“I fucking gave that judge Jimmy Spears. Whatever the fuck Jimmy did to him, I handed that boy, my friend, over on a golden platter, and now he’s gonna screw me. You just watch. Next week, Jimmy will get arrested or he’ll show up dead. Dead’s my bet.” He shook his finger at Peg. “Yeah. That’s why Forak’s so secretive. He’s gonna kill the sonofabitch.”
“Oh damn,” Peg said. “You think?”
Rick nodded. “Remember these words: Jimmy Spears will show up deader’n a doornail. It’ll be in all the papers.” His voice had gone quiet. Conspiratorial.
“Jesus,” Peg said. “And then we’ll turn Forak in, yeah?”
“Yeah, we will,” Rick nodded. “No, we’ll do better than that. We’ll go to the papers.”
Giddiness and love pushed a flat smile across Peg’s face. “Yeah.”
Rick picked up the magazine and turned the cover to face her.
“Sports Illustrated,” Rick said. “ They’ll pay us twenty-five grand.”
“You think?”
“Hell, that’s a fraction of what those swimsuit models make. We’ll sell more copies than them. This guy, the judge, and the lady who’re looking for Jimmy. He’s a smart sonofabitch. Nice clothes. And he’s got connections, all respectable and shit. He’s gonna kill Jimmy and he’d get away with it, too. But you and me, we’re gonna crack the case. Sports Illustrated will get the scoop. We’ll get the money. Be on Dateline NBC. Maybe Oprah. Jenny. Ricki. All that shit.”
“Fa-a-a-amous,” Peg cackled, and twisted in her chair.
“Fame and fortune, hon. Fame and fortune.”
– 31 -
Jackie Moore had been a high school beauty, a college cheerleader, a public relations executive, a stay-at- home mother, an active volunteer, a lonely suburbanite, an ignored and indifferent wife, a psychiatric inpatient, and an untreated alcoholic. As she approached fifty, the only roles she still recalled with affection were the first, the last, and motherhood. Of those three, there was only one she could still claim.
Sometimes she slept during the day, more as an escape from the light than anything resembling rest. The shades in the house were almost always drawn. Davis either preferred it that way, too, or didn’t notice.
She rarely used her husband’s computer, but this morning she sat at his desk in the blue room with a Tanqueray and tonic, staring at the screen. Soon her fingers were snooping mindlessly across the keys. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find – perhaps naked photos of Joan Burton. She snorted at the thought. Davis would never be so obvious. Or tacky. She scanned through a year’s worth of e-mail. Nothing. Only a handful of messages exchanged between them. All work-related.
Snooping through the nested folders and directories, however, she found something she couldn’t explain. Dozens and dozens of files – Christ, hundreds! – each containing an illustration of a man’s face. The pictures were almost photo-realistic, but there was something not quite right about each of them. The dimensionality was wrong, the shadowing too severe, and the broad areas of uniform skin color not quite accurate. They had the look of a sophisticated police sketch in that they resembled a human being, but could never be mistaken for a real picture of one.
The file names were dated (going back five years or so) and then lettered for versions. The later ones looked better than the older ones. And in the later files, the versions were more similar, with the differences being mostly in the hairstyle or the age. In some, the man looked to be about twenty, in others, ten or fifteen years older. Clearly, they were all supposed to be the same person, though. Variations on the same traits and hair and eyes. Each head was the same shape, more or less, and although this seemed to have more to do with the software that had done the illustrating, the eyes had the same tired, indifferent, three-quarter stare. If every person drawn by a machine can be said to look “detached,” this fellow seemed especially so.
She also found many digital photos of a young boy. When she clicked through the first few, a dense and knobbed mass formed in her stomach. Her suspicions of his affair with Joan forgotten, she now worried that her husband was involved in something unthinkable.
Jackie supposed one might find photos of all kinds on a middle-aged man’s computer: posed porn stars in impossible positions, dressed in costumes or populating plywood fantasy environments, hands caressing their artificial secondary sex characteristics. She didn’t understand the static visual mechanics that turned men on, and allowed herself to be amused when she caught Davis’s eyes lingering on a sexy advertisement, or staring unsubtly at photos of swimsuit models, which appeared incongruously in sports magazines and catalogs. But these pictures, chaste and darling, of a young boy she did not know, a young boy who, along with his parents, was almost certainly unaware that his image occupied pixels and bytes on a suburban doctor’s home computer, gave her chills.
As she opened more and more of the files, however, her fear became puzzlement.
Each picture showed the same blond-haired boy. Like the adult composites (and typical of Davis), each file was labeled with the name Justin, a number between three and eight (roughly corresponding to the boy’s age, Jackie thought), and a letter. Not only were the pictures not salacious, most of them were adorable.
Justin was usually dressed in his best clothes and posed in some seasonal setting. There were prop pumpkins and footballs in the autumn and straw hats and wheelbarrows in the spring. There were Christmas poses and red- white-and-blue-themed photos for the Fourth of July.
If she had given more consideration to the other files she found, the illustrations of the strange man, and noted the similarity between their labels and the labels on the little boy’s photos, she might not have leaped to the conclusions she did. Instead, sitting at her husband’s desk in his basement room, Jackie assembled the pieces as best she could, and then she began to cry.
An hour later, when Phil Canella’s cell number appeared on her caller ID, Jackie felt numbing heat up her neck and over her scalp, as she did when a doctor returned with test results. This world of mercenaries, of money traded for information, was foreign to her, but she had to admit it felt good to have secrets, and although her current state of constant anxiety was unpleasant, it was at least a respite from the everydayness of depression.
She hushed the ringing phone with a press of her glossy thumbnail. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Moore,” he said. Jackie could hear activity in the background. Music, voices, glassware, doors opening and closing. A bar. Canella, who had as little self-consciousness as any man Jackie had ever met, seemed unconcerned that others would be wondering about his business. Listening in. Watching him. She found this odd for a man in the business of other people’s business. She was certain paranoia would be a collateral effect.
“Well?” Jackie said, settling on just the edge of her living room couch.
“Your husband and Dr. Burton flew in to Lincoln, and drove to a tiny little town, not even a town, really, called Brixton. They took a tour of the elementary school.”
“The elementary school?” Jackie was distressed by this, though she didn’t know why.
She heard Canella turn a page in his pocket notebook. “After that I followed them to a diner where they met a local guy. A fellow named Richard Weiss.” He checked again. “Ricky. Does that name ring a bell?”
“No,” Jackie said to Canella as she heard a bartender approach.
Canella’s voice became muffled but through the hand he had placed over the phone, she heard him order a beer. “Didn’t think so. He’s a golf course greenskeeper, apparently. Anyway, they talked long enough to order coffee, but not long enough to drink it. Then they drove back to the Marriott in Lincoln. Dinner. Drinks at the bar.” He paused for false effect. “Then they turned in.”
Jackie inhaled a deep breath and let it out in a wheeze. “Don’t dance around it, Mr. Canella.”
“Well, Mrs. Moore, it’s not just dancing. I can only give you the facts I know. They had separate rooms, but adjoining ones. The maid said both beds had been slept in, and she told me there was no, uh, physical – physical – evidence of sexual contact.”
“He could have used a condom, though,” she said, sharpening the words as she said them.
“Yeah. He could have done. There were no condoms in the trash in either room, however.”
“He might have taken it with him. Disposed of it elsewhere.”
“Yes,” Canella admitted, pausing. Jackie heard the thud of a full glass settling on a bar top. “That would be
