"Do you mind if I speak to her by myself?" Gillian asked. "Poor kid. She was pretty upset when I called her. She's trying to put this behind her, and now I'm going to show her a nude picture that might be of her."
"We were thinking it would be better if you talked to her alone," Mary said. "It will be embarrassing enough for her without having an audience. Put it in here." Mary handed her a large manila envelope. Gillian slid the print inside.
Traffic was stop and go. Because of rush hour, it took them longer to reach Holly's than Gillian had thought. They were ten minutes late by the time she knocked on the* door.
Holly answered. She and Gillian embraced; then Gillian took a step back, her hands on Holly's arms. "Are your parents home from work?"
Holly shook her head. "Not yet."
"Would you like to wait until they get back?"
"No! I was all worried they'd get home before you got here. I don't want them to see it. Not now, anyway. And what if it's not even me? Then they wouldn't have to see it at all."
"Okay. Are you ready? Here-let's go sit down on the couch."
They moved over to the couch, sitting side by side. Gillian handed Holly the envelope.
Holly opened the package and slipped the photo out, leaving one end still inside the envelope in case she had to quickly hide it.
She stared at it for a long time.
"Well?" Gillian asked.
"I don't know."
"Is there a chance that it could be you?"
"Well… yeah. Yeah, it could be. But I don't know. I mean, it's somebody's crotch. It could be anybody's crotch."
"Look at it carefully and ask yourself if there's anything about it that tells you it can't be you."
She continued to stare at it, then finally shoved it back inside the envelope. "No."
"Okay," Gillian said. "That's all we wanted to know."
Holly handed the photo over. "I suppose that's going to be passed around all over the place," she said uneasily.
"It's evidence. Some experts are going to enlarge it so they can compare the fabric in the photo to the clothes you were wearing the night you were found."
"Enlarge it? Oh my God. Do they have to?" Holly began to nervously jiggle her knee.
"They aren't going to be looking at you-or whoever it is. And it might not be you at all. They're going to be looking at the fabric. That's all they'll care about."
"Most of them, sure. But there's always going to be somebody in the bunch who'll make a joke out of it."
Unfortunately, that was true.
Her knee moved faster. "They'll blow it up to the size of a billboard and slap it on a wall. Or it will end up on one of those games where you guess what the enlarged object is. Is this a Brillo pad magnified a hundred times? Is it an extreme close up of a moon rock? No, it's Holly Lindstrom's crotch!"
Gillian laughed, and a moment later Holly joined her, a little manic at first, but then she began to calm down. "Hey-how would you like to come to my place this weekend?" Gillian asked.
"You mean, stay over?"
"Yeah. We can rent some comedies or whatever. We can hang out and talk."
"Yeah, cool!"
They quickly made their plans, and then Gillian was joining Elliot and Mary in the car.
"Well?" Elliot asked as he backed out of the driveway.
"She doesn't know," Gillian said. "But there's nothing about the photo that ruled her out either. And believe me, she was looking because she didn't want it to have anything to do with her."
"That's all we could have expected," Mary said. "Either a no, or a it's possible. I had an idea while we were sitting here. Take me back to my car and the photo lab. I want to talk to the kid at the check-in desk. I started thinking about a woman I used to know who hated to pay for trash pickup, so she would bag up her garbage and drive behind grocery and discount stores and toss it in their Dumpsters."
"But the photo lab has a Dumpster," Elliot said, weaving in and out of traffic.
"Yeah, but did you notice how much garbage they had?"
School was "out, and people had gotten off work. There weren't any empty parking spaces near the building, so Elliot dropped Mary off; then he and Gillian circled the block in search of parking.
Mary found the same young man inside at the counter.
"Does anybody ever take any trash away from here to dispose of somewhere else?" she asked.
"We have a Dumpster in back."
"Suppose it was full. Would anyone take a few bags home to throw away in their own waste container? Or maybe even throw it away in another store's container in order to save an extra pickup fee?"
She must have hit on something, because he looked a little worried.
"Can you get in a lot of trouble for that?" he asked.
She held his gaze. "We aren't concerned with trash being dumped in the wrong place. We want to find something that may have ended up in that trash and we need your help."
He shifted uncomfortably, looking away. "We used to leave the extra stuff bagged up beside the Dumpster, but we got in trouble for that. And we used to just not take it out, but we got in trouble for that too.
The owner told us to make it fit no matter what, but that's a hassle, and sometimes it just won't fit, you know?" "Where would it have been taken?"
He gave her a weak shrug. "There's a bar about two blocks from here. And a grocery store on Oak Street. Oh, and a school. I forgot about the school."
"What about this week and last week?"
"Hey, lemme call somebody."
He hunched over the phone and dialed a number, hiding the buttons so she couldn't see. "It's me," he said into the receiver. "You know that trash you took out a few days ago? Where'd you dump it? Okay. No, just somebody looking for something." He hung up. "The bar," he said.
"Thanks."
Mary was leaving the building when she met Elliot and Gillian heading in. "Some trash was dumped at the bar down the street," she said.
They piled in Elliot's car and headed down the block. The place the kid had told them about turned out to be a little neighborhood bar called Catfish. Behind the building, in the alley, was a Dumpster overflowing with trash.
"Luckily we don't need a search warrant," Elliot said, standing in front of the huge metal container with his hands on his hips. "Once garbage hits the alley, it's public property."
Mary eyed the black bags. "I'm going to go in and tell the bartender all the same."
When she stepped into the dark building, several of the men at the bar looked boldly at her. One flash of her badge had them all staring straight back down into their drinks.
"You can have all the trash you want," the bartender said.
They didn't have to go far to find the two bags that belonged to the photo lab. But they continued through the refuse, digging all the way to the bottom to make sure they had everything. Then, since it was getting dark, they took their booty back to the lab to examine it in the light. The investigative team had dispersed, leaving two members to finish up. Those two, a man and a woman, helped sift through the bags of trash.
Gillian found three pieces of a negative. She held them to the light and was able to make out a female form.
"I have something," she announced.
Everyone rushed to her side.
"Rather than trying to hold the negative together," Elliot said, excited again, "let's enlarge each piece separately, then put those pieces together."
"I'll do one while you do one," Gillian said, taking a section over to an enlarger. "Could somebody get the lights?"
"I'll do the third piece," the man from the investigative team said.
Mary headed for the door. "I'll get the photo from the car."
"You'll need these." Elliot tossed her his keys.
All three sections went into the developing bath at the same time. As everyone watched, the broken images slowly appeared, each eight-by-ten sheet blank except for a strip that was the image left by the torn negative. After the final rinse, the lights were turned on and the pieces were cut with scissors, then put together like a puzzle along with the original photo.