“Is that the case file?” Derek asked.
“Not exactly,” Ralph said as he dropped the heavy folder on to the desk, sending dust into an immediate flight. “This here is a little something that those state police investigators overlooked. Now, I’m thinking about showing you some very interesting things I’ve found in this folder, but I need to make sure my impression of you is accurate.”
“Ask me anything you want.”
“Ya see, Mr. Cole, I wasn’t a 100% forthcoming about my feelings on freelancers. Fact is, I often wished I could bend the rules a tad. You know, here and there.”
“In my experience, you’re not alone,” Derek said in a measured response.
“Now I may have actually bent some of those rules over the years but always did so when my instincts suggested that them rules needed a little flexibility. So since I am pretty much alone on this investigation, and the state police see me as someone just to keep informed, I am going to include you into this investigation.”
“I appreciate your trust.”
“You need to catch some shut eye?”
“Eventually, but I’m more interested in seeing what’s in that file first,” Derek said as his eyes grew hungry at the idea of reading the contents of the file.
“Well, I do. So I’m going to leave this file right here on this goofy-looking desk and go find a place to sleep.” Ralph stood and hitched his pants over his belly. “I want to show you a few things first that I want to pay particular attention to.” Ralph opened the file and thumbed through a few sheets until he pulled out a group of photographs. “You take a good look at these, and I’ll bet you’ll understand why I don’t believe your mysterious note leaver wasn’t Alexander.”
As Ralph quietly left the small office, Derek moved to the more comfortable chair behind the desk. He gave a quick glance at Ralph.
“Thanks for not shooting me earlier,” he said.
“Well, I imagine that would have not been an enjoyable event for you. But, there’s still time, I imagine. Still time.”
As Ralph left in search for a bed that would be kind enough to allow him a few minutes of sleep, Derek dropped his eyes to the series of photographs laying on the desk in front of him.
“Holy shit balls!” he said.
The picture on top of the pile was of a young man who, to Derek, seemed to be posing for his autopsy pictures. The man in the picture stood over six feet tall and was standing against a wall. As he stared at the photograph of the man standing naked against the off-white wall, Derek was captured by his eyes.
Baby blue, yet dimmed, surrounded by yellowish-gray skin where white should have been. Eyes too large for a man, and too blue. If not for the spark of something in them, Derek would take these eyes for those of a dead man.
Lifeless. Cold. Vacant.
The man’s eyes were they only bit of life’s color in the picture. The man’s skin was a horrible shade of death; gray mixed with hints of purplish blue. He was completely bald, and though the photograph was obviously taken from a digital camera then printed out on an ink jet printer, Derek could make out whispers of eyebrows, so faint as to remind him of an infants. Soft brown and stretched to a point of comical sparseness. Above each eyebrow were two, nearly perfect circles of much darker skin. They looked like old, healed burn marks and made Derek think of the pictures of electrodes he’d seen pictures of before.
The shade of death the man wore on his face was a theme carried throughout the rest of his body. Though some areas of the man’s body- his elbows, back of his hands, and knees - were a darker shade of death, the man was colorless.
There was very little fat on the man. Muscles, seemingly defying the death motif, were visible. A classic and envied six-pack was clear in the man’s abdominals. Biceps and deltoids both well developed and prominent. Muscles lined the man’s thighs and appeared to have been carefully carved to show each of their assigned functions. His genitals hung softly and assumed a much darker variation of gray. Unlike the rest of the photo subject’s body, his genitals appeared to have never developed.
“I see what you mean, Ralph,” Derek said out loud, somewhat hoping Ralph was still awake and within ear shot. “This guy showing up in an airport would certainly be remembered.” Derek received no report back from Ralph.
As Derek scanned the photograph again, he paused when his eyes met the man’s smile. The thin lips curled just slightly at their corners, parting enough for Derek to that they hid nothing. Though he couldn’t be certain, the way the lips fell inward and the lack of anything white behind them, suggested that the man was toothless.
As he flipped through the remaining pictures, each of the same subject, Derek noticed that each picture was dated and each date marked the same day of the year. June 30th. There were twenty-two pictures in the stack, each taken on June 30th of the last twenty-two years. The only picture that broke the sequence was the very first picture that was dated July 4, 1992.
This picture showed a baby wearing the same alarming shade of death-gray. He was lying in a crib. His eyes, baby blue then, held an unsettling gaze back at the camera.
“This is not a good-looking baby,” Derek said.
Derek quickly scanned the printed photographs again and noticed that the first thirteen were taken in a different place than the last nine. In those, the subject stood, naked and gray against a painted concrete blocked wall. In the remaining nine, the person stood against an off-white and typical-looking sheet-rocked wall.
Derek collected the photographs into a neat pile and set them aside. He wanted to see what else of interest was in the over-stuffed folder that sat in front of him. As he began to thumb through, Derek noticed several smaller pictures, all black and white, bound together by a rubber band that was showing its age with cracks and a visible loss of elasticity.
Derek removed the tired rubber band and thumbed through the twelve or thirteen pictures that the band faithfully bound. Each was of an attractively shaped woman and was obviously taken without her being aware that a camera’s lens was trained on her. The woman was captured in many positions; bending over what looked like a crib, standing with folding arms looking at something in the non-captured distance, sitting at a small desk writing notes. Each picture of the same woman dressed in a white nurses uniform and each taken from what Derek assumed to be a hazy window.
The pictures were not dated, but all seemed to have been taken the same day, for the subject’s uniform and hairstyle remained consistent. The last picture in the lot was of the nurse holding the gray baby. Her backside was the obvious target of the photograph, but the eyes of the baby as the nurse held it over her left shoulder were what sent a disturbing shiver through Derek’s soul.