Snowblind

by Christopher Golden

  Baxter and his friend had a quick, muttered conversation and then Baxter slid out of the booth, glancing up at the menu board. Apparently he’d finally realized how stupid they looked just sitting there. The cute counter girl bagged Keenan’s greasy lunch and rang it up while Baxter tried hard not to look at him. Keenan thanked her as he paid, but then he hesitated, waiting as Baxter started to order.

  “Gimme one buffalo-chicken sub and a six-inch tuna—”

  Keenan’s radio crackled with static, a little squawk that included his name.

  “Detective Keenan, please respond,” the dispatcher said.

  He turned away from the counter, slipping the radio from its sheath on his belt. The greasy aroma steaming up from the brown paper bag in his hand made his stomach rumble with pleasure as he fumbled with it. All eyes were on him as he pushed out the door and into the falling snow, including Baxter’s. He hated the vibe he got off the guy, but he couldn’t arrest him for crimes he hadn’t committed yet.

  “This is Keenan,” he answered as he moved toward his car. “Go ahead.”

  “Detective, we’ve got an assault on a woman, 107 Capen Street, apartment 3B. Officers are on the scene but request a detective.”

  “On my way,” he said, then clipped the radio to his belt and dug out his keys.

  He’d have to eat and drive, but he’d been on the job so long that he’d become pretty good at it. Keenan’s real concern as he drove away was Doug Manning and what he was doing hanging out with a turd like Baxter. They had never exactly been friends back in the Stone Age, but the detective had always thought of Doug as a decent guy. Cocky but well meaning. It might not be today, but eventually that savage thing inside Baxter was going to rip its way out and anybody in the bastard’s vicinity was going to get hurt.

  Keenan hoped Doug wasn’t going to be one of them.

  At least once a week, Jake Schapiro’s mother reminded him that her friends and colleagues thought his occupation ghoulish. Most of the time, he succeeded in ignoring her, primarily because he felt sure that when the subject of his career arose, she would be the first among her particular group of hens to look down her nose at his chosen profession. When she did succeed in rattling him, they always ended up talking about Isaac and he hated having that conversation with her. It had been twelve years, he would tell her, just let it go. But neither of them believed that Jake had put the pain of his brother’s death behind him. He mourned in his way and his mother in hers, and neither approved of the other’s chosen method of grief therapy.

  At least his didn’t involve a bottle.

  Jake focused his camera on the nightstand. The drawer had not been pushed in properly, so it sat at an angle, one corner of its shallow depth peeking out. Something about it seemed off to him. Except for the shattered lamp and overturned chair, the bed in disarray, and the other obvious signs of struggle, the place seemed the domain of a woman who liked things clean and orderly.

  He snapped a photo of the nightstand, the flash illuminating the scene starkly white. When he blinked, the image of his little brother broken and dead in the deep snow—flakes still accumulating on his face—flickered through his mind. The night of Isaac’s death he had watched the crime-scene photographer at his work for several minutes until his mother had realized it and pulled him away, covering his eyes.

  She’d been too late. Every time he used this equipment he saw Isaac’s face with each brilliant flash of the camera and wondered if things would have been different that night if only he’d paid more attention to his little brother’s fear.

  “Are you gonna be much longer?”

  Startled, Jake turned to find Harley Talbot looming behind him. At six foot five and built like a truck, Harley looked like a star linebacker because that’s what he’d been in college, but he’d never had any interest in being anything but a cop. In the uniform he looked especially imposing, but Jake knew him too well to be intimidated by him, police officer or not.

  “Almost done,” Jake said.

  “So damn slow.”

  “Bite me.”

  Harley smiled. Jake knew he did his damnedest not to smile on the job because it gave him a sweetness that undermined any sort of menace or intimidation. Harley tried to save his smile for the multitude of women who paid him attention whenever they hit up the local bars and restaurants. Coventry didn’t have much by way of night life, but what little there was had welcomed the new cop in town with open arms.

