September 16, 2017
Tanner Riley, sixteen, worked part-time at his uncle’s auto repair shop in North Beach, and was just rolling up the shutters when Valerie arrived the following morning.
The night, mercifully, had passed without further damage. Nick had been in bed when she’d got back; eyes closed, but not, she thought, asleep. She’d undressed quietly and slid in beside him, without touching. There had been an hour of silence in which she could sense him weighing up whether to speak—but he’d kept his mouth shut, and eventually had fallen asleep. She’d lain awake herself until just before first light, then risen, dressed, and left before he stirred. But the postponement was over. Tonight, for better or worse, she was going to tell him. Everything. Even that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go ahead. One way or another, life after tonight wouldn’t be the same.
“Morning,” Valerie said to Tanner Riley, flashing the badge. “Got a minute?”
She’d watched him from the car for a while before approaching, a skinny, suntanned kid with blond and brown hair and a flinty blue-eyed face that said yes, this was the auto repair shop, but so obviously a fleeting irrelevance en route to greater things that it was all he could do to keep a straight face while it lasted.
His face went straight, however, confronted with a cop.
“What?”
“Detective Hart, Homicide,” she said. “What can you tell me about Elspeth Grant?”
“Who?”
“Elspeth Grant. The thirteen-year-old girl from Drew.”
Tanner was so suddenly and comprehensively scared shitless, she knew the direct route would be the most profitable. “Word is you and your buddies had a little encounter with her a while back. I need you to tell me about it.”
He blinked, mouth open, stunned. Where the fuck had this come from? Jesus! Valerie was tempted to smile herself: All that teen cool—gone in an instant, as if a trapdoor had opened under him and the whole lot had dropped through. The sunny morning was blue and silver around them. For him, she knew, it would be spinning, sickeningly. Normally he wore the auto shop overalls with patient irony. Now they were a hot torment.
“I don’t … I don’t know what the fuck—”
“You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”
“I “don’t know what the fuck you’re—”
“Well, let’s start with the fact that she’s a minor and I’m a homicide detective. We can talk here or at the station. I’ll square it with your uncle when he gets here.”
“Jesus Christ. I didn’t do anything. She said she was fifteen. I didn’t do anything!”
She had to work fast. First because she wanted to press him while his fear was still fresh, and second because she wanted to get what she needed before his uncle showed up and started making difficulties. She found his story, once she’d burned through the fumbling denials, depressingly unsurprising. Elspeth had been with a trio of older girls (one of whom, Anita Willox, he knew through his sister) at the mall one Saturday afternoon, when Tanner and a couple of his friends had run into them. There followed an hour of driving around, then they’d all gone to Anita’s home in Laurel Heights. Her parents were away for the weekend. Valerie filled in the predictable blanks—a raid on the domestic booze, maybe a joint or two, some version of Truth or Dare. The upshot was that at some point in the afternoon, Elspeth found him alone in one of the bedrooms. According to Tanner, he was half-asleep—and woke up to find her standing there in just her T-shirt and panties.
“I don’t care what anyone’s told you,” Tanner said. His face had thickened as she’d wrung the narrative out of him. It had brought a much younger version of himself to the surface. “Nothing—absolutely nothing happened. I told her to get the hell out.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why’d you tell her to get out? She’s a pretty girl. You thought she was fifteen. You telling me you didn’t even make out a little? There’s no law against that.”
Tanner dragged his hair off his forehead. He was sweating. Not, Valerie decided, out of guilt, but out of the realization that you could be deemed guilty even if you were innocent.
“Look, Jesus, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t … There was something wrong with her. Mentally. She gave me the fucking creeps, okay?”
Valerie believed him. More or less. It might have taken a little more than Elspeth’s appearing half-undressed to give him the creeps (perhaps the beginning of making out, when her not-fifteenness might have insinuated itself) but unless she’d completely lost her mojo, Tanner Riley wasn’t, substantially, lying.
“All right,” she said, putting away her notebook. “If I need to talk to you again I’ll know where to find you.”
She drove to Bay Domestic and picked up contact details for the Grants’ former housekeeper. Isabella Hernandez. Who, it turned out, was neither at home nor answering her cell. Valerie went back to the station.
She was eating a chicken chat and paratha when Nathan came up from Computer Forensics.
“All the Grant hardware,” he said. “We’re done, as far as I’m concerned. Okay to release it?”
“I didn’t know we still had it,” Valerie said. The computers from Willard & Gould had been returned, cleared by Deerholt, and she’d assumed he’d done the same for the domestic equipment.
“Yeah, normally they’re breaking down the door to get their stuff back. You good to sign the release?”
“Sure. Nick in yet?”
“No, he’s over at the Pullman for the CTIN conference today. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Oh, actually, yeah, I forgot about that. You not going?”
