its own way a terrible one.