by PM Weldon
"Don't really know. Black Angel wouldn't give the guy's name out. Always says that is between him and the client."
A slow smile spread across her face. "Two for the price of one—just to save his ass?"
Augustus shrugged. "You know how Black Angel works. He won't move to the next job until this one's complete. It doesn't matter if this kid never saw the shooter or not. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. So my guess is Angel's biding time 'til the kid's old enough to be killed."
"All these years and Angel still won't kill kids?"
"Nope." He finished off his drink. "That's Black Angel's one rule. No kids. And no mothers. Although I do know he's broken that one twice."
"Then I think Black Angel is definitely a woman."
"A lot of people do. And a lot believe Black Angel is a man. Me…I think it's a title. Like Dread Pirate Roberts or something." He shrugged. "Could be anyone."
"How is it you know so much about Black Angel? And about this particular shooting?"
"Because I'm Auggie. I get things done. I find things out and if I say something's going to happen, it happens. Take my old man for instance. I said he'd be gone soon." He smiled at her. "And he was. Thanks to you."
"Don't ever say that out loud, Auggie. Walls have ears." Mary flashed back to the image on McNally's picture and suppressed a shiver. And ghosts, she thought.
"Don't sweat it. But seeing as how Black Angel had a direct impact on the case that involves your target, you might get Black Angel to add in another body. Technically the same case."
"Maybe. But how do I get in contact with her…or him?"
"You don't." He poured himself another glass of rum. "But for ten grand, I do."
Six
The moment the doorbell rang, I knew it was Jewels. I jumped out of the chair, which promptly fell over and made a god-awful noise, and ran to open the door. She stood outside with a horrified look on her face. "Dev—your eyes are red."
"That's because I've been staring at a computer all day. Come here." I pulled her in and slammed the door. She locked it as I rushed back to my living room slash work space. I pulled up a chair to my desk then I righted the one I knocked over. "I've got some things to show you."
"Yeah?" She sat down in the chair and scooted forward. "I've got a few things to show you, too."
"Mine first." I had been agonizing all day whether to show anyone what I found because I was afraid no one would believe me. But I knew Jewels would. "Okay, remember the picture that was open on my desktop with the ghost? The one the mystery hacker was trying to delete?"
"Yeah?"
"I opened every picture I took yesterday and spread them across the screen. Then I took each one and examined it and look what I found." I moved the mouse so the computer would come out of screen-saver mode.
Plastered over the screen were seven pictures of the bathroom upstairs, three of the back room where the staircase was, and two of the staircase itself. And on each of them were distinguishable, ghostly images of what looked like some kind of confrontation. "See here? This is where I think it starts." I mentally reviewed what to say with each picture. Hell, I'd been practicing all day for the moment I could show someone. "It started here, in the back room. This guy hits this woman here, and then another man comes in here and grabs the attacker guy."
Jewels leaned in and stared at the pictures. "It's…it's like looking at cels in a movie, only the actors are all gray and white and see-through."
"Exactly. Now here it goes to the staircase. You see him dragging this girl—a different girl—up the stairs, and if you look in the corner, you can see shoes. I think they're men's shoes."
She nodded.
I shifted the pictures around with my fingers on the touch screen, not bothering with the mouse. Once I had the last seven in order, I pointed to them. "It looks to me like he drags two women into this bathroom. He kills the younger one here, then he kills the older woman out of the frame." I turned my unbelievably geeky grin to her. "Can you believe this? All I did was take pictures yesterday, and this came out on them."
Jewels stared at the pictures. Her hand shook as she reached up and moved them around.
"Jewels?"
She licked her lips. "Dev…I decided to do a little digging into that bar." She pulled her satchel to her feet and pulled out a case file. I knew what it was on sight—I'd created and worked in plenty of them. This file would contain all the notes, pictures of evidence, crime scene photos, and the comments of every detective that worked on the case.
The name scrawled on the top of the file was Justin Birch. "What is this?"
"Just…open it and look inside."
I noticed the strange look on her face. "What's wrong?"
"Just look."
The folder had a smell to it. I recognized it as the dusty, stored smell case files got when they were shoved into cardboard boxes and put into storage. That meant Jewels had to go down to the basement. Hell, I was afraid of that place on a sunny day. She'd been down there in the thunder and rain.
Julie was my hero.
And I thought even more-so as I laid the file out over the keyboard. There were stacks of notes, all fastened with a two-prong wire at the top of both sides. A pocket held a plastic bag of pictures, so I pulled those out and spread them on the desk.
That's when I nearly fell out of the chair.
They were crime scene shots. Victims, their positions marked and unmarked. Some were pretty gruesome and the blood on the walls and floor was still red. But that wasn't what made me shake.
It was the position of those bodies. It was familiar. When I looked up at the ghostly images on the screen, I realized why they were familiar. "This…this can't be right."
"It is. I'm seeing it, too, Devan. If you look through these…." She leaned over my shoulder and pushed them around, pulling five-by-ten shots out and laying them all over my desk and then pointing to the images on the screen. The whole thing just took a dive off of the absurd side of life. "What you took are ghostly representations of what happened to these people."
