“Africa,” Robert said a little tiredly. “I say, Kathleen, can’t we just dispose of the little maggot? He quite wearies me.”
“Me too,” I agreed. “Yeah, let’s dispose of him.”
“Wait! Wait!” the maggot squeaked. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Not a great deal, actually.” Suddenly, Robert looked at me. “Do you suppose he has a camera?” he asked, piecing together modern surveillance techniques.
But the thought had already occurred to me. I dove into the Toyota and began sorting through MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam coffee cups, empty Coke cans, and piles of newspapers. I lifted up Monday’s sports section. “Here’s the camera!” I sang out, turning the camera over in my hands. A second later I found the memory card and handed it to Robert
“What’s this?” Robert glanced at me.
Alfred looked at him in amazement. “They don’t have those in Africa?”
“Evidently not,” I replied, and immediately checked the glove box. There on top of a stack of maps and service receipts was another wallet — slim, black, and designed to flip open easily. Inside was a photo of Alfred with his name and a string of serial numbers underneath, along with various official-looking stamps and embossments.
I held the wallet out the window to show Robert. “His ID,” I announced.
Robert raised his eyebrows in amusement. “So you really are an investigator, are you, Alfred?”
“Unless these documents are forged,” I offered.
“Well, they’re not,” Alfred protested a little stuffily.
I ignored him and returned my attention to the car. I ran my hands under the seats and sifted through more clutter, discovering in the process his cell phone, several different hats, a variety of sunglasses and a stenographer’s notebook. The notebook was interesting not for its scribbles and numerous doodles (which were, actually, surprisingly good), but for the phone numbers — Cameron’s numbers, home, office and cell.
I tossed the cell phone and notebook up on the dash, then grabbed the keys from the ignition and went around to the rear where I unlocked the trunk. Inside, were jumper cables, an assortment of greasy tools, a jack and two small battered canvas suitcases.
“Is this all your luggage?” I asked.
Alfred wouldn’t answer.
“How about a lap-top or an iPad?”
“A what?” Robert asked.
I ignored him. Alfred ignored me. After several seconds of silence, I cleared my throat.
“I think we should search him again, Robert.”
“Right,” Robert agreed briskly, spinning Alfred back against the wall. His hands moved lightly down the guy’s torso. “What are we looking for?”
“Motel keys, man!” Alfred said impatiently. “She wants to make sure I don’t have any incriminating evidence stashed anywhere.”
Robert glanced at me.
“I guess he really is an investigator,” I said blandly.
Robert resumed his patting. “I doubt I would have missed anything as large as keys,” he said.
“It would look like a credit card,” I said helpfully. “Flat and plastic.”
“A credit card?” Robert asked blankly. “Keys in the shape of a card?”
“Sheesh,” Alfred squawked. “What century are you from?”
“Let us leave that subject lie, shall we?” Robert murmured, his hands continuing their practiced search. Then, “No, um, key,” he announced, “but there is this.” He leaned his weight against his prisoner and shook open a folded sheet of paper. “Ah! You may be interested, Kathleen.”
I took the paper from him and looked at it carefully. “A motel receipt,” I said. “With this morning’s date on it.” I looked at Alfred, who was still flattened against the wall.
“Were you planning to leave the island?” I asked.
“Boy, are you guys quick,” he said.
“More likely he’s just changing venue,” Robert offered. “Searching out a better billet.”
I turned back to the car and began unzipping the suitcases, wrinkling my nose at the scent of stale laundry. I picked up a screwdriver from the detritus of the trunk, and used it to poke carefully through shirts, socks and underwear. In a moment I had what I was looking for.
“Pictures,” I said, holding up three envelopes with the words “One Hour Printing” across the top in large bold type. In smaller type underneath was printed Drop ’em off, Pick ’em up.
“Make sure you’ve got everything,” Robert said, so I up-ended the suitcases, dumped out their contents and stirred through the mess thoroughly with my trusty screwdriver. Nothing of interest there. By now Robert had dragged his prisoner over to the car, and the two men watched as I shook another memory card from the Drop ’em off, Pick ’em up envelope.
