The Second Photograph

The evidence inventory for Case 19-0603 says two rolls of film. Wren Harper shot them herself on the afternoon of June 3, 2019, in a house on Main Street Extension where a woman named Aileen Greer had been dead for twenty minutes. Twenty-two frames on the first roll. Four on the second.

The inventory is nine years old, it is in her own handwriting, and it is the only thing in that box that has ever been wrong. Because the box holds one canister, not two, and the paper label on it reads 1 of 2 in her hand.

The second canister is under the box. Taped to the bottom of it, in a county evidence bag, sealed in 2019, with a label that also reads 2 of 2 in the same hand.

And then there is the lab submission form, which she filled in as well, and on which two boxes are ticked. Roll 1 primary. Roll 2 duplicate. Both ticks are hers. She has no memory at all of making the second one.

The rule in that county was that duplicates did not get developed. They went back to the evidence room sealed and they stayed there. So the four frames on that second roll have been sitting in the dark for nine years, undeveloped, unread, and nobody has ever asked about them -- including the woman who made them.

Martin Eskridge served three years for a death a jury said was his. He does not want money and he does not want an apology. He wants the paper fixed.

What is on those four frames is a doorway, a yard, a set of wet footprints that did not belong to anybody on the job, and a man standing in the back door of a house where a woman was dying. It is not the answer. It is a question with a height in it.

The Second Photograph is the eighth and final Harper & Cole Investigations novel. It is about a rule that was a good rule for eleven years, a gas receipt that proves the opposite of what everybody assumed it proved, forty-seven seconds of a 911 call that was never played for a jury, and a woman who has to correct a record that she is the only living person who wrote.