Don't Be Afraid (19 page)

The scene changed. Had she made it change? Another bed, another room. Chris now. Naked except for his boxers, his hair sleep tousled the way she remembered it. Holding the bottle of wine he’d sent to her in one hand, two glasses in the other. Smiling and beckoning to her. Come out from behind the camera and take a drink. He fills the glasses deftly, hands one to her. She lifts it to her lips and sees that it’s blood not wine.

She woke up in a cold sweat, sitting up in the bed. The clock radio glowing five
A.M.
Alone, on her side of the bed. No Chris, no Sheila. But she could hear something in the dark, some guttural sound. A moment’s panic before she realized what it was and raced down the dark hallway to Emma’s room.

The smiling moon night-light cast a yellowish glow. Emma was lying on her back, eyes wide and panicked, in the middle of an attack. She sounded like someone in the throes of dying. The sound from her throat was a death rattle, not a breath. She looked like a fish stranded on land, the small rib cage heaving in and out with each attempt to suck air into the damaged lungs.

“Emma! Sit up, baby.” Amy slipped an arm under her, and lifted her into a sitting position. The little girl’s eyes swiveled to her mother.
Jesus, no. No, baby
. Amy propped pillows behind her, a large stuffed unicorn bracing her in an upright position, afraid to let go but needing to,
just for a moment, baby
, while she got her medicine.

With fumbling hands she found the nebulizer and set it up. Slipped the mask over Emma’s small face.

“It’s okay, just breathe in, baby.”

The medicine looked greenish through the mask. Emma breathed in and out, the sound labored. Amy sat behind her, propping her up and holding the mask in place, regulating the amount of medicine flowing. They sat like that for a long time, till the light in the room was daylight coming through the curtains and Amy could feel Emma breathing normally, sleeping comfortably against her chest.

At nine, Emma woke again and Amy carried her into the kitchen wrapped in a blanket. The bottle of wine that Chris had sent was sitting on the counter and she put it out of sight because it reminded her of the dream. She thought about the dream while she fixed them breakfast, watching Emma carefully while she made pancakes, pouring the batter into a Mickey Mouse head on the griddle, trying to coax a smile onto that pale face.

How had those photographs been taken? All of them in the bedroom, but there was no evidence that anyone had been in the houses. No reports of break-ins from Sheila or Meredith. So how had they been taken?

She flipped the pancake onto a plate and presented it to Emma, thinking about the tiny cameras she’d seen in stores, more like spy equipment than a photographer’s.

“Mommy, syrup.”

Emma liked the bottle shaped like a woman. She never mentioned the maple-leaf-shaped bottle they used to have because that was the only kind of syrup her daddy would eat. Real stuff, not that flavored corn syrup “commercial crap.” That’s what he’d called it, Emma mimicking him sometimes. He probably still bought it, but Amy couldn’t afford to.

She drizzled syrup over Emma’s pancakes and some over her own and ate them mechanically, thinking of the dream again and pushing the creepiness aside, clearing her mind to think only of the photos. If she’d been the photographer, really, how would she have taken those shots?

It gave her an idea and after Emma was done eating and she’d bundled her into the living room to watch
Sesame Street
, Amy went into her home office. She took down various cameras from shelves, hauling them into her own bedroom to do a little experimenting.

At 10:45, Chloe arrived, cheeks ruddy with the cold, her long blond hair stuck under an ugly knit hat that was fashionable if not pretty. Emma ran to greet her, pushing past her mother to throw her arms around the young woman’s jean-clad legs so hard that she almost knocked her over.

“Chloe Bloey!”

“Emmy Memmy!”

Their own silly names for each other and Amy smiled at the laughter that always accompanied them. Here was something to be grateful for, she thought, that this college student actually cared for her daughter and didn’t just care about the money.

“I’ll only be gone for a few hours,” she said. She waited until Emma had run to her room to get some toy to tell Chloe about the attack she’d had. “She seems fine now, but call me if that changes.”

“Okay, will do.”