“Is that all of it?”
I looked at Alfred, who looked back at me morosely.
“Check again,” Robert advised, and I did, giving a fair imitation of a suspicious border guard as I went over every accessible inch of the car. I worked rapidly, worried that someone would discover us. It was noon, and I figured most of the construction guys (and gals) were at lunch. Even so, we couldn’t be sure that the site was completely deserted or that someone wasn’t munching on a sandwich just around the corner somewhere.
Finally, after several fruitless minutes, I tossed the cell phone, pictures, camera, notebook and memory cards into the Accord.
“I think we’ve got it,” I said, turning back to Robert.
“Now,” Robert said, “what do you suggest we do with our friend?”
Our friend, who had been looking a trifle crestfallen, suddenly perked up. “Look,” he said, “maybe we should discuss this, take a vote. It would be a shame to do anything hasty.”
“From your point of view,” Robert agreed, “it would be. But we’re not planning to throw you off a bridge or anything, are we Kathleen? Although—” there was a significant pause while Robert appeared to consider. “You do swim, don’t you?”
He looked expectantly at Alfred, who paled and began to stutter.
“I have a better idea,” I said casually.
Alfred looked at me in hopeful desperation.
“But first, tell me how much Cameron knows.”
“What?”
“What have you told him, Alfred? Have you talked to him? Phoned him?”
“Oh, yeah. On Sunday. I wanted to know how long he thought you’d be here, you know, so I wouldn’t sit around like I did on Saturday, wondering if you were still here or not. So he said he’d call you, try to stir things up and see what he could find out.”
So that had been the point of Cameron’s Sunday night call. Dinner with the chief-of-staff was just a ruse. “Did you tell him anything?” I asked again. “When you talked to him, Alfred, did you make any sort of a, um, report?”
“No way. It was too soon. And anyway, if I told him there was a guy, he’s the kind to go off on me, breathing down my back, trying to direct the investigation. So I held off.”
“And have you talked to him since? Sent him anything? E-mail? Voicemail? Fax?”
“No. Nothing.” Alfred shook his head.
“Why did you check out of the motel this morning?” I asked.
“Look at the receipt. That’ll clue you.”
I held his gaze and waited.
“The motel was in Nags Head,” he said finally, lowering his eyes. “If I was going to be here a while I wanted to find a closer place.” He paused for a moment, then shrugged. “But not in Avon. I was thinking Rodanthe or Waves.”
“Well, you can spare yourself the trouble,” I told him, “because you’re going back to Fredericksburg, and you’re leaving now. When you get there you’re going to call Cameron and tell him you have nothing to report. That you followed me to and from the grocery store and so on, that I was by myself, that you had the house under constant surveillance and that I had no visitors. You’re going to tell him that’s he’s wasting his money and you
r time. And you’re going to make him believe you.”
“I can’t tell him that,” Alfred whined. “It would be, ah…unethical or something.”
“Quite possibly,” Robert agreed patiently. “But to tell him anything else would make you look like an ass.”
“You’d have to tell him why you have no pictures,” I added. “No evidence. You’d have to tell him—”
“That she caught you,” Robert finished for me. “And indeed, you would look quite … stupid.”
“Unprofessional,” I supplied.
“Incompetent,” Robert elaborated.
“Which would be bad for business,” I went on, “if word got out. And I promise you it will.”
Alfred glanced at me and then away. His shoulders sagged and he exhaled slowly and a little unevenly. Robert eased his hold and stepped away.
I retrieved Alfred’s cell phone from the Accord and fiddled with it a few minutes, checking the memory to see who he had called. There was only one call to Cameron, on Sunday, just as Alfred claimed, but none to the cottage. Just for good measure I erased everything I could, then gathered it up with his camera and wallet. I kept his notebook, photos and memory cards.
“Here’s your things, Alfred,” I said, holding out my offering. “And your cigarettes. They aren’t very good for you. The cigarettes.”
Wordlessly, Alfred pocketed his belongings.
