by Dale Mayer
Seeing the man Keith that they’d found on the sixth floor, and the way he’d reacted to seeing her, wanting her photographs, well, that was just creepy.
At his side, Quinn said, “Really makes you rethink things, doesn’t it?”
“In many ways,” he said. “I still can’t figure out if those photographs were meant to be like that or—”
“I was wondering that myself. It’s odd either way.”
“It’s all odd though,” she muttered from the back seat.
“Here we are,” Quinn said, as he pulled up in front of a large warehouse in a much more commercial artsy district and said, “This looks like an interesting space.”
“Depends on what we find in it,” Fallon said.
“Please tell me that you’re not expecting dead bodies,” she said.
Both men stopped and looked at her.
Quinn asked, “Why would you even bring that up?”
“Because so far we’ve got one,” she said, “and the case has just slipped down some weird rabbit hole. I don’t know how many others might be around.”
“Well, let’s hope not,” he said, “because that’s not something any of us want to deal with.”
“You think?” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know where that thought came from. Just fear I guess.”
At that, Fallon hooked his arm through hers and said, “You don’t have to go in.”
“You’re not keeping me out,” she said. “I mean, it’s just really puzzling to see the men involved in this case. There was definitely an issue with the guy who was my admirer,” she said, in that mocking tone. “He was off in some way.”
“Such as?”
“It’s hard to explain. I don’t want to say that he was off his meds, but it kind of was that.”
“Which would make perfect sense,” he said. “Not that you’re not plenty beautiful enough to get a lot of stalkers on your own,” he said hurriedly. She just looked at him and rolled her eyes.
Quinn, on the other hand, snorted with laughter at Fallon’s clumsy attempt to get his foot out of his mouth.
“Okay, enough already. I get it.”
“You know,” Quinn said, serious now, “somebody acting the way Keith was, it does make sense that there could be some mental instability there.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed. “Definitely an issue with this Keith guy.”
“Or could he just be good at whatever he does and then completely creepy about a lot of other things,” Quinn suggested.
“Not just guys though,” Fallon corrected. “A lot of men and women are very good at what they do professionally, yet they are also socially inept. They don’t have enough practice or an established skill set or some social ability to interact as you and I would,” he said quietly.
“Recent conversation excluded,” Quinn quipped.
“Ya think?” she said. “Seriously though, there are all kinds of proper medical terms for that kind of thing, with many nuances,” she said cheerfully. “But you’re right, and I’m considering that a whole lot right now.”
“Well, if you come up with anything, let us know.”
“Don’t expect any psychiatric diagnoses from me,” she said. “I’m a surgeon. I’m not somebody who studies and understands all the mind-sets of people with these kinds of mental problems.”
“Did psychiatry ever interest you?”
“No,” she said quickly, maybe too quickly. “It brought me a little too close to thinking about—well—the people who killed my parents.”
“I guess that’s one of the reasons why I was wondering if you would go into something like that,” Fallon said. “Because it might help you to understand the people who did it.”
“Helping me to understand the individuals, or that mind-set, didn’t let me sleep at night,” she said. “I learned as much as I needed to from Uncle Dave and the rest of you over the years, and I decided that my own mental health needed a completely different field.”
“Good enough,” he said. “We all have to make decisions for ourselves.”
“Then we hopefully have enough perseverance to actually act on them and to follow through,” she muttered.
He looked at her in surprise.
She shrugged. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to quit over the years.”
“I don’t know of anything much harder than med school,” he said. “The fact that you persevered and did make it is a huge accomplishment, and you should be very damn proud of yourself.”
“I am,” she said, with a nod. “Didn’t make it any easier to get there though.”
He chuckled at that. “No,” he said. “All of us have had certain things that we’ve pushed ourselves for, and, when we’ve made it, it’s been a huge blessing, but that doesn’t make it any easier to get to that point, and it’s not exactly something anybody else can help us with.”
“No,” she said, “not at all.”
They stood outside the warehouse, and Fallon said, “I think I’ll check around the back.”
“I got it,” Quinn said, already taking off in that direction. “You guys go in through the front. I’ll go in through the back.”
“We’re expecting it to be empty, right?” she asked Fallon, as they stepped closer.
“We’re expecting it to be, yes, but we can never count on something like that.”
She just nodded, and he was grateful for her quiet silence and support. Once out on this road trip, she never questioned their decisions, never questioned why they were doing something; she just followed along.
“Stay behind me though,” he said. “Just in case it isn’t empty.”
She took a deep breath at that, slowly nodded, and said, “Okay, that makes sense. Are we going in right now?”
“I’m giving Quinn a couple minutes to get into position,” he said.
