WILSON WATCHED THE VIDEO ON REPEAT. WATCHED IT SO much he was afraid he was going to ruin the tape. In his hotel room he had erected a corkboard and brought up all the photographs and information he kept tacked to the wall in his apartment and reassembled it all and drew new lines to new suspects. Some with names. Some just a question mark. The three found dead in the basement were a concern but he hadn’t been sent here to solve that. The mask, the ritual, that was his purpose.
His first move was to find out who the girl in the video was. The missing persons list at that point in the state of Washington was very long and she could have been anyone. If she was even missing. Or worse, if she was even missed. He had only the color of her skin and a rough sense of her age. Her face was shown but the black paint hid a lot and comparing her likeness with the photos on file helped very little.
The sun swung in a perfect arc from one horizon to another. A rare brilliant winter day. No rain and no snow and no wind. Perfectly calm and perfectly at ease. But Wilson didn’t notice the nice weather. He didn’t notice that it was daytime, and he didn’t notice when it became night.
He had the curtains drawn and had moved the cheap hotel chair close to the television so he could more easily start and stop and rewind the video. The only inconvenience was that the corkboard was across the room so he moved the dresser over to the corkboard and set up the television and VCR atop the dresser. Satisfied, he pressed play again.
It was a bit of an exercise in insanity. He watched the same scenes over and over with the expectation of seeing something new. He was missing something. He knew it. But every time it was the same. Always the same ending. Same tortured expressions. Same muted pleas. But there had to be something more. Some mistake. Some slipup. Something. What he was watching was crude and made by crude people and the thing that Wilson could always count on was that crude people always, at some point, made mistakes. There had to be a mistake in there somewhere.
Later he stood from his chair and went to the window and drew back the curtain and saw that the sun had fallen some hours ago and that night was well advanced and that the weather had changed and now snow was falling.
He stood at the window looking down at the street. The snow was falling through the cones of light from the streetlamps. There was a restaurant across from his hotel. The name BAYSIDE GRILL was glowing red. The neon name coruscated on the wet pavement. It burned there like an image in a warped mirror until a car passed through it and the name washed out.
There was a fair number of people on the sidewalk. Going into the cafés, the restaurants. Coming out. In and out of the corner bars. Men and women coming home from work. Dour faces and tired faces and faces filled with worry or exaltation. Some of the men still wore the hats and long coats of an older era. Half of the women he noticed wore heels. Since it was a port town some of them wore coveralls, condemning them to the cold storage of the fisheries or canning lines.
He leaned closer. Pressed a single palm against the glass. His nose nearly touching the glass. He could feel the cold passing through the pane. A cold that went through him, that chilled him in a way that made him feel like a child with a fever.
Among the crowd his eyes were attracted to a lone figure standing at the mouth of an alley. The figure was leaning against the brick wall and smoking a cigarette. The burning tip raised and lowered mechanically. When the cigarette was done, the figure in the alley lit another. Wilson saw the flare of the lighter and the hot glow of the cherry as his lungs inhaled. Wilson watched as the man held the cigarette to his mouth and dragged on it again.
A sound came out of the television that took his attention away from the window. The video had almost run out. The screen had been blank for a while. Then there was a man’s voice. Almost unintelligible. Wilson went to the television and watched it. What he saw was an old factory framed in the shot. He knew it. The old paper mill in Tacoma. As recognizable as Smith Tower. Then the mill vanished and the screen went full of static.