of dust over things, and nothing seemed to have been disturbed recently. By the time I’d finished with the workbench, I’d concluded only that Holly had had expensive taste in her equipment, and that she’d taken excellent care of it. I pushed the rolling stool back under the workbench and heard a bump. I rolled it out again, knelt down, and looked underneath. I needed my penlight to see them: two cardboard filing boxes, side by side and up against the corrugated plastic wall. I pulled them out and opened one.
It was filled with plastic bags. They were the self-sealing variety, like evidence bags, and in them were souvenirs from Holly’s video encounters- items of the sort I’d seen in her reliquaries, though these were going nowhere now. Used condoms, stockings, soiled underwear- his and hers- neckties, cigar butts, washcloths, a pillowcase, some matchbooks, six inches of rubber tubing: a sordid lost-and-found. Each bag was labeled in black marker with a date and a location, in a firm, precise hand. I read the labels and realized that the items on top must have come from her sessions with David. While it was comforting to know that he’d practiced safe sex, the trophies made me uneasy, and my eyes skidded away. I picked through the box delicately, enough to see that it was bags of mementoes, top to bottom, and nothing more. I closed it. My heart was pounding, and I waited a moment and took a deep breath before I opened the second one.
It held memories of a different sort. There was a zippered black nylon case inside, filled with plastic sleeves. Each sleeve held several DVDs and was labeled in Holly’s neat print: “Interview #1”; “Interview #2”; “Interview #3,” all the way up to 12. Nestled next to the binder were twelve external computer disk drives, each one the size of a thin paperback. Like the DVDs, each was labeled: “January 31 backup”; “February 28 backup,” all the way up to last December 31.
I sat on the stool and looked down at the locker. Mike Metz’s voice sounded in my head: “Just keep the word ‘tampering’ in mind, and be fucking careful.” He was accompanied by Detective Vines: “And God knows what you did to the evidence.” I tapped my foot on the concrete floor.
“Shit,” I whispered.
34
It was past seven when Clare came in, and I closed the lid on my laptop. She stood in the doorway and took off her coat. Her brow was furrowed for a moment, and then a smile spread on her face as a blush rose on mine.
“The last time I saw anyone move that fast, and look that guilty, was when I walked in on my cousin Roger, in the bathroom. He was fourteen, and I forgot to knock.” She unwound her long scarf. “Keep it up, and you’ll go blind.”
“It’s work,” I said.
“Roger said he was just reading the interview.”
I pointed at the bags she’d brought with her. “Dinner?”
“I’ve got cold sesame noodles, hot-and-sour soup, steamed dumplings, and broccoli with garlic sauce… assuming you can tear yourself away.” I didn’t have much appetite, but I was glad for the break.
Back at Creek Self-Store, I’d stared for several minutes at Holly’s file box, and then I’d said fuck it. I’d returned one box to its place under the workbench, emptied the other one, and snapped the lock that I’d brought with me onto the door of unit 58. I put the empty file box in a Dumpster near the stairs, and took the elevator down. My backpack was considerably bulkier on the way out, but no one at the front desk seemed to notice.
When I got home, I fired up my laptop and connected Holly’s December 31 backup disk to it. I’d been going through files and watching videos ever since, and I’d sat through two painful hours of Holly and my brother when Clare walked in. I’d watched the scene McCue and Vines had shown us, and many others, and they left me covered in a skin of sweat and embarrassment. The only solace to be had was in the fact that David hadn’t hit her. As it turned out, my brother’s appetites seemed to lie in quite the opposite direction.
Which was cold comfort. I imagined the video playing in a court-room- to jurors, to the press, to what family and friends were there. I imagined it playing on television. The humiliation would be crippling, and it wouldn’t take a prosecutor half as bright as Rita Flores to turn that footage into a basis for blackmail and a motive for murder. If the cops had seen what I’d seen, it was no surprise they liked David for Holly’s death.
Clare called me to the kitchen counter and dinner, and she eyed my bruises as we ate. She’d been openmouthed and staring when I’d come back in tatters the night before, and she’d stood unmoving for nearly a minute. Then she’d put on her coat and walked with me to the ER at St. Vincent’s. “Fucking crazy” had been her only comment, and she’d made it two hours later, when we were walking home again. I took it as rhetorical, and kept my mouth shut.
We were drinking tea, and she put out orange slices and fortune cookies. Her eyes went to my splints.
“Nothing new since last night,” I said.
She nodded. “Slow day, huh?”
“It doesn’t happen that often.”
“No? I guess I’ve just been lucky to see so much of it.”
“It comes with the job now and then.”
“You say it like you’re talking about carpal tunnel syndrome or something. Coming home cut and bruised and broken, it’s not quite the same thing.”
“It doesn’t happen-”
Clare stopped me. “ ‘Doesn’t happen often,’ ‘part of the job’- I heard you the first time. And I’m not asking you to justify it. You love it- that much is clear.”
“You think I love getting beat up?”
“No.” She smiled. “I don’t think you’re quite that twisted. I meant your work- it’s clear you love your work. Enough so that you’re willing to get the crap beat out of you on a semiregular basis to do it.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that I’m cut out for much else.”
Clare squinted at me. “What bullshit!” she said. “There are a zillion other things you could do, or you could sit around and do nothing at all. But you don’t- because you love your work. You love running around town, and digging around on-line, and talking to people, and finding things out. And I think there’s a part of you that likes being- very quietly- the smartest guy in the room. Mostly, though, I think you want to help people, as corny as that sounds. I think you want to do good. You love your work, and you get all morose and weird- weirder- when you don’t do it. So don’t be shy about saying so. I guess all I’m saying is: be careful.”
I looked at her. Her hair had fallen forward, and soft shadows lay across the planes and angles of her face. Through a blond curtain, her gray eyes were shining, and larger than I’d ever seen them.
“I didn’t realize you’d given it so much thought.”
“Go figure,” she said, and she ran a fingertip around my ear.
“I don’t know how much good I’ve done lately, though.”
“For your brother?” she asked. I nodded. “You’re still at it?”
“For what it’s worth.”
She smiled. “I’ll put coffee on.”
Clare made a large pot and I went back to my laptop. I got through another hour of Holly and David, and then I walked around the room and tried to force some oxygen into my lungs. It had been more of the same, and maybe more embarrassing toward the end. At least he hadn’t hit her.
There were other hotel clips on the disk, though they were much shorter than the ones with David. They showed Holly with two other men, one tall and bald, the other pale and very hairy, and from the dates on the video files, in March and May of the previous year, I guessed that they were outtakes of earlier works, and that these guys had already had their final interviews. There was nothing in the sequences to make either man a more likely suspect than David, and nothing to identify them.
Clare ran a hand over the back of my neck and went into the bathroom. I heard water running in the tub and I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I clicked on another folder and found another video file, this one dated from last summer.
I played it, and I thought of some things Jamie Coyle had said: “She’d always come by to shoot the shit, though- it didn’t matter if I was on the door or behind the bar or wherever.” And: “She had in mind making different