“And the emergency number’s right by the phone, like always, along with my cell phone number and number for Braxton, but try my cell first.”

She hadn’t realized until that moment that she wasn’t planning to go into the office at all.

Fighting the influx of big discount chains, the local camera store offered specialty services—one-hour developing, specialized prints, discounts on enlargements, unique Christmas card and baby announcements—with the ambience of an old-time shop.

Hung on the walls near the latest equipment, which was neatly displayed in glass cabinets, were cameras of yesteryear. Detective Black identified the small Kodak he’d owned as a young man, as well as the Brownie his father had owned. It didn’t fill him with nostalgia; it just made him feel old.

The twenty-something behind the counter was what was referred to now as metrosexual. He wore skintight black jeans, a tight white T-shirt that highlighted his thin chest and a Kanji tattoo on one bicep. His blond-tipped hair was carefully mussed, and he looked like he was wearing eyeliner and had small silver hoops in both ears.

Things had been a lot simpler when guys like this could be written off as pansies, Black thought, watching as Mr. Silver Hoops openly flirted with the very hot and very hotly dressed young woman who’d walked in just ahead of him.

“I love those Nikons, don’t you?” the girl was saying as Black moved closer, trying to catch the guy’s attention. She was leaning against the counter so that the navel ring visible above her jeans clicked against the glass.

“Yeah, they’re bad,” the clerk said, leaning forward so that he could check out her cleavage.

“Excuse me,” Black interrupted. They both turned to look at him, giving him the universal teenage expression of boredom mixed with anger, like he was dog shit they were being forced to scrape off their designer shoes.

He pulled out his badge and the expressions changed. Miss Naval Ring’s eyes got big and she thanked Mr. Silver Hoops and took off. Probably packing some meth in that tiny little purse, Black thought, following her hot ass out the door along with Silver Hoops.

“I want to know what kind of film this is,” the detective said once she was gone, laying the least salacious of photos of Meredith Chomsky on the counter. In it, she was staring at something, probably a mirror, one hand raised to the spaghetti strap of a dark silk teddy.

Silver Hoops whistled. “Hot chick,” he said before fixing his eyes on Black with a knowing look. “I can’t do this kind of developing for you, man,” he said. “It’s illegal.”

“Yeah, nimrod, I know—I’m a cop, remember?” Black lost his patience sooner than he expected. “Is this standard paper? I don’t see any mark on it.”

Holding the photo by the edges, Silver Hoops examined it carefully. “This is printed out on a computer,” he said at last. “There’s lots of different paper that can be used, but I think this stock is done by Xerox.”

“So this wasn’t done at a lab or in a darkroom?”

“No, man, this was done on a personal printer.”

“Any sense which one?”

Silver Hoops shrugged. “Could be done on any number of printers,” he said, moving over to a display case filled with them. “Like this Epson model.” He pointed to one. “Or this Fuji.” He moved down the case, launching into jargon about pixels and acid-free quality and matte versus glossy. It was all too much for Black, who finally interrupted him.

“Do you keep a list of which models are stocked and sold?”

“Yeah, man, but I can’t give that out to you. That’s like, private data.”

“I could get a subpoena,” Black said, “but if I do, I’m going to have a really good look around and who knows what I’ll find?”

He let his gaze fall on the edge of the
Penthouse
he’d noticed lurking below the counter and sniffed the air just a bit. Was that pot he smelled?

“Let me just find the file,” Silver Hoops said. Five minutes later, he’d pulled it up on the computer and swung the screen around so that Black could scroll through it. In addition to the lists of printers stocked, there were also names and phone numbers of people who’d purchased the printers in the last year.

Halfway down the list, Black hit pay dirt.

 

 

When Detective Juarez saw Amy waiting for him beyond the front desk, he got a funny look on his face and glanced quickly around as if there was someone behind him. The desk sergeant grinned.

“She’s been waiting for you,” he said to the detective, giving a nod to Amy, who’d been looking through the wanted posters hanging from a bulletin board, but turned in time to catch it. An incomprehensible statement, but it made the detective blush.