  “Keenan’s gonna be here in a few minutes,” Harley said, smile vanishing, voice low. “Sooner you’re both done, the sooner we’re out of here. Simple assault, Jacob. Snap a couple more shots and let’s take off.”

  Jake glanced at the bedroom door but the corridor outside was empty. Harley’s partner, an aging cop named Ted Finch, had been taking the statement from the victim out in the tiny living room when Jake had arrived. No one would overhear them.

  “You sure it’s that simple?” Jake asked.

  Harley raised a brow. “You aren’t?”

  “Not sure,” Jake said, glancing at the nightstand again. “Anyway, you’re the cop. Just a couple more pictures.”

  Jake moved into the corner of the room to take an establishing shot of the room from that angle. Harley stepped out of the frame, leaving only the twisted bedspread and sheets, which hung like drapes on one side of the bed. The pillows were askew. The lamp had been thrown and shattered, maybe after striking the bureau.

  He frowned. The drawers of the bureau were all shut tightly.

  So what? he thought. Nobody does anything the same way every time.

  In his mind’s eye, though, he saw the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen. The struggle hadn’t gotten that far. The overturned chair was in the living room, where a shelf of knickknacks had been shattered—things that had clearly had sentimental value to the victim.

  Something didn’t fit, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Instead he took a step nearer and focused more clearly on the bed from this angle. A small spray of blood had scattered droplets on the dangling sheets and he wanted to get a clear picture of it. Would the police have a lab analyze the blood to see if it had come from the victim or the assailant? In a murder or rape, sure, but what about assault and attempted rape? He figured they had to, but even after a couple of years at this job, he didn’t know as much about police work as he pretended to while talking to girls in bars.

  He had to compete with Harley somehow.

  Looking through the camera’s viewfinder, he noticed something else. Snapping the picture, he zoomed in and took another, then walked to the bed and got down on one knee.

  “What are you doing, Jacob?” Harley warned.

  “Yes, Jacob, what are you doing?”

  Jake glanced up sharply. Detective Keenan had come into the room just behind Harley and they made a comical picture. With his Irish face and blue eyes, the detective reminded Jake a little of the actor Daniel Craig. His big hands and the slight crook in his nose that showed it had once been broken suggested he might once have been a boxer, and he was not a small man, but next to Harley the detective seemed diminished.

  “Doing your job for you, I think,” Jake replied.

  The look that rippled across Keenan’s face made Jake blink. His balls didn’t exactly shrink up inside his body, but they certainly did not approve. The detective’s light tone and the way he’d entered the room had allowed Jake to forget for a second just how serious Keenan was about his job.

  Keenan stepped around Harley and moved deeper into the room, taking in the crime scene with a sweeping glance.

  “You want to explain that?” he asked without looking at Jake.

  “Just instinct and observation. I get a different perspective sometimes through the camera. The nightstand drawer is in kind of cockeyed, which I know sounds stupid…”

  He trailed off. It did sound stupid. But had he just seen Keenan take visual note of the same thing?

  “Go on,” the detective said.

 
Jake pointed to the spot where the mussed sheets draped to the floor. “Under there.”

  Keenan went down on one knee and picked up the edge of the hanging sheets to reveal the small white pill-bottle cap that Jake had spotted in the shadows there. The detective left the cap where it was—he wouldn’t pick it up without donning latex gloves for fear of contaminating evidence.

  “Talbot, gimme your flashlight,” Keenan said.

  Harley handed it over and the detective used the light to search under the bed before clicking it off and handing it back. Keenan brushed off the knees of his trousers as he stood and turned a contemplative eye on Jake.

  “No bottle,” Jake said.

  “Nope,” Keenan agreed.

  Pulling a latex glove onto his left hand, the detective went to the nightstand and tried to open it. The drawer stuck but with a bit of jostling he got it to slide open. It was empty.

