4

He’s a tractor salesman,” Stevens told his wife over dinner that night. “Swears he never saw the woman before in his life, has no idea how these pictures keep popping up on his phone.”

Stevens and Windermere had grilled Higgins for a couple more hours. Pushed him for information about the lost pictures until, finally, the lawyer stepped in. This time, they conceded the point.

“My client is going home, too,” the lawyer had told Stevens and Windermere as they packed up to leave. “There’s no reason to keep him here. He’s committed no crime. I insist—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Windermere had waved him off. “Go home if you want, Mr. Higgins. Maybe call your good friend Jessie—or Tanya, if you prefer. But don’t go anywhere, understand? Stay close.”

Higgins laughed humorlessly. “Where would I go?”

“That’s the spirit. Go home, fire up Netflix, wait for us to call you. Oh.” Windermere reached back, took Higgins’s phone off the table. “And we’re going to be keeping this.”

Dinner had been all but cleared from the table when Stevens arrived home in Saint Paul, but Nancy Stevens had a plate in the oven for him, and she sat beside him at the kitchen table and listened as he explained the case between mouthfuls of meat loaf.

“And you’re sure he’s telling the truth?” she asked as Stevens turned his attention to a pile of steamed broccoli. “Could he be trying to protect someone? It seems weird that these pictures would just show up like that.”

“Very weird. We’re going to talk to the cell service provider tomorrow, see if they have any answers. Have to call the sheriff in Idaho, too. We—”

Stevens broke off as his daughter entered the kitchen. “What’s going on?” she asked as she walked to the fridge.

Stevens and Nancy shared a look. Andrea was seventeen, a high school senior, as smart and stubborn as her mother, who herself was a legal aid lawyer and perennial champion of the underdog. Andrea was mature for her age, almost an adult, but Stevens still didn’t feel especially comfortable talking shop with her in earshot.

An awkward silence ensued. Andrea poked her head out from the fridge. “Come on, Dad. How bad could it be?”

Plenty bad, Stevens thought, but he kept that to himself. “It’s nothing crazy. Just a guy out in farm country had a bunch of weird pictures show up on his smartphone, one of which happens to be evidence of a crime. But nobody knows how the pictures wound up there.”

“Huh.” Andrea retreated from the fridge with a carton of milk and poured herself a glass. “Did he lose his phone recently? Like, did he have to replace it?”

Stevens frowned. “I’m not sure. What difference would that make?”

“Well, it’s the cloud,” Andrea said, as if the answer were obvious. Stevens looked at his wife, but she was mystified, too. Andrea sighed the way only a teenager forced to explain technology to her parents can sigh, and brought her glass of milk to the table. “The cloud,” she repeated. “You know, like, online storage. So you can access your data from anywhere.”

“Sure,” Stevens said, though he was already kind of lost. “But what does this have to do with phantom pictures?”

Andrea took a drink. “I was reading about this online, the exact same thing. Some guy in New York had his phone stolen. He replaced it, but then these weird pictures from China started showing up on his new phone. Some guy taking selfies in a bunch of orange trees.”

She paused, waiting for her parents to make the connection. When they didn’t, she continued. “Because the old phone was still connected to the guy’s cloud, don’t you see? Even though the old phone was, like, in China, the cloud system meant the New York guy was still getting pictures.”

She grinned at her parents. “It turned into this huge thing. The guy in New York went over to China and they both became, like, huge celebrities. All because of a stolen phone.”

“So if this guy’s phone was stolen,” Nancy said, “someone else could be taking pictures on his old phone and automatically uploading them to his new one.”

Andrea sat back. “Exactly. So does that help?”

Stevens was already standing. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. “I have to make a phone call.”

—

Replaced my smartphone?”

On the other end of the line, Mark Higgins gave it a beat. Then his voice brightened. “Actually, yeah. I was out at some bar in Minneapolis about six, seven months ago and someone swiped the damn thing. It was a real pain in the ass, too; I had to shell out five hundred bucks to replace it.” He laughed a little. “That’s all you wanted to know? Does it get me off the hook, or what?”

“I don’t know yet,” Stevens told him. “I’m still putting this together.”