He took her by the upper arm, a little too firmly for her liking, and led her down a hall into a small, bare room, closing the door behind them. “What are you doing here?”

“I had an idea about the photos. How they might have been taken. But I need you to test it out with me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

He’d seemed friendlier before, not treating her the way the other detective did. She wondered if she’d made a mistake. Maybe he suspected her, too. But no, she’d seen the clips of the press conference on the nightly news. He thought it was a serial killer. Surely he didn’t think she fit that profile.

“Because you want to find out who killed Sheila Sylvester and Meredith Chomsky.”

“And how does that involve you?”

“I’ll show you. At least I’ll try to. But we have to go to one of the houses. And I need the photos. I have an idea.”

Juarez stared at her for a long moment, arms crossed, and then he nodded. “Okay. We can take my car.”

He put a hand on her arm again as they left the room. “Just wait for me outside, though, okay? I’ll pull the car around.”

She waited for him across the street, feeding the meter where she’d parked her Toyota, checking her watch because she didn’t want to stay away from the office too long.

Detective Juarez finally pulled around front in a brown sedan and got out to open the passenger door for her.

“We can go to Sheila’s house,” he said, “but not the Chomsky place. Not right now. Okay?”

She nodded, feeling for the camera she’d stuck in her purse. For the first few minutes of driving, there was an awkward silence. A newer manila envelope was stuck on the seat between them and she knew it contained the photos, but she didn’t want to see them again. Not yet. She shifted in her seat, rubbing her hands surreptitiously down the front legs of her jeans, wondering if this had been a good idea after all. What if she was wrong?

The detective stared straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, his face solemn. He looked tired, she thought, noticing the smoky blue circles under his eyes and the way his mouth dragged down at the corners.

When they stopped in a traffic backup, Juarez put a flashing blue light up on his dash and turned on a siren. Cars parted like the Red Sea and they sailed past.

“Nice,” Amy said. “I’ve always wondered if you guys were really running to emergencies.”

Juarez grinned. “Job perk.”

It wasn’t until he turned onto Sheila’s street that Amy felt any sadness. She didn’t say anything, but just the sight of her friend’s house was enough to bring tears to her eyes. Juarez stopped the car in front of 1730 Roland Street.

Amy stared up at the two-story, pale yellow house with the periwinkle blue shutters. Sheila had been so proud of her home; her very own house that she’d worked so hard for. Amy could still remember the faint perfume of the purple mums Sheila had planted in the big stoneware urns that flanked her walkway. The flowers were still there, shriveled stalks and heads hardened by frost.

“I just realized—I don’t have a key,” she said to Juarez, blinking hard to keep the tears at bay, determined that she wasn’t going to cry in front of him. She tried to hold on to the toughness that Sheila had taught her, but just thinking of Sheila made her ache so badly that she wanted to fall to her knees right there on the walkway and sob.

If Juarez noticed, he didn’t say. Instead he fished in his pocket and held up a key. “Let’s go in the front,” he said.

It wasn’t a crime scene, so the house wasn’t circled with yellow tape, but there was a small strip across the front door and a sign stating that the entrance was barred because this residence was part of an ongoing police investigation.

Juarez removed the tape without any hesitation and he knew where the light switch was in the front hall. It was dim inside and it took Amy a second to realize that curtains were drawn in every window of the house. That was unlike Sheila. She’d loved light. She loved the fact that her house had so many windows. “Not like so many of these crap construction new jobs,” she’d said to Amy.

“You’ve been here before, right?” Juarez said, his voice almost jarring in the stillness of the front hall. Amy nodded.

“Many times,” she said. It seemed odd to see the front hall devoid of a tangle of boys’ shoes and backpacks or to not hear the sound of rock music blaring. The boys were gone, too, of course. She’d seen them drive away with Sheila’s sister after the funeral, and it struck her that the murder of one person wasn’t simply a single, grotesque act of violence, but the wiping out of an entire family.

Sheila had struggled and succeeded to build a good life for her and her sons and in an instant it had all been erased.

