The first thing he sent the detective was an empty picture.
It was the little view he'd taken from the doorway before moving into the recess. Pale wall, rail, leaves shifting in the hot air. No one on the other terrace. Cal watched it twice without touching the next file, where Felix waited with his hip against the corner post.
He exported the empty view and two public shots showing the approach to the passage. In the message he called them the location checks. He said he didn't think they'd filmed Felix separately. He didn't say there was no other file. He stopped himself from adding anything else and pressed send.
The cards were in the wallet. Both drives lay beside the laptop. He left every file where it was.
Juno came in carrying the fixed-camera case.
“They won't let us get to the screen,” she said.
“Which screen?”
“The one outside. The one all our cables go to.”
He closed the viewer, leaving the export on the desktop. “I sent Quinn the views.”
Juno put the case down. “What did you send?”
He turned the laptop enough to show her the three files. She opened the first, skipped along it, stopped on the empty terrace.
“Was that where he was?”
“I don't know exactly.”
She looked at him. Then she went back to the case and pulled out the coil of cable they'd brought as a spare.
“She asked me to keep everything. I need that laptop back for the cut. I don't want somebody turning up and taking it because we sent three little files.”
“I'll speak to her.”
“Tell her the work's on the drives.”
He nodded. Juno waited until he nodded a second time, then put the cable around her shoulder. There was already a red mark where the camera strap had been.
Downstairs, the ballroom had become louder. The music was off, so people heard one another too clearly and raised their voices to cover it. A group of men near the windows had removed their jackets. Someone had asked the bar to stop serving; someone else had told it to start again. The bartender was polishing a single glass, waiting for the person whose order counted.
Their outdoor screen stood on the far side of a glass door they were no longer allowed to open. It was ready for a loop of family pictures during dinner, with a short piece of the afternoon portraits at the end. Cal could see the edge of the white fabric through the garden. An extension cable ran under the door toward the closed service route. They had laid it before lunch. Now the door was locked, and the rental company's operator had gone to speak to somebody about getting it back.
Emilio stood between two carts of dinner plates, reading a new seating plan. He did not look up when Cal said his name.
“I need a place to show the pictures.”
“There.” Emilio pointed with the plan toward a blank wall.
“People can't see that from the other tables.”
“They can turn their chairs.”
“We need power.”
Emilio turned a page and pointed again. A socket near the floor, behind a plant. Cal could have found it himself.
“The tables are too close.”
This time Emilio looked up.
“They were set for a room with two doors. We have one door. I have to get food through it. I've got people trying to leave through it. I have a police officer asking where my people were this afternoon. Go and talk to the woman with the clipboard. She can move your tables.”
He picked up a tray, found it was the wrong one, and put it down harder than he meant to. A server beside him reached for it without saying anything.
Cal looked at the wall. Without a screen the surface was uneven, and the picture would run into the edge of an enormous mirror. The other wall had a pair of doors with a brass handle in the center. He could put Adrian's face on the handle if he wanted to.
Juno unwound the cable from her shoulder.
“We can make it smaller.”
“They paid for the big one.”
She looked out through the glass at the inaccessible screen, then back at him. He took the cable from her.
They used a low table for the projector and covered it with a cloth borrowed from Emilio's cart. The image came up across the plant, the wall and half a mirror. Juno moved the plant, and Cal pushed the table back a few inches. A palm leaf remained like a large black feather over Adrian's mother's face.
“Can we tie it?” Juno asked.
Cal took a strip of red tape from the kit. It stuck to his fingers, then to the leaf, then let go. Juno watched him with a mouth full of the little crackers somebody had left beside the projector.
“Don't laugh,” he said.
She swallowed. “I'm eating.”
He held the leaf while she wound a cable tie around it. They got the picture clean. It was smaller, but people near it could see faces instead of shapes. He adjusted the brightness, then stopped before the clothes turned into white holes.
A little girl came over and put her hand in front of the projector. Five huge fingers appeared across the wall.
“Not in the beam,” Cal said.
She made a rabbit with two fingers. Juno caught Cal's wrist before he could move her aside.
“One second.”
The rabbit hopped over a photograph of Adrian at seventeen, standing beside a bus much newer than the one he'd bought. The child giggled. Juno filmed the hand and the wall together. Cal waited, then took the photograph back to the start so the child could do it again.
Emilio came through with a cart. He saw the girl in the narrow passage and called to someone on the other side of the room. Her father came for her with an apology already on his face. He carried her away while she continued making the rabbit against his neck.
“That's a good bit,” Cal told Juno.
She was checking it, smiling without answering him.
At the laptop, one of Lena's friends had a different problem. There was a picture of Felix in the loop: a group on a beach with a banner behind them. Cal hadn't put the photographs together; the planner had supplied a folder, and Juno had made them run without jolting. He paused on the image.
Lena stood near the center. Felix, younger and heavier, had an arm around her shoulders. The banner was too far behind them to read except for a word: SHORE.
“We can't put that up,” the friend said.
“Has she asked?”
“She shouldn't have to.”
Juno stepped closer. “I can skip it for tonight.”
The friend pointed at another thumbnail. “And that one.”
The next image had Felix in the background, half out of the picture. Cal could make him disappear with a tighter crop. He could do that in less than a minute.
“Don't delete them,” he said.
Juno looked up sharply.
“Just make another version.”
She made a copy of the sequence. The original folder stayed where it was. The friend watched until the beach was gone, then went to find Lena.
Cal looked over the room for Adrian. He stood near the doorway with one of the older guests, listening. His father's watch case was no longer in his hand; it bulged in the pocket of his jacket. He saw Cal watching and came over.
“Is that us?” he asked.
Cal brought the portrait material up. “Just a bit from today.”
Adrian leaned forward, his hands on his knees, to get closer to the little laptop. On-screen he was trying not to sit on the sunglasses. Lena's laugh followed, and a corner of his mouth lifted.
“Show it,” he said.
“You don't have to do any more tonight.”
“I know. Show it.”
He went back to the guest. Cal watched him put a hand on the man's arm and take him toward a table. People needed somewhere to put their elbows, something to ask for. Once the first dinner plate came out, others followed it.
Emilio brought the servers through in pairs. He had them turn their bodies to slip between the projector and the door, plates held close. One stopped to ask a question, and Emilio sent her on with a little circling movement of his finger. Cal moved their case under the table to give them another few inches.
“You charge extra for this?” he asked when Emilio passed.
“They do. I don't.”
“You should.”
Emilio looked at him to see whether it was a joke. When he decided it wasn't, he said, “My place won't have a second entrance I can't use.”
“You've got a place?”
“Not yet.”
He picked up an empty wine glass that someone had set on the projector table. He held it by the rim, fingers apart, the way a man held something that wasn't clean enough for his own counter.
“Catering,” he said. “Small. People who know how many people they've invited.”
A server called from the door. Emilio put the glass on her tray and went after her.
Cal's phone vibrated. Quinn had received the files. She wanted the original camera material retained, including the rest of the location scouting, not only the short exports. She would follow up in the morning. If he remembered anything else, he could call her now.
He read the message while a picture of Adrian's mother filled the wall behind him. There had been no music supplied for that part. Juno had left the room sound underneath it, people eating and a chair dragging, until the first note of the little portrait edit came up.
“Quinn?” Juno asked.
He nodded.
“What does she want?”
“The originals kept. She's coming back.”
Juno touched the laptop, checking the export. “I've kept them.”