When his phone buzzed, he checked it—Quinn sending him a message, saying he was going in. With that, he slipped up to the front door, checked that it was locked, and quickly picked it. He pushed open the door ever-so-quietly and stepped inside, holding his hand back to keep her slightly behind him. Being protective just came naturally. Lindsey was somebody he cared about, though at this moment he wished that she were a long way away from here.
He tilted his head, as he listened to the silence around him. He felt her warm breath, she was so close to him. But his senses weren’t telling him anything was wrong.
Then he sniffed and wrinkled up his nose. Maybe there was after all. But it didn’t smell like what he’d expected it to, and decomp never really had anything other than that very distinctive odor. But if somebody had utilized some chemical to cover it, then that might explain this particular smell. But this was different. Definitely a chemical smell. He took a step forward cautiously, and, in the back, he heard Quinn—at least he hoped it was Quinn. Not knowing for sure, he sent out an echoey owl call.
Quinn responded quickly with his own birdcall, confirming it was him.
Fallon moved through the front part of the building, looking for a light switch. The place was dark.
“What’s that smell?” Quinn said, when they met up.
“I don’t know,” Fallon said, his tone grim. “But we need to find out.”
Just then Quinn found a light switch and turned it on, and powerful lights filled the small room, a darkroom scenario going on here.
Fallon looked at the photographs hanging on a series of strings and whistled. “Wow. They’re all Linny.”
“That’s just beyond creepy,” she muttered beside him.
He reached out with his hand, and she reached back. “Just stay calm,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“The only thing I can figure out is he took a normal-looking photograph.” She pointed to one on the wall that was somewhat clear. “I’m outside one of the shops. I don’t even know when he took that.” She studied it for a moment and shrugged. “I think I was out shopping, with Uncle Dave.”
“Bu
t that’s not recent then, is it?”
“No,” she said in surprise. “We haven’t done that on this trip. Not since Bullard’s accident,” she said carefully.
Fallon nodded. “So this is somebody who knew of you from before.”
“Yes, but we already knew that.”
He nodded. “But it also indicates that this whole thing has most likely been going on for a while. Because he’s been taking variations of that photograph and doing things to them.”
She took a long slow breath. “As long as he’s not thinking that what he was doing was something that he’d like to do to me.”
“No, we aren’t going there,” he muttered.
“Good, because seeing myself in these photographs is kind of creepy.”
“More than kind of,” Quinn said. “It’s very creepy, for all of us. Weird too.”
“Right,” she muttered, as they wandered through the place.
“At least the smell appears to be the various solutions he used to develop his photos.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “How did he make these variations on the photograph?”
“Well, he had the negative,” Fallon said. “And apparently some very old-fashioned techniques.”
She nodded, as she studied them. “Each one gets a little blurrier, a little more abstract.”
“I think that was the look he was going for,” Quinn said. “It’s not so much an art form that you would recognize nowadays, but it was an art form that had had its day, at least for these guys.”
“Okay, well, that makes me feel a little better than him stalking me.” But then she turned and looked at the wall of the hallway they had walked in the dark and saw several more facing her. “Or not,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “Look.”
They turned to see the various poses, as she got out of a vehicle, as she stood beside a vehicle, outside a shop talking with Uncle Dave, talking with various other people.
Fallon stepped closer, took a look at the photos, and asked, “These are all over here though, right?” He turned to face her. “We need to confirm that our quarry is literally located here in Africa and that he hadn’t been traveling around the world after you.”
She studied each of the photos and then shook her head. “No, they’re all from here, but they have been taken over the last few years,” she said. “At least as far as I can tell.”
“That wouldn’t be a big surprise,” Fallon said. “It probably started fairly simply and then carried on. Without having specifics, it’s hard to know just how far back his fascination went with you.”
“He only contacted me a year ago, or maybe two actually,” she said.
“Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a short time frame,” he added. “It could be a case of a stalker finding something they like, and staying quiet for a long time with that, until something triggers them. Or they can go after it with a ferocity that will surprise anybody.”
“It’s hard to be surprised, after everything I’ve seen,” she said. “But this guy’s surprising me.”
Fallon chuckled. “I think what’s fascinating is the distortions he’s making to the photos. And those are the ones that he’s sending around. It’s almost like, ‘Hey, this is me, this is what I like, this is what I’m doing. If you appreciate it, here’s more.’”
“And that would be the nicest of the options,” she said. “Otherwise I’m dealing with somebody who’s also ridiculously crazy to have photos of me.”
“Which is why we have to contact these other members and see what they’re doing with the photos.”
“Agreed.” She turned and looked around and said, “Is there anything else we need to do here?”
Quinn came through from the other side of the room. “I’m not seeing anything of terrible interest, are you?”
“No, not particularly.” Fallon looked back at her. “You ready to go home?”