“Are you okay?” Juarez said, looking at her. “I guess this must be hard.”

She nodded again, unable to speak. She led the way up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, trying not to think of the sound of the boys’ feet clambering down them and of Sheila yelling to “stop running like a herd of elephants inside the house.”

Family photos had been removed from the upstairs hall, whiter spots against the wallpaper looking like ghosts of the life that had once been. She stopped at the door to Sheila’s room and turned to the detective.

“He was in this room,” she said in a hushed tone as if he could hear the ghosts, too. “Or his camera was. Some of the photos were taken from here. I’ve been trying to figure out how.”

He nodded and she walked ahead of him into the room that had been Sheila’s sanctuary. It was a large master bedroom, much larger than the original home’s, but the combination of two smaller rooms into one large suite had been done with such skill that it was easy to believe that some colonial-era couple had enjoyed this spot.

The place of honor went to the king-sized bed with carved pilasters and a pink net canopy. On the bed itself was the hot pink satin spread that Sheila adored. “White trash,” she’d joked when she showed Amy the room. “I dreamed of a bed like this when I was a child and when I could finally afford one, I figured why not?”

She’d had the satin mules and the negligee to go with it. They were probably still hanging in the walk-in closet.

She’d tried them on for Amy once. The boys were away, Emma had gone to her grandmother’s and Sheila and Amy had a girls’ night out, laughing like teenagers and watching a movie cuddled up on this huge bed with its dozens of ridiculous pillows.

Juarez walked to one of the curtained windows and drew the shades up. Light filled the room and highlighted the layer of dust covering everything. Sheila hated cleaning. She thought the best thing about having made a good living was being able to afford a cleaning woman.

Without saying a word, Juarez took the photos of Sheila out of the envelope he’d carried in and laid them one by one on the bed. For a minute, they both looked at them in silence and then he asked, “Do you think he took these outside or inside?”

Amy walked slowly around the room, considering the angles. Then she walked to one of the windows and looked out. There was a tall maple tree in the yard, but it was hard to believe that someone had actually climbed into its branches to take pictures.

“We actually sent a guy up the tree,” he said, following her gaze. “Nothing. No prints, no evidence, and no sign that anyone was even up there.”

“I don’t think he climbed the tree,” Amy said. “That would have attracted attention.” She looked at the base of the tree and contemplated the height of the long windows in the room.

At least one of the photos could have been taken from ground level with a telephoto lens. If Sheila had been standing close to one of the windows, it was probable that at least one photo had been taken that way. But what about the others? The ones of her on the bed?

“I think it must have been someone she knew,” Juarez said, as if he could read her mind. He held up the photo where Sheila was lounging naked in bed, knees bent so her crotch was jutting at the viewer, a cordless phone to one ear.

“These could be posed,” the detective said. “Maybe she was being blackmailed.”

Amy shook her head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a flattering pose—I can’t imagine Sheila allowing herself to be shot looking like that.”

“Then how did he get it? That shot had to come from inside.”

“Maybe.” Amy looked at the photos again and then back at the windows. She’d had to see the room first, had to see the bed relative to the windows, but the angle was right.

“I think I know how,” she said, stepping to the window farthest from the bed. The windows were casement that opened out with a crank and the screens were on the inside. Amy took out the screen and cranked open the window as far as it could go, leaning forward over the sill and running her hands along the outside of the aluminum sash. Her fingers grazed over something and stopped. She turned sideways in the tight space so she could look up. What she saw made her smile.

“What is it?” Juarez said. “What did you find?”

“Take a look.” She exchanged places with Juarez so that he could see it, too.

Attached to the sash at the roofline was a small metal tripod with a swing arm. A camera could be screwed on and moved into position.

Juarez whistled appreciatively at the work. “Clever—it’s so small and tight I never noticed it.”

“All he had to do was screw in the camera—”

“And he had clear pictures of the bed.”

Something sounded behind them and Amy jumped. Juarez whirled around, hand up and on the holster under his jacket. Detective Black was standing in the bedroom doorway, with a tight smile on his face, clapping.