me.
It made me wonder if Tommy ever had a song he wanted to write.
Chapel and Burchett came outside together a little before three that afternoon to give me the joy.
“We’re done with the sweep, miss,” Burchett told me. “If you want to see what we’ve found?”
“Not if I’m going to be photographed doing it.”
He grinned big. “Made sure that won’t happen, miss.”
“You should see,” Chapel told me. “It’ll help you decide what you want to do next.”
I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, but I kept them to myself, since mostly they consisted of violence and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. I got off the steps and dusted my butt off, then nodded for them to lead the way.
We went through the kitchen, where Burchett’s colleagues were packing their gadgets into shiny metal containers not unlike my flight case. The scary woman watched me as I followed Chapel and Burchett, and I wondered what her problem was, then wondered if it was that she’d seen the pictures, and so didn’t ask.
Burchett led the way to the music room in the basement, and we started there, working the same path they’d presumably taken in their search. He pointed out each pink flag, even though they were easy enough to spot. It was an alarming education.
One flag in the music room. One flag in the downstairs bathroom, in the medicine cabinet over the sink, so that anyone looking—or grooming—in the mirror would be seen. One flag in the downstairs guest room, positioned so it could catch anything or anyone that happened onto the futon. Two flags in the kitchen, presumably in case things got exciting while I was fixing a late-night snack. Two more in the living room. Two in the master bathroom: one of them angled to catch anything happening in the shower or tub; the other one, and Burchett was impressed by this, set in the outlet between the mirrors over the sinks.
The last three flags were all in my bedroom. One directly over my bed. One in the wall just over the headboard. The last one in the outlet by the bureau, to catch me in the mornings when I picked out my day’s lingerie.
“And you know what the irony of this is?” I said to them, standing in my bedroom, looking at all of the little flags. “I fucking hate pink.”
Chapel smiled thinly, but Burchett laughed out loud.
“Fred says that some pervert pulled a gun on you when you got into town Monday morning. Says he got you into his truck and had you give him your clothes, that right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think that same guy was in your house last night?”
“Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“Any sign of a break-in?”
I shook my head.
Burchett scratched his beard, craned his head back to look around my bedroom again. “You started renovating about when?”
“When I left on tour.”
“And they finished when?”
“Last month, the beginning of September. I’m not positive of the date.”
Burchett looked at Chapel. “That’s when this was done, Fred. Our pervert must have gotten himself onto one of the crews working here, maybe working with an electrician. Hell, he could
“Then why the hell did he do all that stuff Monday morning?” I asked.
Burchett reached for the Leatherman on his belt, snapping out the Phillips head, then leaned past me and began unscrewing the cover to the outlet by my bureau. Chapel and I waited, watching. It didn’t take him long, and he hummed while he worked. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.”
When he removed the cover, he pointed to a portion of the wall, just above the lower outlet. There was a black smudge on the paint, a teardrop shape.
“Scorch mark,” Burchett told us. “The camera shorted. He must have been trying to replace it.”
“And if he’d been listening for news of when she was going to return home, he’d have known she was on her way,” Chapel said.
“But he got me outside,” I said. “He wasn’t inside.”
Burchett began replacing the plate over the outlets, his brow furrowed. “Maybe there were two of them, working together. You get one in the house when you come home, the other is outside waiting. He sees you, panics, thinks he can’t let you go inside. That would explain why he dropped you off here when he was through. All he wanted to do was keep you occupied for an hour or so.”
“There’s the little detail where he had me strip for him.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t touch you, right? And if he has your clothes, you’re less likely to make a break for it, irrational modesty being what it is. He takes your clothes, you’re going to stay put until the danger is so great your modesty comes second. For most people, by the way, the point when their modesty stops being first is normally right after too late.”
“Could the partner be the one you saw last night?” Chapel asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But if one of them was fixing the camera Tuesday morning, then why’d he come back last night?”
“Well, could’ve had another short, maybe. Might’ve forgotten something, something that he thought would incriminate him.”
“Or maybe he wasn’t here to work on the cameras,” Chapel said.
Burchett frowned at him, then glanced at me. He looked embarrassed, and it took me a second longer to realize why, that he’d been thinking the same thing Chapel had, but hadn’t wanted to say it.
So I said it for them both. “You think last night he came here to rape me.”
“We don’t know that,” Burchett said, replacing the Leatherman in the pouch on his belt. “Got one more thing to show you.”
“I think I’ve seen enough.”
“We’re almost through.” He smiled reassurance at me, then opened my closet and stepped inside, sliding my clothes down along the rod and revealing the access door into the attic space. He shoved it open and crawled through, then called back for me to follow. I ducked and shimmied after him.
It was dusty and dim, the only illumination the sunlight slanting through the small vent at the front of the house, and it smelled of insulation and wood and stale air. Cobwebs hung off the rafters, and I swiped at them uselessly as I got to my feet. There was just enough room to stand, hunched, if you were short like myself or Burchett. Chapel, when he came through, stayed on his knees.
Burchett had moved forward and when I reached his side, he indicated the vent. Through the slats I could glimpse the street out front of the house, the tops of the apple and elm trees in my yard.
It took me another second before I could make out the antenna, short and stubby and rubber and black, attached to the underside of one of the slats. From outside, in the shadow of the house, it would have been invisible. Burchett had crouched and was fumbling beneath the crossbeams, and then he came up with what looked like a thin rectangular box, also black plastic. It had another antenna attached to it, even stubbier than the first, and a row of three lights, all of them off. A power cord ran away from it, disappearing in the insulation at our feet.
“The transmitter,” Burchett explained. “Broadband wireless; you can get one at just about any computer hardware store for a couple hundred bucks. All of the cameras in the house send to this little guy here, you see? Then this fella, he beams the signal to another unit somewhere, maybe only a couple blocks from here, maybe up to a mile away, and it downloads the signal onto tape or maybe even direct to a hard drive.”
“Tape?”
“The cameras, they’re video, Miss Bracca, not still-image. Those pictures of you, they’re not photographs, they’re video captures. This guy is taking videos of you, selecting the image he wants, pulling that, and cleaning it up. You see?”
I did see, and it alarmed me enough that I shot a glance back to Chapel, where he was wedged just inside
