My food came, and I paid up. I kissed her again at the front door. There was a coldness that hadn't been there before. I thought I understood. Rose wasn't going to invest any more emotion in me until I committed myself to her and to our marriage.
I told myself I could live with that.
The sandwiches were met with smiles at the station. Kevin had found a week's worth of footage from the history teacher's trial, and Fountain, Saunders, and I ate in Fountain's office while watching a plasma monitor mounted to the wall.
“Because the girl was a minor, the judge didn't allow TV cameras inside the courtroom,” Fountain explained as the first clip ran. “As a result, we used a courthouse artist to capture renditions of the different witnesses who testified during the trial.”
I ate my sandwich while trying to hide my disappointment. My reason for wanting to watch the trial was to see if Simon Skell had attended and sat in the spectator gallery. Without a camera inside the courtroom, there was no way for me to know.
Instead, I decided to focus on the film taken outside the court room each day after the trial, when both the prosecuting attorney and the defense attorney made statements to the media. If I was lucky, Skell's face might show up here.
On the fourth clip I got a hit. This was the day Bash came and the cameras caught him leaving the courthouse. Bash wore a flowing black garment that made him look downright evil. When a reporter asked him a question, he shoved his palm into the camera and said, “No comment, asshole!”
As Bash came down the steps I spotted a man walking beside him.
“Can I see this clip again?” I asked.
Fountain rewound the tape and started it over. I had her freeze the picture as Bash appeared at the top of the steps, then play it in slow motion. As Bash descended, another man also came down, walking to his right. We leaned in to stare.
“Any idea who that is?” Saunders asked.
“He looks familiar, but I'm not sure,” I said.
“Think it might be Skell?”
“It could be.”
We watched the clip again. The second man's face never became visible to the camera. I felt as if I were watching a Hitchcock film, and the master was taunting me.
“You had contact with Skell, didn't you?” Saunders asked.
“That's one way to put it,” I said.
“Judging by the guy's size, do you think that might be him?”
I hesitated. Body parts were hard to distinguish, and I couldn't really be certain. The guy looked about six foot and one-eighty, which matched Skell's proportions. He also had a bounce to his step, and Skell was athletic. But there was no way of knowing for sure. Fountain rewound the tape, and we watched it again.
“I just don't know,” I said.
The air had been let out of the room. We finished eating in silence. A tapping on the door lifted our heads. Kevin stood in the doorway, looking pleased with himself.
“Guess what I just found,” he said, holding a Beta tape in his hand.
Kevin came into Fountain's office and handed her the tape with a flourish.
“I decided to search the video archives to see what we had on Bash,” Kevin said. “Guess what turned up? The clip when he castrated the hog.”
Fountain let out a sickening groan.
“Oh, please, Kevin, I just ate lunch,” she said.
“The station filmed it,” Kevin said, “but it was so gross it never aired.”
I looked across the desk at Fountain. “Do you mind if we watch it?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Do you mind if I leave the room?”
“Not at all.”
Fountain left her office. When she was gone, Kevin inserted the tape into the deck attached to the TV and hit Play.
“You want it with or without audio?” he asked.
“With,” Saunders said.
The screen flickered to life. Dressed in black, Bash stood in a grassy field clutching a cordless mike. Beside him stood a gap-toothed farmer wearing dirty coveralls. Behind the farmer was a large squealing hog tied to a stake in the ground.
Bash and the farmer bantered back and forth like a couple of frat house buddies. Then the farmer drew a curved knife from a sheath in his belt, and knelt down beside the hog. The castration took place with the farmer's back to the camera. There was nothing to see, but the sounds were gruesome.
“Enough of that,” Saunders said.
Kevin muted the clip with the remote. Soon the segment ended, and the camera pulled back. I could see Bash standing beneath the shade of an enormous oak tree off to the side. With him were four men, their faces masked by shadows.
“Freeze it,” I said.
Kevin froze the clip. I stared at the four faces, as did Saunders.
“Any of them look familiar?” Saunders asked.
I stared hard. Then I shook my head. The resolution on the clip was poor, and the faces were indistinguishable.
“I need this blown up and lightened,” I said.
“Your wish is my command,” Kevin said, popping the cassette out.
We followed him down a long hallway to an editing room, which was windowless and quite chilly. A black male technician was on duty, and Kevin explained what we needed. The tech inserted the tape into a deck, then had us go into the next room, a brightly lit soundstage with a giant video monitor hanging on the wall.
“I'd like to watch football on that baby,” Saunders said.
The frame we'd just been watching appeared on the monitor. Now, Bash and the four men looked larger than life.
“Would you look at that,” Saunders said.
Standing next to Bash was the history professor who'd molested his student. The teacher wore a baseball cap pulled down low, but it didn't hide enough of his face. It was definitely him.
“Do you recognize any of the others?” Saunders asked.
I stared at the other three men. They were smiling and looked like a bunch of guys having a barbecue in someone's backyard.
“Can you make the faces lighter?” I asked the tech.
“Sure,” the tech said from the other room.
The faces turned a few shades lighter. The guy to Bash's left wore shades and a leather bombardier jacket and was trying to look cool. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Skell, and I looked at his hands. Fingers were missing on both.
“That's Skell,” I said.
“Jesus, are you sure?” Saunders said.
“I'd bet my life on it.”
“What about the other two?”
The third man's face was partially turned. Hispanic, broad-shouldered, with an ugly facial scar. It was the guy who'd pumped three bullets into my car on 595.
“This guy tried to kill me the other day,” I said, pointing.
Saunders shouldered up beside me.
“What about the fourth one? Do you know who he is?”
The fourth man in the photograph was ten years older than the rest. He had meticulously styled blond hair
