glass.
I watched patiently through the binoculars, waiting for him to emerge again. Finally, I saw him on the beach. I didn’t even notice him come out of the water.
Shadows kept him invisible. Then he used topiaries and scrub grass to keep himself camouflaged. He stayed there for a good forty minutes. The party guests moving in and out of the mansion, never seeing him, never suspecting. Couples and groups moved into his frame without knowing it, then out again. Eventually, he moved. With smooth stealth he was back in the water again. Soon, he was back on the boat.
“Still here, I see,” he quipped after removing his goggles and oxygen mouthpiece.
“Still here for good reason.”
“You finally trust me?”
“I don’t know how to start the engine on this tub.”
Jim smiled. “Give me a chance to change and maybe I’ll give you a lesson.”
Ten minutes later, he was topside again. “You want to see some of my shots? They turned out great.”
“You have the pictures already?”
“It’s digital media. Come on down.”
In the cabin below the open deck, Jim had set up a laptop and printer on a bolted down table. On the screen were thumbnails of the photos he’d just taken. He sat me down in a folding deck chair, then he leaned over my shoulder, and clicked on a few to show me the results.
I shook my head in amazement.
Jim noticed. “You can’t get over the technology, can you?”
“I can’t get over how many parties Keith Judd gets invited to on this tiny strip of land.”
“Keith Judd? Oh, yes, there he is in the background, surrounded by pretty young jail bait, as usual. My focus wasn’t on him for that shot. See here—that’s Radio Brenner, the baseball star. He’s got his arm around Gina Sanchez, the pop diva. In March they started their relationship. But nobody’s gotten a photo of them together this summer. Now my client does.”
“I see.”
Rand heard the stiffness in my voice. He turned his gaze away from the laptop’s screen to look at me. “You see but you don’t approve.”
“It’s not my place to approve or disapprove. It’s your living…”
“But?”
“But why don’t you just do the kind of photos you did at Bay Bar? Why don’t you just do legit stuff?”
“I do legit stuff. My partner, Kenny, does too. He even does accident scene photos for the police around here. You’d be surprised how many traffic smash-ups there are during the season.”
“After driving around here this summer with the displaced, impatient Manhattan elites, no, I actually wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well, those jobs don’t pay enough. And I want my own boat by the end of summer. I want to make enough to retire on before I’m too old and too fatigued to dive anymore. Life’s short, Clare. I’ve witnessed that first hand, I can tell you.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to make the most of it while you can.”
“Like I said…it’s your business…it’s just creepy, invading people’s privacy.”
“Oh? You mean, like when you invaded my privacy today?”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d justified breaking and entering, telling myself it was for a higher cause. But it was still an invasion of his privacy. It was still breaking the law.
Jim rose, unfolding himself so high, his head nearly brushed the cabin’s ceiling. “Clare, the places I’ve been… the things I’ve seen, the poverty, the suffering…fuck it. If the worst thing that ever happens to these filthy rich people is that they have their candid photo put in a magazine, I’d say they’re still coming up winners on the global lottery…You want a drink?”
I nodded, surprising myself. But I suddenly needed something to sooth my nerves, my feelings of guilt about being a voyeur. And from the look on his face, so did Jim Rand.
He went to the galley fridge, pulled out two cold bottles of beer and opened them. He handed me one and went topside again, taking a seat on a padded bench near the stern. I stood against the rail. We both drank in silence for a fewminutes, the waves lapping the hull, the boat gently bobbing on the dark water.
“So why did you leave the SEALs?” I asked. “Age?”
“Injury. It happened during…a training exercise.”
“Oh, wow, that’s bad luck. I mean, it wasn’t even on a secret mission or anything.”
Jim laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Clare, no SEAL is ever allowed to say he’s injured on anything but a ‘training exercise.’”
“Oh?…Oh! I see. Sorry…so what exactly is your injury?”
“Decompression injury. In laymen’s terms, the bends. It messed up my inner ear, my joints. If I go any deeper than recreational diving—about one hundred feet—I’ll probably suffer severe bone damage.”
“And this work you’re doing. You don’t dive any lower than—”
“Twenty feet tops. In the Caribbean, during the winter, I’ll go deeper. Fifty…but no more.”
“I see…”
I moved to the padded bench and sat down next to him. His dark, shaggy hair was wet and slicked back, dampening the green collar of his button-down. The scent of soap and citrus was still there on his skin, along with the faint briny smell of the open ocean. I liked it. I didn’t want to like it, but I did.
Together we continued to drink our beers and watch the play of moonlight on the water. At least I thought that’s what he’d been watching. When I glanced up, however, I found his eyes on me.
A sudden gust of wind tossed my chestnut hair around my face. Jim’s brown eyes seemed to liquefy. For long, silent minutes, he didn’t move.
That’s when I realized that being this close to Jim Rand was like being too close to a lightning strike. I could practically feel his coiled energy, the burning below his surface. He wasn’t bothering to mask anything now. I could see what he wanted, and if he had touched me just then, it would have been over. I would have melted like chocolate in a five hundred degree oven. So I stood up before he got the chance—
“Jim, I need your help.”
“You need my help?”
“David’s in danger, and I need to find out who wants to hurt him.”
Jim looked away, took a long swig of beer. “You need my help?”
“That’s what I said.”
He turned back to me, met my eyes. “Will you be grateful?”
“Yes.”
An eyebrow arched. “How grateful?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether we catch the killer.”
A smile spread slowly across Jim Rand’s face. “I’m game.”
With patient silence, Jim listened to all of my theories and suspicions. Then he suggested we go below and use his laptop again. He thought we might get somewhere examining the party photos on screen since he could zoom into any image. His idea was to locate David in every photo and analyze what was happening around him.
There were about seventy photos in the file. We didn’t see anything suspicious for the first twenty-two. On twenty-three, however, I saw something that put a chill through me. The main image was of a beautiful young movie star laughing. But in the background, something caught my eye.
“Can you zoom in on David back there, make the image bigger?”
“Sure.” Jim moved the cursor and clicked. “What do you see, Clare?”
“David is talking to his restaurant manager, Jacques Papas. And look what Jacques is doing.”
“Looks like he’s handing David his drink to taste.”
“Go to the next photo in order.”