  “Talbot, have you been into the bathroom?” Keenan asked.

  “Took a look, yeah.”

  “Anything out of place?”

  “No,” Jake said, cutting in. “And I took pictures. But I didn’t—”

  Keenan nodded. “But you didn’t open the medicine cabinet.”

  “No,” Jake said. “I didn’t.”

  Harley crossed his arms, his body practically blocking their view of the open door. “So it’s a drug thing. We go into the bathroom again, we’re going to find the medicine cabinet empty. Some pill-head came in and beat the lady up for her meds?”

  “Not just her own prescriptions—” Detective Keenan started.

  “I get it, Detective,” Harley interrupted. “She’s a pill-head, too. She had a bunch of illegal scrips, maybe was selling them, and some guy knew it and cleaned her out. Probably someone she knows.”

  Jake and Detective Keenan both looked at him.

  Harley laughed and shook his head. “You two think you’re Holmes and friggin’ Watson. Can we just finish this shit up and go? I go off duty in twenty minutes and I need a cocoa.”

  “Cocoa,” Jake repeated.

  Harley glowered at him. “When it snows, I like cocoa. A little whipped cream, too. You got something to say about it?”

  Detective Keenan outranked him but didn’t say a word. Neither did Jake.

  “I thought not,” Harley said. Scowling, he turned and left the room. Jake laughed and started packing away his camera.

  “You’re pretty smart, kid,” Keenan said, sounding for a moment like he’d stepped out of some 1940s gangster movie.

  “Harley doesn’t think so,” Jake replied with a laugh.

  “Ever think about becoming a cop yourself?”

  Images of that night flickered through Jake’s mind again. Isaac’s broken body, the falling snow, the flash of a camera … those had been real, tangible things. Awful things, yes, but they had been solid and true and grimly understandable. The bright flashes had taken away the shadows—all except for the sad hollows around his dead brother’s eyes. That had been a reality that twelve-year-old Jake could understand. The more he had talked about the things that Isaac claimed to have seen out in the snow, only to have cops and shrinks think he’d imagined it or was making it up, the less he felt willing to admit what he had seen. A face at the window. Icy hands coming through the screen …

  Until eventually he had begun to realize that the cops and the shrinks had to be right. They had to be. His little brother’s imagination and his own grief had gotten the better of him.

  But even now, a dozen years later, the camera gave him comfort. Pictures made it real. The flash chased the shadows away and left only the tangible world. If the camera couldn’t see something, it wasn’t real.

  “I’d make a terrible cop,” Jake said at last, as he slung his camera bag over his shoulder. “Besides, I only do this so I can afford to take the pictures I care about.”

  Keenan fished out his phone. No crime-scene tech had shown up and he needed some fingerprinting done. Whoever had been sent out had probably been delayed by the storm, but Keenan didn’t need Jake to tell him that.

  “Be sure to invite me to your first gallery opening,” the detective said.

  Jake couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. He didn’t like to talk about what his mother called his “nice pictures.” She thought his paying job was ghoulish and wished that he could make a living as a different sort of photographer. So did Jake.

  “I’ll do that,” he said, and headed out the door.

  On his way out he took another look at the victim. In the bedroom they’d been making light of the situation, but when she glanced at him and he saw her face again—the swelling, the dried blood on her lips—he felt bad about that. Addict or not, she deserved sympathy. At twenty-four, he knew far too many people who used drugs or alcohol to try to forget the things that haunted them. Coventry had more than its fair share of bad memories.

  He went down the stairs and out into the storm, nodding to the cop guarding the door. Normally there would have been neighbors and other spectators gathered outside but the snow fell thickly now, a white silence that spread across the city. The forecast called for about eight inches, turning to rain at the end. It would be a hell of a mess tomorrow, but this afternoon and tonight it was beautiful.

