A long shot. But possible.
"Good one," I say.
"Thanks."
Oil and ball bearings, I think. On the killing ground, this is the only place that James plays nice.
The stage is set. He's moved the bed . . . just so. The camera is positioned . . . just so. He does one last check to make sure that everything is perfect. It is. Now he gives Annie his full attention, gazing down at her. This is the first time she truly sees. He's been distracted, setting up his theater. She still had hope. Now his gaze is fixed on her, and she understands. She sees eyes that have no horizon. They are bottomless, black, and filled with an unending hunger.
He knows when she knows. When she understands. It enflames him, like it al- ways does. He has extinguished hope in another human being. It makes him feel like a god.
James and I have arrived at the same place on this timeline. We are there. We see him, we see Annie, and out of the corner of our eyes, we see Bonnie. We smell the despair. The dark train is picking up speed, and we are along for the ride, tickets punched.
"Now let's watch the video again," he says.
I double-click the file, and we watch as the montage rolls by. He dances, he slices, he rapes.
The sheer violence of what he is doing sprays blood everywhere, and he can smell it, taste it, feel the slick of it through his clothes. At one point, he turns to look at the child. Her face is white, and her body shakes as though she's having a seizure. This creates an almost unbearable, near-orgasmic symphony of delicious extremes for him. He shivers, every muscle shaking with emotion and sensation. He isn't just being bad. He is raping good. Fucking it to death. Music and blood and guts and screams and terror. The world is shaking, and he is its epicenter. He is climbing toward the pinnacle, and he lets it come to him--that point where all of it explodes in a searing, blinding light, where all reason and anything human dis- appears.
It is a brief moment, and it is the only time that the hunger and need fade to nothing. A tiny instant of fulfillment and relief. The knife comes down and there is blood and blood and wet and blood and he is climbing, climbing, climbing, standing on tiptoes at the peak of a mountain, stretching his body as far as it will go, reaching a finger out, not to touch the face of God, not to become something MORE, but to become nothing, nothing at all, and he throws his head back as his body shakes with an orgasm more powerful than he can stand.
Then it's over, and the anger that is always there returns. Something jitters in my mind. "Hold it," I say. I use the controls of the player to rewind the video. I let it play. That jitter again. I frown, frustrated. "Something's not right. I can't put my finger on it."
"Can we do a frame by frame on this?" James asks.
We play around with it a bit until we find a setting that, though not frame by frame, at least takes us through it in slow motion.
"Somewhere in here," I murmur.
We both lean forward, watching. It is toward the end of the tape. He is standing next to Annie's bed. I see a flicker, and he is still standing next to Annie's bed, but something is different.
James sees it first. "Where's the picture?"
We roll it back again. He is standing next to the bed, and on the wall behind him is a picture of a vase of sunflowers. The flicker again, he is still standing next to the bed--but the picture is gone.
"What the hell?" I look over at the place on the wall where the picture would have hung. I see it, leaning up against the overturned end table.
"Why did he remove it from the wall?" James asks. He's asking himself, not me. We run through it again. Standing, picture, flicker, standing--no picture. Over and over. Standing, flicker, picture, no picture, picture no picture . . .
Understanding doesn't just rush over me. It roars. My mouth falls open, and I get light-headed. "Jesus Christ!" I yell, startling James.
"What?"
I rewind the video. "Watch it again. This time, note where the top of the picture frame is, and track that point on the wall once it's gone."
The video moves through, we pass the flicker. James frowns. "I don't--" He stops and his eyes widen. "Is that right?" He sounds incredulous. I run through it again. There's no doubt. We both stare at each other. Everything has changed.
We know now why the picture had been removed. It had been removed because it was a frame of reference. For height. The man standing over Annie while the picture was still on the wall was a good two inches taller than the man standing over her after it was removed.
We'd reached the engine room on the dark train and had been thrown out of it by the shock of what we saw.
Not one conductor.
Two.
15
YOU'RE RIGHT," LEO says. He looks up at James and me in amazement.
He has just finished examining the video. "That flicker is a bad splice."
Callie, Jenny, and Charlie are there, crowded around the monitor. We had filled them in on the sequence of events as we saw them, ending with this bombshell.
Jenny looks at me. "Wow."
"You run across anything like this before?" Charlie asks. "Two of them working together?"
I nod. "Once. It was different, though. A male-female team, and the male was dominant. Two males working together, that's very unusual. What they do, it's personal to them. Intimate. Most don't like to share the moment."
Everyone is quiet, mulling this over. Callie breaks the silence. "I should check for those prints, honey-love."
"I should have thought of that," Jenny says.
"Yes, you should have," James bites. He's back to his old self. Jenny glares at him. He ignores her, turning to watch Callie. Callie is unpacking a UV scope and its accoutrements. The scope uses intensified ultraviolet reflectance to detect fingerprints. It emits intense light in the UV spectrum. This light reflects uniformly off flat surfaces. When it hits imperfections--such as the ridges and whorls of fingerprints--it reflects these as well, making them stand out against the uniformity of the surface they are on. You can take crystal-clear photographs of these imperfections with a UV camera, usable in fingerprint matching and identification. The imager boasts a head-mounted display that protects the eyes from the UV rays, a UV emitter, and a hand-carried, high-resolution UV
camera. The scope doesn't always work, but the advantage of trying it first is that it does nothing to the surface you're examining. Powders, superglue . . . once these substances are applied, you can't take them back. Light leaves it the way you found it.
"All ready," Callie says. She looks like something from a sciencefiction movie. "Turn out the lights."
Charlie hits the switch, and we watch as Callie gets onto her back and squirms under the bed. We can see the glow of the UV emitter as she passes it across the surface of the baseboard. A pause, some fumbling, and we hear a few clicks. A few more clicks. The emitter light goes out and Callie squirms back out, stands up. Charlie turns the lights on. Callie is grinning. "Three good prints from the left hand, two from the right. Nice and clear, honey-love."
For the first time since Callie called me to tell me about Annie's death, I feel something besides anger, grief, and coldness. I feel excited.
"Gotcha," I say, grinning back at her.
Jenny shakes her head at me. "You guys are truly, truly spooky, Smoky."