“Milt of the PJs is hyper-aware of his mark,” he told Jules and Sam, who were still silently watching over his shoulder. He glanced back at Sam. “A mark is something actors use to know where they need to be when the camera’s running—so they don’t accidentally move outside of the frame of the shot,” he explained in case the SEAL wasn’t as fluent as Jules was in actor-speak.
“Gotcha,” Sam said.
Robin pointed to the video as he played it again, using the trackpad to move through the footage slowly—essentially frame by frame. “Look at him sliding Drunk Milt toward him—up away from the edge of the video frame. He’s trying to make it look natural, but he sucks as an actor.” The man’s movement was furtive but very definite. “And look at how he’s kneeling there. Sam’s right. No one kneels like that when they’re worried their kid might be dying.”
“Tableau vivant,” Sam repeated.
“But as far as Gavin LaCrosse goes,” Robin said. “I’m not seeing much here that’s been edited—I mean,maybean editor could’ve blurred Milt Junior’s face, to make him unrecognizable, but... If that was Gavin’s job, he obviously failed. Especially since the tape got leaked and ended up proving the kid’s guilt. So why the monthly payments for... what it is...?” He looked at the timeline to find the first payment and did the math... “Forfifteen years, Gavin gets a monthly salary from Milt the senior forfailing?”
“Or... succeeding,” Jules said, slowly sitting down in the chair next to Robin, staring out the window as if he were doing some kind of complicated logic problem in his head. But when he looked up at Sam and then Robin, his eyes were sharply back in focus. “Holy shit, as we used to say back at the Bureau. What if Milt the senior leaked the video because he wanted exactly what he got? To prove to the world that his son was driving the car that killed Marina Santana? Except, what if this... tableau vivant was part of a set-up? A frame? What if it was really...”
“Milt the senior behind the wheel,” Sam finished for him. “Fuck! You think?”
Jules was practically vibrating with excitement as he turned back to Robin. “How hard would it be to remove a timestamp and to add a different one—a fake one? So that the video footage would falsely appear to have been recorded on the morning of the hit-and-run?”
“I don’t know, Jules,” Robin said. “There’s more than just that visible timestamp on a digital recording. There’s data embedded in the video file that would reveal the actual recording date.”
“Devonshire’s security setup isn’t digital—the footage is stored old-school, on VHS tapes,” Jules told him.
“Wow. Okay.” Robin looked back at the video—at thetime stamp that ran across the top. When he’d seen similar time stamps in the past, they usually ran across the bottom of the frame. This one, on the top, was doubly interesting because its placement meant that it didn’t, rather conveniently, cover any of the action in the lower half of the video—where PJ Milt posed so tragically insincerely over Drunk Milt’s limp body. “What kind of security camera is this?” he asked. “We could google it and find out?—”
“If the timestamp running across the top is the default. Good idea.” Jules stood up and started searching through the files on the table.
Sam asked, “You want me to grab Cosmo and go over to the estate?—”
“No. I got it.” Jules found what he was looking for—his note pad. He flipped back through the pages. “I wrote it down.” He looked up at Sam. “You mocked me, remember?” He spoke in an exaggerated drawl, “SweetJesus, Squidward, you don’t need to write everything down. I’m hungry.”
“Yup,” Sam said. “That was me. Sorry?”
“The system is something called POMTek,” Jules announced.
Robin jumped over to Google. “Spell it for me.”
Jules did and Robin typed it in and... The website for POMTek Personal Security Systems came right up. He went to their search bar and typedtimecode.
“Currently,” Robin reported as he clicked through the website, “the timecode from the POMTek cameras are... boom! At the bottom. Totally different font, too. Although if the cameras at the estate are older models...”
“Much older,” Jules reminded them all as he now searched for something else on the table.
“At least fifteen years old,” Sam said. “If not older than that. The technology is definitely different. I love whereyou’re going with this, Cassidy, but this really doesn’t prove much.”
“But we have this.” Jules held up what looked like an old video tape, ensconced in one of those hard plastic cases. “Security footage from the Estate from the same year as the hit-and-run. We can use it to compare and confirm.”
“And again, I do believe I laughed at you when you took that off the shelf,” Sam admitted. “That’ll teach me. Well, probably not.” He used his phone to search for... “There’s a company in Burbank, pretty close to the estate, that’ll make the transfer from VHS to something we can actually watch. Let’s add that to our list for first thing tomorrow.”
“Or,” Robin said, “we can watch it right now on Jane’s VCR.”
Both Sam and Jules turned to look at him as he rolled his chair over to the built-in cabinet in the corner of the room. He opened the bottom door to reveal every type of media playback device under the sun.
“Jane still has a VCR,” Jules said as Robin powered up the system and used the remote to turn on the TV. “That’s... not entirely unexpected.”
Robin told Sam, “She does a lot of historical research—” many of the films his sister wrote and produced were historical dramas “—and sometimes old footage is in older formats. She even has a Betamax player.” Robin made agimmemotion for the tape.
Jules popped open the case and handed it over. Robin inserted it into the slot and pushed play and...
The TV displayed ragged lines of mostly noise.
“Well, shit,” Sam said.