“I’m going tomorrow. It’s three days. Nerd heaven. I’ll email you the release.”
The paperwork arrived in her in-box ten minutes later. She’d just put pen to paper to sign the printouts when something stopped her.
Or rather, something and nothing.
The nothing was Nathan’s remark about hardware owners normally clamoring for the return of their gizmos.
The something was a combination of two facts.
Fact one was that with the exception of tracking down the housekeeper in the fragile hope that she had useful intel on Adam Grant’s secret life, Valerie had absolutely nothing practical to do.
Fact two was that she’d never looked through the computer material herself.
So what? There was no reason to suppose Nick and Nathan had missed anything. They knew what they were looking for, and they hadn’t found it.
Maybe that was the problem. They’d known what they were looking for. She’d given them specific targets. It invited selective scrutiny. But what about the other way of looking? When you didn’t know what you were looking for? You looked peripherally, intuitively, tangentially—all the fancy words for simply opening yourself to whatever might be there.
She was glad Nick was at the conference. The state they were in right now, he’d take her going through material he’d already trawled as an insult. Nathan wouldn’t be convinced either, but he wouldn’t be offended. He was in on the half joke of Valerie’s reputation as an instinct-follower, a left-field merchant, a practitioner of Police Occultism. She was in on it herself, unashamedly. It could only be a half joke, because her results were beyond question. When her colleagues laughed it was openly, the laughter of baffled admiration, since so many of her hunches proved her right.
She went down to Computer Forensics. Nathan was on his way out for lunch.
“You’re not going to like me,” she said.
“I don’t like you already. No one does.”
“Can you set me up with the Grant stuff?”
Nathan looked at her. Understood.
“I know, I know,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
“Is it boxed up?”
“Naturally. Where’s the fun for you if it’s not boxed up?”
Twenty minutes later she sat alone in the windowless lab. Four hard drives, no cigarettes, no booze—and no idea what she was looking for.
It was a long, long day, and she realized halfway through it that she’d chosen this partly to eat up the hours before the conversation she was going to have with Nick at its end. The realization brought panic—but she squashed it. She’d done all the inner wrangling she was going to do. Granted, there was still a blank space when she tried to imagine what would follow from that conversation, but there was stark comfort in knowing that soon everything would be out in the open and at the mercy of their shared forces. At least she’d be free of the burden of secrecy, which—not surprisingly—was now a physical sensation in her belly.
She worked methodically through the files, the emails, the receipts, the photographs, the videos. She kept her mind open, intuitions limber—but she found nothing.
Nathan came back, worked at the other desk in silence, stood over her when he was ready to go, said, “You’re wasting your time, Val,” then left.
By 10:00 P.M. her eyes were aching. There was only the hard drive from the Campbellville desktop left unexamined, but she doubted she had the energy or the will to start on it. She sat back in her chair and stretched. A text from Nick arrived.
Going for drinks with the nerds. Don’t wait up.
No endearment. No x. Fair enough. She’d earned it. It didn’t matter. Trivial hostilities that would evaporate in the face of what she had to tell him.
Still, the idea of going home to an empty apartment and waiting for him didn’t appeal. There would be time to kill, and space in it for her confessional resolve to weaken.
She opened up the Campbellville hard drive.
Sick of looking at print, she started with the My Photos file. Not, truthfully, because she expected them to yield anything, but because there was still, whether she liked it or not, a fascination with this family which, for all the time she’d spent considering it, remained strangely opaque.
The photos were what she’d expected. Thirteen years of ordinary life, albeit of the well-heeled variety. Christmases, Thanksgivings, vacation beaches. A lot on the boat. There was a nightmarish mesmerism to looking at so much normality in full knowledge of where it would end up, namely with Adam Grant murdered. All those moments and days, smiles, glances, poses and funny faces, each snapshot testifying to a terrible ignorance of what lay ahead. It was as if Death was an invisible presence in every picture, smiling, waiting patiently for its appointed time, while the subjects went about the bright business of Being Alive, never for an instant suspecting they weren’t alone. From which it followed, Valerie knew, that we were all in the same predicament. Which person’s photos wouldn’t, in retrospect, have the same invisible guest—if they ended up murdered?
One folder was titled “Better Late than Never.” Opened, it revealed a dozen or so pictures of Rachel Grant’s university graduation—though surely not more than six or seven years ago. Interesting, if irrelevant. Rachel had presumably gone back to school, as what was euphemistically called “a mature student.” Valerie wondered what she’d majored in. Maybe literature, given the omnivorous nocturnal reading. Which thought took her back to the neighbor, Vincent Lyle, he and Rachel exchanging a small-hours wave of shared literary insomnia. Again, it niggled: Dwight Jenner spotted on the Lyles’ back lawn, kitted out in black gear and ski mask. What the fuck, exactly, was he doing there? Okay, better concealed access to the Grants’ from the rear—but why not just get into their yard to start with?
