The video was clear and steady, the lighting was good. The technical aspects of crime scene videotaping had vastly improved since McCaleb’s days with the bureau. The content had not changed. The tape McCaleb watched showed the starkly lit tableau of murder. McCaleb finally froze the image and studied it. The cabin was silent, the gentle lapping sound of the sea against the boat’s hull the only intrusion from outside.

At center focus was the nude body of what appeared to be a man who had been trussed with baling wire, his arms and legs held tightly behind his torso to such extreme that the body appeared to be in a reverse fetal position. The body was face down on an old and dirty rug. The focus was too tight on the body to determine in what sort of location it had been found. McCaleb judged that the victim was a man solely on the basis of body mass and musculature. For the head of the victim was not visible. A gray plastic mop bucket had been placed entirely over the victim’s head. McCaleb could see that a length of the baling wire was stretched taut from the victim’s ankles, up his back and between his arms, and beneath the lip of the bucket where it wrapped around his neck. It appeared on first measure to be a ligature strangulation in which the leverage of the legs and feet pulled the wire tight around the victim’s neck, causing asphyxia. In effect, the victim had been bound in such a way that he ultimately killed himself when he could no longer hold his legs folded backward in such an extreme position.