“Only if we’re done,” she said firmly.
He gave her a long look, seeing the fatigue in her gaze and the unrest in her eyes. “It’s pretty well time. We’ll do one last loop back through to make sure that we’re not missing out on anything,” he said. And, with her at his side, he did a quick sweep, checking drawers, checking the tabletop.
“You think the cops will come in here?”
“They should,” he said. “If not, we’ll direct them.”
“Good, it’d be nice if all this were destroyed,” she muttered.
“We’ll see what we can do about that too.”
“I was thinking,” Quinn said, “that we should set up a camera, see if anybody comes here after all these treasures.”
“That would imply that somebody knew where this Ben guy developed his photos,” she said, frowning.
“Keith did. Why wouldn’t somebody else come here to see his creations?” he said. “Think about it.”
“Right, somebody obviously knows what Ben’s been doing, so they could potentially have followed him to get more information.”
Quinn nodded. “But we don’t have the video equipment with us.”
“But we can get it easily enough,” Fallon said. “Let’s head back home. If we decide to do this, I’ll grab what I need, and I’ll come back here and set it up.”
“Or I’ll come. In the meantime, let’s make sure we set the door, so we can tell if anybody has come in,” Quinn muttered.
Chapter 7
Linny watched as they set up the door, so they knew if somebody had come through or not. She thought it was a string they’d used but then realized it was a hair, so small and so insignificant that most people wouldn’t have a clue that it was even there. “That’s a tricky way to do it, isn’t it?”
“It’s fairly commonplace, so some people might be looking for it, but only if they’re doing the kind of work we are.”
“Which most of them probably aren’t,” she said, with a nod of her head.
“Not likely, no.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s a given.”
“Right.”
She smiled as they walked back to the vehicle. “I don’t even know how to feel,” she said, “except relieved.”
“That he’s dead or that you found the source of the photos?”
“Both maybe. I know that doesn’t make me a very good person, but, if Ben’s dead, he won’t cause me any more trouble.”
“Exactly, which is why a lot of people think murder is the best solution to their problems.”
“Gruesome, but yeah,” she said.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
She turned and followed Fallon back to the SUV. The drive was quiet, Fallon in the driver’s seat, and Quinn typing away on his phone. “Well, Ben’s employer is out of business. Shut down over nine months ago. So one less place to check out.”
When they parked in the garage at the compound, she looked at the men and said, “I’ll go to bed.”
“Who’s going back with the camera?” Fallon asked Quinn.
Quinn nodded. “I’ll head back.”
Fallon motioned at Lindsey. “I’ll stand watch.”
“Why do you have to stand watch?” she said. “Why does anybody have to stand watch?”
“Because it’s what we do,” Fallon said. “I’ll help him collect the stuff he needs to get this job done.”
“Shouldn’t you go with him then?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Go on. Get to bed.”
She glared at him but realized there wouldn’t be any point in talking to him. Considering that the darkroom was basically empty, she wasn’t sure Quinn would be in any danger either. “You really should call somebody else back here, so you have an extra person,” she said.
“That would be nice, but it’s not necessarily an option right now.”
“I thought there were some guys in Australia.”
“They’re involved in locating Bullard,” he said. “That’s a priority. We don’t want anybody pulled off that.”
“I thought th
ey were also helping you.”
“They are,” Fallon said, with a smile.
“Says you.” She rolled her eyes at him.
“It is what it is,” he said. “So don’t worry about it.”
She headed up to bed, her mind still consumed with the photos that she’d seen. Such an odd thing. When she got up to her room, she checked her laptop for emails and messages, trying to find a way to unwind. But one stopped her in her tracks. She immediately got up, dressed, then with her laptop in her hand, she headed down to where Fallon worked in front of the command center console.
He turned to look at her in surprise. “What’s up?”
Wordlessly, she held out her laptop. “I was just checking on my emails to see if I needed to be dealing with anything,” she said, “when I saw this one.”
He looked at it in surprise, quickly scrolled down, and said, “Interesting.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” she asked in surprise.
“Well, there is no such thing as a big surprise over something like this,” he said. “The fact is, this creepy dude has got a copy of one of the photos.”
“I’ve never had any email from him before.”
“I don’t think it’s the same photo,” he said.
She frowned at that.
“It looks like one of the photos that we saw hanging in the darkroom,” Fallon noted.
“So, did this get sent before our dead guy ended up dead, or did this get sent afterward?” she asked. “In that case, it could be from the killer.”
He looked at her in surprise, immediately pulled out his phone, and contacted Quinn. When his buddy picked up the phone, Fallon said, “Go in easy. We’ve got an email here on Lindsey’s laptop with one of the photographs we saw hanging there earlier.”