  Jake hurried to his car, anxious to get out his personal camera. He’d first truly fallen in love with the camera in high school, taking pictures of ominous thunderheads from his back porch, finding beauty in the churning clouds and the way the blue sky had been so quickly blotted out. Now his real art—photography that he had indeed shown in a few galleries, not that he’d ever tell Keenan that—was photographing storms of all kinds. Trees bending in a gale, rain on glass, shafts of light spearing through black clouds. Snowstorms provided the most beautiful and haunting images of all.

  But his favorite photographs were not of the storms themselves. The ones about which he felt the most passionate, and perhaps not coincidentally the ones he had sold for quite a bit of money, were pictures of the mornings after. When the sky had cleared and the sun had returned and, despite whatever damage the storm had left behind, everything looked clean and pure and somehow renewed …

  He never saw Isaac in the snap of the lens when he took those pictures.

  Those were the moments he lived for.

  SIX

  A knock at the door got Allie Schapiro up out of her chair. She’d been sitting beside a window in her living room, reading by the wan gray daylight that filtered through the storm and drinking a glass of red wine. One finger holding her place in the book, she went out into the little foyer and put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  TJ Farrelly identified himself and she pulled open the door. Scruffy and blond, midthirties, he stood on the stoop in the swirl of snow and greeted her with a kind smile and tired eyes. His hair was too long and he needed a shave, but that unkempt quality made him more handsome instead of less.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “And thank you so much for coming out today.”

  Allie stood back to let TJ enter. He stamped snow off his boots on the little rug in the foyer and his eyes found the book in her hand.

  “Sorry to interrupt your reading.”

  “Oh, not at all,” she said with a nervous laugh, closing the door. “Honestly, I kept rereading the same section over and over. I haven’t been able to focus on it at all.”

  TJ adjusted the heavy tool belt on his waist in that unconscious, get-the-job-done way she had always loved to see in men. It gave an aura of confidence that was contagious.

  “No worries, Ms. Schapiro,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Though he seemed a bit wary of her, Allie gave a little inward chuckle at the sexy-handyman clichés that popped into her mind. As a younger woman she would have blushed, but once she had passed fifty something had changed in her. Yes, she kept her hair dyed an attractive auburn and had it styled regularly, and she chose her clothes carefully, but those were things
she did for herself and not for others. She no longer cared quite as much about what other people thought. Once it had bothered her that she had a reputation as being a bit of an uptight bitch. People ought to have understood, given the losses in her life, or that was the way she’d rationalized it. Now she understood that life was all about loss, that everyone suffered in his own way. She just wasn’t ever going to be able to be the kind of person who pretended to be happy when she wasn’t.

  “Please, TJ,” she said, “I’m not your daughter’s teacher anymore. You can call me Allie.”

  The man looked surprised. “All right, Allie. Lead the way.”

  She picked up the heavy-duty flashlight from the little table in the foyer and clicked it on. TJ unclipped a small but powerful light of his own from his belt and followed her down the short hall to the kitchen, through the cellar door; and down the steps into the basement. Even less of that gray light filtered through small box windows close to the ceiling, the glass rectangles half covered by the newfallen snow outside, making the flashlights helpful but not entirely necessary. Not until nightfall, at least.

  “The fuse box is over there,” she said, shining her flashlight on it.

  “Gotcha.” He went over and opened the panel, moving the light over the circuit breakers.

  “It really does mean the world, you coming out in the storm.”

  “I couldn’t leave you in the dark,” he said, almost casually clicking the breakers and snapping them back into place. “Not with the snow…”

  He trailed off, pausing as if rooted to the spot, one hand on the metal door of the fuse box. The flashlight wavered in his hand.

  Allie’s chest hurt. She had forgotten to breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning toward her, the beams of their flashlights throwing ovals of illumination on opposite walls.

  She wet her lips. “It’s okay. After all this time I’d better be able to talk about a little snow without letting it get the better of me. Besides, you lost someone in the storm, too. I’m sure you’re happy to talk about your mother, to remember her.”