I was ripped in half at that moment—torn between my detective's curiosity and my victim's sensitivity to violence. I must have said something or moved funny because I was turning the chair around and Jewels was yelling at me to wait.
What little I'd had to eat for lunch came rushing up. Jewels shoved a small trash can in front of me. When the convulsions stopped, she handed me a wet paper towel and I wiped my mouth and forehead. She took the towel and the trash can and set them aside. "Take a deep breath, Devan. It's normal to have that kind of reaction after what you've been through."
"I just…" I wanted to shove my head under a rock. I just puked in front of Julie Brenner, my high school crush and my best friend's wife.
Widow. It was hard to be married when your husband gets murdered.
And there you have it: the source of my continual guilt. The fact that I lived and Jimmy died. Jimmy, who'd had a new life ahead of him and a beautiful, caring woman. If there was a Jessie's Girl out there, Julie was it for me.
But being a good guy, I never said a word and kept my thoughts to myself. She was a damn good friend and I doubted I could live without her. Evidence of that was right there on my desk. She'd gone out of her way to help me on this.
I looked at her and she brushed a thumb over my cheek. "You need sleep."
"I need…I need to look at these more closely. And don't worry—I think that was all I had in there. Luckily it wasn't the spaghetti from last night."
She made a face. "I'll keep the trash can close by." She stood. "I'm going to make you some dinner, you're going to eat it, and then you're going to bed." When Jewels got like that, there was no arguing with her.
After brushing my teeth and ignoring the lanky ghost in the mirror, I got back to the computer and started on my own research. It was easy to fall back into investigative habits; after all, I'd been a cop a lot longer than a photographer.
I turned the print
er on and started matching up my ghostly photos with the crime scene shots. Once I had one or two that fit, I printed them out and clipped them to their corresponding photo. When I got to the image of the woman standing in front of the wall shelf—in essence, the first picture I noticed weirdness in—I couldn't find anything it matched, so I set it aside. I printed it and added it to a small pile with no matches.
Jewels made chicken soup and cheese sandwiches. I ate half a sandwich as I made my piles and then sat back with my glass of sweet tea to look at the shorter pile. Jewels set her plate aside and pulled her chair close to look at the pictures with me.
"What has your attention?"
I pointed to two of the shots and set the others aside. "This guy. Who is he?"
She took the pictures and looked closer at them. I reached to the desk and pulled out a magnifying glass to help. After looking at them through that, she sat back. "There was another man there. That is, if we say these are legit. Why is he all black and the others are all white and ghostly?"
"I don't know. I mean, I noticed it, but I have no idea why."
"Well, the theory was that Justin killed his wife and the daughter of the guy next door. And here and here you can see the women. There's the wife and there's the daughter and there's Justin Birch way over on this side of the room. But this black shadow is with the women."
I narrowed my eyes at the prints of my photos. "You know, he looks familiar."
"He does look familiar. And if we were to say—just hypothetically—that these pictures are somehow…I don't know…images of past events captured on film and the ghostly white ones are the dead people and the dark one is living…" She grinned and winked. "Then I think this guy killed them, not Justin Birch, because he looks like he's already dead." Jewels leaned in closer. "Hey, hand me that other stack of photos."
I did as she asked and watched her as she thumbed through them. I was as amazed as she was when she found a five-by-seven of a man who looked just like the guy in the photos. "Wow, this guy's a dead ringer for Mister Shadow. Who is he?"
She pursed her lips. "That's Randall Cahan. The father of the girl that was killed. Neighbors next door." She looked at me. "The man who said he wasn't home that day."
Seven
If there is one thing about going freelance that I enjoyed more, it was not having to get up until I wanted to. Which of course means I'm up with the sun.
But this morning I could have stayed in bed. Why? Because we were in the office of Captain Drew Vale, my old boss. After reviewing the file, Jewels had been sure she found something that could actually break the old Birch case open and set the truth free. Her words, not mine.
I sat in the chair watching Vale, trying to read his responses. But the thing about Vale was no one could read him. The man was a robot. No emotion. Not even an eye-brow twitch. Nope. He didn't move. And he was cool. Long hair in a ponytail, always a sharp dresser on a police captain's salary (the rumor was his wife was loaded.) The only movement was flipping papers.
After what felt like seven hours but was in reality only a half hour, he set the folder on his desk and looked at me. "That's one hell of a talent."
"Sir?"
"Photoshopping those pictures to match the crime scene shots."
I felt as if I'd just been punched in the face. "Sir…I didn't Photoshop anything. And I'd never seen those photos until Julie brought them over."
"Yes. Lt. Brenner and I will be having a refresher course in precinct protocol. You never take case files out of the building."
"But it was just Devan—"
"Who is no longer a part of this squad." Vale leaned forward. "I don't know what kind of bullshit the two of you are trying to pull, but falsifying these shots like this…" He looked disgusted. "These are things better printed in a local gossip rag or psychic magazine than used as evidence against a suspect."