No answer.
Too many no answers.
The next folder was marked “Kruger Party.”
Dan Kruger, obviously.
He appeared in the first of the pictures—though it took her a moment to recognize him, since he was bare-chested in leather trousers with his hair wet, holding what appeared to be a live white dove. He was standing with his arm around a guy dressed, as far as she could tell, as Humphrey Bogart. Costume party then. Kruger, she realized, had made use of his natural coloring (and indeed a basic resemblance) to present himself as Rutger Hauer’s replicant from Blade Runner.
The rest of the pictures—interior and yard of a swanky and clearly very large house—confirmed the theme was movie stars or movie characters. It was only the third time Morticia Addams cropped up in a shot that Valerie recognized her as Fiona Perry. The only people not in costume were the hired hospitality crew, glimpsed here and there bearing trays loaded with champagne flutes or canapés. The guests had taken the dressing up seriously, since they could afford to. All the gear looked professional, tailored, rented. Costume parties, Valerie observed, revealed two kinds of person, one who was happy to put glamor aside, and another who used the opportunity to enhance it. The demographic at Kruger’s bash fell squarely into the second category. There were no King Kongs, Mickey Mouses, or Big Birds. On the other hand there were two Barbarellas and three Jack Sparrows, though none of the men who fancied themselves Johnny Depp looked remotely convincing, and one of them should really have put himself in a corset first.
It took her a while to spot Adam Grant. He was Indiana Jones, pictured raising his glass to the camera, flanked by Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra and Raquel Welch’s fur-bikini’d cavegirl from One Million Years B.C. The latter looked like she’d spent a year working out for it, and the result was, Valerie was forced to concede, impressive.
There were a lot of photographs, and the quality suggested Kruger had hired a professional photographer. Examining them was—after the dreary hours of scouring the other documents—fun. Count Dracula. Princess Leia. The Joker. Scarlett O’Hara. Valerie’s heart warmed to one small guy in his sixties who’d gone, with convincing hilariousness, as Norman Bates’s mother from Psycho. Not surprisingly, since the photographs appeared to be chronological, the costumes and makeup suffered as the evening wore on and people got drunk.
It occurred to her—with a dumb belatedness that scolded her for losing focus—that Rachel Grant hadn’t shown up in any of the images so far. Either that or Valerie had been fooled by a costume. Not invited? Unlikely. Maybe she couldn’t go. Maybe she was away with Elspeth. Maybe she was sick. Clearly, since here were the photographs, Adam Grant hadn’t kept it a secret. Maybe (this seemed feasible, given the little Valerie had seen of her) this just wasn’t Rachel Grant’s kind of thing.
She began going through the remaining twenty or so images with renewed concentration.
Then stopped. At a picture near the end of the collection.
The photograph she was looking at showed Adam (Indiana) with his back to the camera. And his hand resting in the small of a blond woman’s back. She, too, was facing away from the lens. She was wearing a white halter-neck fifties dress that left her arms and shoulders bare. Marilyn. From The Seven Year Itch. The dress of the famous scene where the skirt blows up over the subway grille.
The next picture—Valerie could all but hear the photographer shouting “Hey, you two!” over the noise of the party—changed everything.
In it, “Marilyn” had turned to glance back over her bare shoulder.
The hair wasn’t quite accurate. It was a little longer and more voluminous than its screen original’s.
And shorter than Sophia’s in the three pictures from Adam Grant’s darkroom.
But there was no doubt it was her.
What Adam’s three hidden pictures had obscured—courtesy of the tilted-back head in the kitchen, the fall of the hair in the study, the gag and blindfold in the bedroom—namely the face, was, in this snatched shot, visible.
Even then Valerie’s circuits jammed. All she could think was why on earth would Adam Grant take his mistress to a party where surely some of the guests would have been expecting his wife? Moreover (sweet satisfaction), it proved Dan Kruger had lied when he said he didn’t know her.
Then she looked at the final photograph in the sequence.
In it, Sophia was staring straight into the camera, frowning.
Valerie forced herself to resist what her eyes told her. In the moment of resistance she heard some inner voice—or rather a combination of voices, only one of which might have been her own—saying How could you not, but why would she, he took it or she did with a timer, you only see what you’re expecting to see, that’s the trouble, expectation. You see what you’re expecting to see. Expectation is blindness. You never saw the face, really. You never, clearly, saw it.
She enlarged the image.
The resistance melted away.
The woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe, the woman in the photographs from the drawer in Adam Grant’s darkroom; the woman bent over the desk; half-naked on the kitchen worktop; bound, blindfolded, and gagged in bed; the woman from the hotels’ CCTV, hidden behind a bigger blond wig and giant sunglasses—Sophia—was Rachel Grant.