Rik is right. The photograph is bad. The Chief and Rik and I are back around the conference table in Rik’s office, where we each have had a long look before Rik closes the folder again. There’s not much of Blanco in the picture. He’s seen from the back, from the level of his shoulders. His right arm, supposedly holding the phone, is not visible. His left hand, as he said in court before he got cut off, is groping her tit, and his head is buried in her crotch, deep enough that her thighs are covering his ears.
As for the Chief, the view is nowhere as limited. She’s seated in a big black leather executive chair. Whatever she wore to work—pants or skirt—has been discarded, and her full thighs are squished unflatteringly because they’re thrown over Blanco’s shoulders. And she is smiling in a way I’ve never seen from her before, which is, frankly, nasty and pretty repulsive. She’s loving all of this, including, it seems, the ugliest part, which is that her service weapon—a .32 Beretta that she carries in a shoulder holster—is in her left hand inches from Blanco’s temple. That to me is the shocking part of the photograph: not the sex, which always looks pretty strange when it’s somebody you know, but what it reveals in the Chief, a kind of twisted piece of her.
“There’s no mirror in my office,” she says finally. “There never has been. You can call Stanley if you want,” she says, referring to the former Chief.
“And what does that mean?” Rik asks. “You used somebody else’s office?” Rik has lost his usual good nature. You’d expect the same from any trial lawyer who got bushwhacked with something this critical that his client never mentioned. “Let’s cut the crap, Lucy. Is that you?”
“You’re the one who said this is Photoshopped.”
“I said it because that’s my job. To cast doubt. But you tell us. Is that picture real or not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lucy, is that you? Does that look like you?”
“In a galaxy far far away and long long ago.”
“How long?”
“Twenty pounds,” she says. “And my hair hasn’t been quite that short in years. Every woman in the station will testify my hair was longer last November.”
“But that’s you in the Highland Isle police station with some guy, right?”
“It’s not Blanco. That’s one thing I can tell you for sure.”
“Granted, Blanco’s a liar. He wasn’t at your house, and you’ve never had an apartment in HI. The ring doesn’t fit him. He’s not going to find the original print of the photo either. So in the long run, we don’t have to worry about the US Attorney believing him. That’s the good news.
“But Lucy, whoever cooked this up, Steven DeLoria or the Ritz or whoever else, to them Blanco’s just a Trojan horse. They knew that whether Blanco is telling the truth is almost beside the point for their purposes. Once this image goes public, it’ll be a sensation. Which the commission won’t be able to ignore. Whatever break P&F was going to cut you because there aren’t written rules against fraternization, or because DeGrassi and Cornish are lying oafs—they can’t do that with this. This didn’t happen in the privacy of your house after hours, Lucy, with some fuck buddy you’ve been bopping since you were both pups. You’re on the job here, in a chair and an office the citizens pay for.”
“I’m not the first cop to have sex in the station. I’m not even the first Chief.”
“But you’d fire the ass of any cop you caught doing this.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s an election year, Lucy. The mayor will have to do something.”
She studies Rik. “Are you telling me to resign?”
Rik thinks about that for a while.
“I’m telling you we need to defend this,” he finally answers. “And to do that, we have to have the facts. If this isn’t Blanco, then who is it?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t remember, Rik.”
“How can you not remember? Because it happened so often?”
The Chief, who’s kept it together pretty well so far, doesn’t care for the sarcasm.
“Who are you,” she answers, “my mother?” You can’t be a police officer for decades without being sharp and tough, but the Chief has that woman thing of trying not to let people see it. Revealed, it’s like a knife coming out of a sheath. “I don’t know who it is, and I don’t remember if anything like this actually happened. I can’t tell you one way or the other if this is even real. Okay?”
Rik glances at me to see if I believe her, which I don’t. We’re all quiet, which gives me a chance to kind of think out loud.
“Okay,” I say. “But let’s just stay on the road you’ve been on, Boss. Our position is that this is a Photoshop, you know, the picture is manufactured, like you said in court. I guarantee you that with Blanco admitting that this is a photocopy of a printed picture, every expert will say that there’s no way to be sure whether the original digital image was altered.”
The Chief watches me and then gives a weighty nod. But Rik isn’t satisfied.
“A Photoshop from what? You have to start with a real photograph, don’t you?”
I look to the Chief and ask, “Could somebody have hacked your phone and found a picture like this that they pasted into an office setting?”
Rik holds up a hand to keep her from answering.
“Then you’d need to produce that photo,” he says. He’s warning her off before she lies. “Different question. Is there a guy out there who’s got a photo like this that he took? At your house? Or somewhere else?”
She gets a little whimsical smile and gestures at the folder.
“Apparently.”
“That still looks like a Highland Isle tunic to me,” Rik says about Blanco’s shirt, which is in that Sick Teal shade the HI department wears so they’re not confused with the Kindle County Force, with all its frequent problems.
“Changing the color of something is easy digitally,” I say.
“But Lucy is obviously in uniform.”
“Or was,” says the Chief with a sad little smile. Even to me, the person who invented inappropriate, Lucy’s nervous humor feels childish and annoying.
“You can’t just stick her face on another image, can you?” Rik asks. “I mean, it would look like a cartoon.”
“We need to find an expert who can explain how those programs work,” I say.
The Chief groans, thinking about the expense.
“And if we say, ‘Photoshop,’” Rik tells the two of us, “then Mr. Not-Blanco better not show up and say this took place at the station.”
“Not happening,” says Lucy.
“Because?”
“Because it’s a fucking Photoshop,” she says. “This isn’t real.” Now that I’ve said the experts won’t disprove that, she’s suddenly a lot more certain.
Rik says it’s time to go home. We’re all tired. We gather our stuff and walk out into the night. The summer humidity, thick as cotton, has arrived, so that outside you never feel like your skin is completely dry. Even so, I’ve always enjoyed that sensation, because it takes me back to when I was a kid, and the heavy air meant I was free—not in school, not messing up, not getting scolded.
It’s past 11:00 and the city is starting to fall silent, with the usual isolated urban sounds jumping out. A jacked-up vehicle with a big baffler on the muffler guns down the avenue, and someone’s shouts follow. There are lights of a truck going into the Tech Park across the street, delivering something to Northern Direct or another business.
Given the hour and the surroundings, Rik walks the Chief to her car. That’s kind of dear, since Rik, the escort, is the only one of the three of us without a gun. The Chief recovered hers from the lockers in City Hall after the hearing, and my two-shot is a few feet away in the trunk of the CTS. But I know he wants to give Lucy a hug, just to show he’s with her, no matter what. He does that and says something to her that I can’t hear. Maybe he’s apologizing for losing it a little.
Then he returns my way and rolls his eyes and mouths, “Clients,” as he strolls to his Acura, parked a couple spaces over.
I’m about a minute out of the parking lot when Tonya calls. I imagine she wants an update on the hearing, but she already knows all about it.
“I hate to tell you,” she says, “but that picture is all over the Internet.”