open onto the water and the Florida sky, and she sees through his eyes. She doesn't know why, but when she looks at that huge, deep tub built into agate, she feels that he looked at it, too.
Then something occurs to her and she backs up to the archway that leads into the bathroom. Maybe when he came up the stone steps to the master floor, he turned left instead of right and ended up in the bathroom instead of the bedroom. That morning it was sunny, and light would have filled the windows. He could see. He might have hesitated and looked at the tub before turning around and heading silently into the bedroom, where Henri was clammy and miserable with a high fever, the blinds down and the room dark so she could sleep.
So you came into my bathroom, Lucy says to the beast. You stood right here on the marble floor and looked at my tub. Maybe you never saw a tub like that. Maybe you wanted to imagine a woman naked in it, relaxing, minding her own business before you murdered her. If that's your fantasy, she says to him, then you're not very original. She walks out of the bathroom and back down the steps to the second floor, where she sleeps and has her office.
Past the cozy movie theater is a large 'guest bedroom that she has converted into a library with built-in bookcases, the windows covered by black-out shades. Even on the sunniest day, this room is dark enough to devlon film. She turns on a li^hr, and hundreds of reference books and loose-leaf binders and a long table bearing laboratory equipment materialize. Against one wall is a desk that is centered by a Krimesite Imager that looks like a stubby telescope mounted on a tripod stand. Next to it is a sealed plastic evidence bag, and inside is the drawing of the eye.
Lucy plucks examination gloves out of a box on the table. Her best hope for fingerprints is the Scotch tape, but she'll save that for testing later because it involves chemicals that will alter the paper and the tape. After brushing Magnadust over her entire back door and the windows nearest it, she lifted not a single print with ridge detail, not one, just smudges. Had she found a print, chances are it would be the yard man's, Rudy's, hers, or that of whoever washed the glass last, so there isn't much point in feeling discouraged. Prints outside a house don't mean much, anyway. What matters is what she finds on the drawing. Gloves on, Lucy unsnaps the clasps of a hard black briefcase lined with foam rubber and gently lifts out the SKSUV30 Puissant Lamp. She carries it to the desk and plugs it into a surge protector power strip. Pressing the rocker switch, she turns on the high-intensity short-wave ultraviolet light, and then turns on the Krimesite Imager.
Opening the plastic bag, she grips the sheet of white paper by a corner and pulls it out. She turns it over, and the eye drawn in pencil stares at her as she holds it up to the overhead light. The white paper lights up and there is no watermark, just millions of cheap paper pulp fibers. The pencil-drawn eye dims as she lowers it, placing the sheet of paper in the center of the desk. When the beast taped the drawing to her door, he attached the tape to the back of it so the eye would be staring through the glass, into her house. She puts on a pair of orange-tinted protective goggles and centers the drawing under the Imager's military-grade ocular lens, and peers into the eyepiece, opening the UV aperture all the way while slowly rotating the focus barrel and focus ring until the honeycomb viewing screen is visible. With her left hand, she directs the UV light at her target, adjusting it to just the right angle, and begins moving the sheet or paper, scanning ror prints, hoping the scope will pick them up so she doesn't have to resort to destructive chemicals such as ninhydrin or cyano acrylate. In the UV light, the paper is a ghostly greenish-white beneath the lens.
With her fingertip, she moves the paper until the piece of Scotch tape is in the field of view. Nothing, she thinks. Not even a smudge. She could try rosaniline chloride or crystal violet, but now is not the time for that. Maybe later. Sitting down at the desk, she stares at the drawing of the eye. That's all it is, just an eye, the pencil outline of an eye, iris and pupil, fringed in long lashes. A woman's eye, she thinks, drawn with what looks like a number-two pencil. Mounting a digital camera to a coupler, she takes photographs of magnified areas of the drawing, then makes photocopies.
She hears the garage door go up and turns off the UV lamp and the scope and places the drawing back inside the plastic bag. A video screen on the desk shows Rudy backing the Ferrari into the garage. Lucy tries to decide what to do about him as she shuts the library door and quickly skips down the stone steps. She imagines him walking out the door and never coming back and has no idea what would become of her and the secret empire she has created. First there would be the blow, then numbness, then pain, and then she would get over it. This is what she tells herself when she opens the door off the kitchen and he is there, holding up her car keys as if he is holding up a dead mouse by the tail.
"I guess we should go ahead and call die police," she says, taking the keys from him. "Since technically this is an emergency."
"I guess you didn't find prints or anything else important," Rudy says.
"Not with the scope. I'll do the chemicals if the police don't take the drawing. I'd rather they didn't take it. Actually, we won't let them take it. But we should call. See anybody while you were out?" She walks across the kitchen and picks up the phone. "Anybody besides all the women who ran off the road when they saw you coming?" She looks at the key pad and enters 9-1-1.
"No prints so far, Rudy says. "Well, it ain't over til it's over. What about indented writing?"
She shakes her head and says, "I want to report a prowler."
"Is the person on the property now, ma'am?" the operator asks in her calm, capable voice.
"Doesn't appear to be," Lucy said. "But I think this might be related to a B-and-E your department already knows about."
The operator verifies the address and asks the complainant's name because the name of the resident showing up on her video screen is whatever limited liability corporate name Lucy happened to have selected for this particular property. She can't remember what it is. She owns a number of properties and all of them are in different LLC names.
"My name's Tina Franks." Lucy uses the same alias she used last time she called the police, the morning Henri was attacked and Lucy panicked and made the mistake of dialing 911. She tells the operator her address, or more specifically, Tina Franks's address.
"Ma'am, I'm dispatching a unit to your home right now," the operator says.
Good. You happen to know if CSI John Dalessio is on duty?" Lucy talks to the operator easily and with no fear. "He might want to know about this. He responded to my house the other time, so he's familiar." She picks out two apples from a bowl of fruit in the kitchen's center island.
Rudy rolls his eyes and indicates that he can get hold of CSI Dalessio a lot more quickly than the 911 operator can. Lucy smiles at the joke and shines an apple on her jeans and tosses it to him. She buffs the other apple and bites into it as if she's on the phone with a take-out restaurant or the dry cleaner or Home Depot and not the Broward County Sheriff's Department.
"Do you know which detective worked your breaking and entering, originally?" the 911 operator asks. "Normally, we don't contact the crime scene investigator, just the detective."
"All I know is I dealt with CSI Dalessio," Lucy replies. "The don't think a detective ever came to the house, just to the hospital, I guess. When my house guest went to the hospital."