"No problem." They both stand up.
"You ready to brief me, Agent Carnes?" I make my voice a little stern. He needs it.
"Yes, ma'am."
He has some color in his cheeks again and looks a little more determined. To me, he just looks young. Leo Carnes is a baby, introduced to murder, now destined to get old before he should. Welcome to the club.
"Well, go ahead, then."
His voice is calm as he talks. "I came over and ran through the initial checks, verifying that there were no booby traps or viruses present. I then did the first thing you always do--I checked to see what file was last modified. It turned out to be a text file named readmefeds."
"Really?"
"Yes. I opened it up. It contained a single sentence: Check the pocket of the blue jacket. There was no blue jacket I could see, but then I looked in the closet. Inside the left pocket of a woman's blue jacket, I found a CD."
"So you decided to take a look. It's okay. I would have done the same thing."
He continues, encouraged. "When you make a CD, you can give it a title. When I saw the title of this one, I got very interested." He swallows. "It was named The Death of Annie."
Charlie grimaces. "Son of a bitch. Jenny's going to be pissed that we missed this."
"Go on," I say to Leo.
"I looked to see what files were on the CD. There was just one. It's a high-quality, high-resolution video file. It essentially fills the entire CD." He swallows again. Some of the paleness is coming back. "I clicked on the file, which launched a player, which then played the video. It was . . ." He shakes his head, tries to get a grip on himself.
"Sorry. The killer encoded and created this video. It's not a complete start-to-finish timeline--that would probably be too big for a CD, in terms of the size of the video--it's more of a . . . montage."
"Of Annie's murder." I say it for him; I know he doesn't want to have to say it himself.
"Yeah. It's-- indescribable. I didn't want to keep watching, but I couldn't help myself. Then I started puking, and then you called. I left the apartment and I waited outside until you came."
"You didn't puke in the bedroom, did you?" Charlie asks.
"I made it to the bathroom."
Alan claps him on the back with one of those catcher's-mitt-size hands. If Leo had dentures, they would have gone flying out of his mouth. "See? You do have the stuff, Leo--you kept your head about losing your stomach. That's good."
Leo gives him a sheepish half smile.
"Let's go see this," I say. "Leo, you don't need to be there if you don't want to be. I mean it."
He gives me a very direct look. It is a surprising mixture of maturity and contemplation. I realize in a flash of insight that I know what he is thinking. He is thinking that Annie was my friend. That if I'm going to go and watch her die, anybody should be able to. I can almost hear his thoughts. His eyes confirm it; they get hard and he gives a determined shake of his head. "No, ma'am. The computer end of things is my job. I'll do my job."
I acknowledge his strength the way we acknowledge things like that--by making nothing of it. "Fair enough. Take us inside."
Leo opens up the door to the apartment and we enter. It hasn't changed much from how I remember it. It's a three-bedroom layout, with two bathrooms, a large living room, and a great kitchen. Most striking is the fact that Annie is everywhere. She lives through the decor, the essence of the place. Blue was her favorite color, and I see blue in the drapes, a blue vase, a photograph containing a broad blue sky. The place is classy, it has a kind of effortless quality, without gilt edges or gold leaf. Everything matches, but not in that irritating obsessive-compulsive way, that "keep up with the Joneses" way. It is a study in muted beauty. It is serene.
Annie always had that gift. The ability to accessorize without having to think about it. Everything, from the clothes she wore to the watch on her wrist, was always stylish, without being arrogant or frumpy. Elegant without being ostentatious. It was instinctive for her, and I always viewed it as evidence of her inner beauty. She did not choose things because of how others would see them on her. She chose them because they called to her. Because they were right. Because they fit. The apartment is a reflection of this. It is covered in the ghostly dust of Annie's soul.
But there is another presence here as well.
"You smell that?" Alan asks. "What is it?"
"Perfume and blood," I murmur.
"The computer is this way," Leo says. He leads us into the bedroom. Harmony dies in here. This is where he did his work. It is a conscious opposite of Annie's unconscious beauty. Here someone strove for dissonance. To break the serenity. To destroy something exquisite. The carpet is stained with blood, and my nose picks up the strong, rotten odor of decay, mixed with the smell of Annie's perfume. They are two opposites: one the smell of life, the other the stench of death. An end table is overturned, a lamp smashed. The walls have been scratched, and the whole room feels jagged and wrong. The killer raped this room with his presence.
Leo sits down at the computer. I think of Annie.
"Go ahead," I tell him.
Leo pales. Then he moves the mouse and positions the arrow over a file, double-clicking it. A video player fills the screen, and the video begins. My heart almost stops as I see Annie. She's nude from head to toe and handcuffed to the bed. Bile rises in my throat as I think of myself with Joseph Sands. I force it back. The killer is dressed in black. He has a hood over his face.
"Is that a fucking ninja outfit?" Alan rumbles. He shakes his head in disgust. "Christ. It's all a fucking joke to him."
My gift as a hunter kicks in on automatic. The killer looks to be about six feet tall. He's in shape--somewhere in between muscular and wiry. I can tell from the skin exposed around his eyes that he is white. I'm waiting to hear him speak. Voice-recognition technology has come very far, and this could be a crucial break. But then he disappears from the camera view for a moment. I can hear small sounds of him fumbling with something. When he comes back into the camera's view he looks right into the lens, and I get the sense from the crinkles around his eyes that he is smiling behind that mask. He lifts up a hand and gives a count with his fingers. 1, 2, 1-2-3-4 . . . Music fills the room in the video. It drowns out all other noises. It takes me only a moment to place it. When I do, I am almost sick. Almost.
"Jesus Christ," Charlie whispers, "is that the Rolling Stones?"
"Yep. 'Gimme Shelter,' " Alan says. His voice is flat with rage. "Just a barrel of laughs for this sick fuck. Giving himself a little mood music."
The volume is up and the song is loud. As it picks up speed, the killer starts to dance. He has a knife in one hand, and he dances for Annie and for the camera. It's frenetic, crazy, but he does move with the beat. Insanity with a rhythm.
"Ra-a-ape, murder . . ."
This is why he picked this song. That's his message. It echoes my sentiments earlier in the day. What he can do, it's always just a step away. I close my eyes for a moment as I see that Annie, too, realized this. It is something I can see in her eyes. Terror mixed with a loss of hope. The killer has stopped dancing, though he still twitches to the beat. His movements seem almost unconscious. Like someone tapping their foot to a song without realizing they're doing it. He is standing by the bed, his eyes fixed on Annie. He seems mesmerized. Annie is struggling. I can't hear it over the music, but I can tell she is screaming through her gag. He looks at the camera once more. Then he bends forward with the knife.
The rest of it is as Leo had said. A montage. Flashes of Annie's torture, rape, horror. The knife is what he uses on her, and he takes his time with it. He likes to cut slowly, and he likes to cut long. He touches her everywhere with its blade. I physically jolt as each new image flashes. Full body spasms that make me feel like I'm being shocked by a car battery. Flash, shock, jolt, Annie getting tortured. Flash, shock, jolt, Annie getting raped. Flash, shock, jolt, he cuts, he cuts, he cuts, dear God, he won't stop cutting. Her eyes fill with agony, her eyes fill with terror, and eventually they empty and fill with an endless gaze at nothing. Still alive, but no longer there. The killer is joyous, exultant. He is doing a rain dance, and the rain is blood. I watch as my friend dies. It is slow and awful and without dignity. By the time he is done, she is long since gone, a gutted fish. Watching her die, this woman I held as a child, this woman I grew up with and loved, it's like being back in that bed, watching Matt scream.