Whoever had installed that camera had installed it well, and whoever had burned the office had not known it was there.

There is a grim irony buried in that detail, and it is worth drawing out, because it is the hinge on which the whole story turns.

Richard Cole had been, by any measure, meticulous.

He had planned the killing, staged the scene, planted the evidence, and then destroyed the room with fire, precisely to erase any record of what had truly happened there.

His thoroughness was the reason the frame had held for five years; he had thought of nearly everything.