There was a campsite a mile south of Totnes with a small room next to its shop that had a computer and internet access. I’d been past countless times on the way along the A381, seen the “Surf at the beach—then come back and surf the web!” sign out front, and I knew this time of year it would be empty. They were a week short of closing for the winter so the whole place was deserted. I paid for a couple of hours, then pushed the door shut.
In the silence of the room, I started to realize how tired I was. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d last slept and I was beginning to feel exhaustion dragging at me, deep down in my bones. But I pushed it away and tried to press on, slotting the memory stick in and double-clicking on its icon. Carrie had called the stick “Diss/CL.” I’d expected to find Word docs full of notes, interview transcripts, perhaps some scans of history books; instead, it contained a single folder called “Pics.” There were fifteen photographs inside.
I opened them up.
As I saw the first, I felt the tiredness slip away immediately. Eric Schiltz, Carter Graham and Ray Muire were all in the center, arms around each other’s shoulders, all smiling at the camera. They were young, in their midtwenties, all dressed in the same early 1970s fashion. It wasn’t the original—the picture was of a frame with the original photograph inside. This is it. This is the one Carrie must have taken in Schiltz’s study.
In its background a building was taking shape, at the midway point of being constructed, and as I double-clicked on it and zoomed in, I felt something else fall into place. It’s part of a series I’ve already seen. This was Carter Graham’s LA office, rising up out of the Californian dust. The other stages of its assembly were documented in the twelve photographs I’d seen behind the door in the library at Farnmoor. I wondered why he’d never made this one a part of it, then recalled something he’d said: Eric e-mailed a picture—I don’t know, maybe a year ago, maybe eighteen months . . . I remember it because it was taken around the same time as these ones—except his one had all three of us in. Even if he’d wanted to include the picture of the three friends standing next to the office, he wouldn’t have been able to. Because Katie Francis had been into Graham’s e-mail and deleted it.
Just like she or Prouse had done with Ray Muire.
Just like Cornell himself had done with Eric Schiltz.
I remember Eric and I were down there a lot, watching it all take shape, he’d said to me. We clubbed together and flew Ray out a couple of times too. They were good days.
I looked around the edges of the shot.
The backdrop was dusty, without landmarks, but I’d read that Graham had chosen Marina Del Rey, a man-made harbor south of Venice Beach, for his LA office, and I knew from my time in the city that it had only opened in 1965. Five, six, seven years later—when the picture was taken—it would still have been a development, full of pockets of space. On either side, people and machines milled around—construction workers, the right angles of heavies and cranes, big piles of concrete slabs and huge metal girders.
My eye was drawn to the far left.
There were two men.
One, in a hard hat, was pointing to something off camera; it looked like he was talking to someone else, perhaps relaying instructions. He could have been the foreman.
Then there was the second man. He was in his early fifties, almost entirely obscured behind the foreman, only his top half visible. It looked like he’d been in the process of stepping back as the picture was taken. His shape had a gentle curve to it, as if he was leaning away. He was slim and well built, smartly dressed in a pale blue flannel suit, with a waistcoat buttoned up underneath. He had a tan, silver hair swept back from his face, and a thin scar—colored a deep pink—running down the left side of his forehead, from his hairline to the ridge of his eyebrow.
I clicked through to the next photograph.
It was a second camera-phone picture taken in Schiltz’s study of the photo frame. Same resolution, same light. Except this time Carrie had cropped in on the man to the left-hand side. Graham, Schiltz and Muire were all to the right, Muire barely in it at all.
This had been the one she’d had in her notebook.
This was the epicenter.
This was Daniel Kalb.