"But sir," Julie said as she sat forward and braced her hands on the armrests of the chair. "When this case happened, Devan was still in a coma. The whole thing occurred and was closed in less than three months. He didn't even know the case existed until he was hired to take those pictures. The ones we pinned to the crime scene photos aren't even the one that caught his attention."
Vale looked at her under his brow for a few seconds before he opened the file again and pulled out the picture of the woman and the shelves. "You mean this one."
"That one," she said, and pointed. "And just the other night, someone hacked into Devan's computer and server to try and delete all of these pictures."
That got the captain's attention. "Someone hacked your computer?"
I cleared my throat and went back over everything that happened that night while Julie was there, and then I went over what my server person did to successfully shut this guy out.
"You have logs of this?"
"Yes, we do. He wasn't able to backtrack the hacker. But they were specifically targeting those photos." If Julie noticed I was referring to Pink as a "he," she didn't flinch or blink.
"These photos were marked as specifically taken of this old bar?"
"Yes sir." I licked my lips. "The only people who knew I was there taking shots were the guy at the bank, and this woman who showed up asking about the bar."
"What woman?"
I told him about Mary Smith and how I'd given her my card.
"And you didn't find her suspicious?"
"Why would I? From what I've discovered, the bar was once a fixture in the neighborhood."
"You didn't get anything else from her but her name?"
"No sir. Other than she drove a nice Mercedes." And then I noticed something. "Sir, earlier you referred to Randall Cahan as a suspect, not an innocent man."
Vale sat back with the folder in his hand. He eyed the two of us and the tension behind his eyes lessened enough that his shoulders relaxed. "Cahan's been a suspect ever since the murders happened. Too many discrepancies about his story and the way the bodies were positioned. I could go over those with you, but given the pictures in your…art…you probably already see them."
I had. "I think the difference in their builds is a huge discrepancy. In the notes, the detective said the younger girl had been killed in the bathroom upstairs with a pair of scissors, the killer behind her. Justin Birch was a big man—standing close to six–foot-three. He would have a hell of a time just standing in that bathroom by himself. Him holding someone in front of him would make it impossible for either of them to move." I slid forward and stood so I could take the folder from Vale and sift through the shots. "Here…" I pulled out three pictures. Two were of the crime scene, the third one I'd taken. "Her body was slumped over the sink where she died after he slit her throat with a razor not scissors. And here is where the blood spattered over the mirror and wall of the bathroom. If Justin Birch was holding her from behind—if anyone had and then cut her throat from left to right as stated by the coroner, then his entire forearm would have been sprayed with arterial blood."
Vale frowned at the photos and then pulled a picture of Justin Birch's body before it was covered. "There's no blood."
"Exactly. And the only reason I thought of that was because in my photo…" I turned it around for him to see it "…there is a guy in the bathroom with her, but it's her father. His image is shadowed instead of white, which Julie and I believe is a signal that he's still living. He's shorter and smaller and able to hold her so he can watch. He used that mirror in the bathroom to watch himself kill his own child."
Julie cleared her throat. "We still have to prove it was Cahan and not Birch. We know Dev's photos aren't admissible, but are they enough to reopen and take a closer look? Maybe this Mary Smith is linked to Cahan? Maybe she knew the truth and when she saw Devan in the building and the ghosts she panicked and hacked his computer?"
Vale thumbed through a few of the pages. "That's a lot of maybes. But I do like them—as unconventionally attained as they were. Can you two go back out to the building and take a closer look, using both
of these sets of photos as references?"
I smiled. It was the first genuine one I'd had a in a while. "I'd love to."
"Just let her collect anything you find. Chain of evidence." He pulled up the shot of the woman, the one that didn't match up to the crime scene shots, and pointed to it. "So what is this one?"
"I don't know. It was taken of the shelving in the main part of that shop."
"Witness?"
I really didn't have an answer. Vale shrugged and slipped the photo into his desk. "Maybe I'll take a look at it later and see if there's anything in it that inspires me. You two get over there and look. This is the only time you're going to get on it, got it?"
Julie grabbed the file and we started out the door.
"McNally."
I turned to look at him.
"Don't get your hopes up, okay? You know the reason I can't let you back on the squad."
Yeah…I knew, and nodded.
"You still having them?"
He meant the blackouts. "Yes. Not as frequent or as long, but I still have them, so no worries. I'll just be there for Julie."
Captain Vale nodded and looked down. I had been dismissed. And it was the closest thing to a compliment I'd ever received from the man.
So sad.
Eight
She hated being a stalker. Or even imagining or categorizing herself like that. But with no news from Auggie as to whether Black Angel would see her, much less take the job, she was obliged to keep an eye on McNally. She hoped there would be another opportunity to hack into the server, but Auggie had recommended against it. They were probably forewarned against her now and if she attempted it, there was the possibility they would find her.
So she resorted to renting a car and tailing him. Seeing him enter the precinct on 3rd Street downtown unnerved her to no end. She had to physically grip the steering wheel to prevent herself from ditching the car and running the hell away. He used to be a cop, she reasoned to herself. So it was natural he might visit them sometimes. Or the more plausible story was he was there to report someone hacking his computer last night.
