Bodies, and parts of bodies, intact and taken apart, naked and partially clothed and bound and tied and posed, some identified, some unidentified, going back years and years and years surrounded him.
Picture time for Behr. He’d pinned police department victim photos, both in stark black and white and in lurid color, on bulletin boards and along the walls of his office, and they were quickly becoming plastered across the surfaces of his brain. Motel rooms, wooded areas, roadsides, Dumpsters, a warehouse, a fifty-five-gallon drum, parks, including the most recent find along the tree line of Northwestway. That one was the most bizarre tableau and seemed to have been staged with great care.
Behr had run through the half dozen sets of photo printer ink cartridges he’d picked up for the project. He was aware that now, along with his time, he was spending his own money combing cold cases, but so far none of the unidentified bodies announced themselves as Kendra Gibbons. He was also aware, painfully so, that he had nothing substantive that connected her to any of these past cases.
“Huh,” Behr said aloud, as he stood back and appraised the shots in total. He’d hung them in chronological order, and he had begun to recognize a very clear difference in them, a progression, starting about six years back. The difference was in the quality and in the impact of the photos. At first he ascribed it to the advent of digital photography and the new, sharper lenses that came along with it. But he soon realized the distinctions went beyond that. There was a skill level at play, lighting-wise and compositionally, even in the overall density of image, in the more recent photos that far outstripped the prior ones. Behr moved closer and noticed a tiny photo credit in most of the recent batch that read “D. Quinn.” He stepped back again and understood what made the difference.
When looking at crime scenes, Behr had been trained to concentrate on the edges. The investigator can’t ignore the central piece—the body, or the blown safe, or the looted car—but too many investigators got sucked into that element. It was only natural. It was, after all, the reason for the investigation. But the mind tended to become overwhelmed by it. It caused a type of tunnel vision that shut out other pertinent information. So one was advised to instead focus on the periphery, where a pen might’ve been touched or a drinking glass used, or a bottle or a footprint or a tool might’ve been left by the criminal. Behr realized that the pictures of the more recent scenes seemed to be shot with this aesthetic. The bodies were in the photos, of course, and they were central, but they weren’t dead center in the frame, and the surrounding spaces were included in a highly detailed manner. Behr stared and studied the more recent batch for hours. He pulled up a chair and continued. He didn’t see anything that helped. He knew he might not for a long time, if ever. But at least he knew there was a chance.