Mark Dawes sat looking at the pictures with his wife Bree. His day job was general photography, weddings, graduation, and the like. It kept the bills paid and provided a stable income so he could pursue his side business which he felt some day would become the primary. Mark was a paparazzi. He liked the rush. In his spare time he followed the rich and famous taking pictures. He hoped to some day hit the jackpot. Mark was good. Over the last five years they had paid off most of their mortgage and accumulated a sizeable college fund for their four kids selling pictures. When he seemed to have a dry spell Bree would show him the running total she kept of the income from the side business.

Bree was a stay at home mom who spent hours looking at the pictures he took, looking for something that would sell. Most of the sales were the result of the collective effort of his ability get in the right place and get good pictures and her good photo interpretation and salesmanship. He rarely got a thousand for a picture but Bree’s good eye made sales on ones he would have missed. She would remind him, a thousand here, a thousand there and soon you are looking at real money. He joked at times that she should take a camera and start shooting. She tried on two occasions but lacked the chutzpah as he called it to press in close enough and work in places that were really forbidden. He had spent several hours at the hospital trying to get pictures of Karen Harris and had gotten about seventy shots, many of them in places that were really off limits to anyone but patients and staff. He got several shots of her leaving the hospital and was able to race through traffic to be at her home when she got there to take some more. Bree was tired in the evening and only spent a short time looking at the pictures from the day. Finally Mark had to leave for work and neither of them had seen anything on the pictures that was even vaguely interesting.

Bree had just fed the kids breakfast and was now re-scanning the pictures from previous days. She hated to have Mark spend energy, time and gas and get no return. It was her job to make it profitable. Actually she got as much of a rush out of finding something as he did taking the pictures. She had been through the ones of Karen Harris at least five times this morning and seen nothing. It was like that. Often it took time. The largest amount she had ever gotten for a picture came on one that was five weeks old that she had repeatedly looked at without noticing something. Faith and patience brings the promise, she remembered. She blew up the picture to eight hundred percent and started looking at the pieces of it. Each one of the segments filled the whole monitor screen. In one of them she saw a glint that looked like metal on Karen’s arm on one of the pictures in the hospital hallway and zoomed in on it. It was a piece of metal. It was on the end of her arm, possibly on the back of her hand. Maybe it was a brace. Did she have more surgery on her hand? It was where her hand should be. Bree wondered what kind of brace it could be on the back of her hand. She zoomed till the resolution of the camera limited her going further. It was some form of brace on her right arm. For some reason she couldn’t see Karen’s hand but she could see the brace. She measured Karen’s left arm, the metal was about where the fingers would be on her hand. She wrote down the picture’s id and went on. She flipped through pictures and finally found one she had somewhat ignored before because Darin was blocking the view of Karen at the elevator door. Without her it was not an interesting picture. But that assessment changed because he was not blocking the view of her right arm that was hanging partially bent with her hand toward the camera. She zoomed in on Karen’s right hand only there wasn’t a hand, only a piece of metal and in this picture it was totally obvious. It took a couple seconds to register and she whispered, “No shit.” She hit the speed dial on the phone. “This is hot.” While it was ringing she pulled up Google and did a search. A woman answered.