“If you want to quit smoking, there’s this doctor in Fredericksburg, a friend of Cameron’s, actually, who’s pretty good …” I broke off. I was babbling, as Robert would say, and besides Alfred wasn’t listening. He was staring defeatedly at the contents of his trunk.
“What did you do before you became a detective?” I asked.
“Huh?” Alfred tore his eyes away from his car to look at me.
“What did you do before—”
“Oh, I worked in a grocery store.” Mechanically, he went over to the car and began stuffing clothes back into his suitcases. “I was in produce,” he added.
“Perhaps you’d best go back,” Robert told him not unkindly.
Alfred turned away, rubbing his twisted arm.
Chapter 37
We spent the rest of the afternoon sprawled out on the sofa at home, looking at the stuff we confiscated from Alfred. The notes — in which I was referred to rather monotonously as “the subject” — were sketchy, incomplete and only mildly incriminating. Certainly not the work of a CIA agent, in case I had any lingering doubts. The photos, too, were commonplace to the point of boring. Most of them were of me, but a few of them were of Robert and me together — generally getting in and out of cars. Even with a zoom lens we looked like insect tourists against the backdrop of parking lots, shops and restaurants. There were several pictures of us on the deck, largely obscured by railings, and belatedly I remembered the man on the sand dunes, the dog that leapt on him, the camera that dropped and the lady who apologized. There were no night pictures, nothing that suggested Alfred had any sophisticated equipment. Even his zoom lens seemed inadequate at best.
Robert examined the photos over and over again, as if he was looking for something we might have missed, something that posed a risk to us — or to me, at any rate. I fell silent, watching him flip repeatedly through the pictures, and fought down a rising swell of dread.
“Did you see,” he remarked finally, “that on the front of the envelopes one could specify the number of sets of, ah, prints one wished to order—”
I looked at him sharply. Flipping through the photos I had been aware that there were doubles, but I had stupidly failed to grasp that this was somehow important. “I noticed there were some … duplicates,” I said carefully.
“He ordered two sets of prints,” Robert said, holding up the envelopes to show me. “On each envelope he marked two sets.”
I had only checked the negatives. I saw the prints, of course, but I hadn’t thought to make sure we had all of them. Dismayed, I glanced at Robert.
“They’re all there,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “Both sets in each envelope.” He dropped the envelopes on the coffee table. “I don’t think we missed anything,” he went on. “I really don’t think we did. More to the point, I don’t think he found anything … nothing that was useful, at any rate.”
“Nothing that was incriminating,” I said, spelling it out. “No, I don’t think so either.”
“Fortunately for us, Kathleen,” he grinned, “Alfred simply didn’t look hard enough.”
“We’ve been very lucky,” I told him a little tartly. I picked up one of the envelopes from the coffee table and stared abstractly at the pictures all over again.
“Your first photographs,” I said suddenly.
Robert lifted one of the glossy prints from my hand and smiled a little self-consciously. “So odd to see yourself as others do. As I would see myself were I someone else.”
I glanced at him. “Haven’t you ever been sketched or painted?”
“Oh yes. I’ve sat for two or three portraits. One with my brother when we were children. I recall that now. And another as a young man in uniform, for my father. And Anne—”
He broke off, his expression pensive.
“I recall something,” he said finally. “Something about the inn.”
“Something other than the dark passage?”
“Yes. I recall Peter nodding at a boy sketching in a corner. Our host had mentioned that he was an itinerant artist, had come in several times of late. Peter wanted a sketch of himself to send home. All the others took up the idea … to have the boy sketch them, but I was not interested. Though … had I a wife…”
He picked up my hand, turned it over and drew it to his lips. His kiss shot through me to the center of my core, tingling against my skin like an electrical current. I closed my eyes in a spasm of pleasure.
“You were telling me something about Anne,” I reminded Robert a few minutes later.
“You are right. I was.” He paused for a minute, recollecting. “Anne could draw beautifully. In fact, she sketched me any number of times.”
“Snapshots, in a way.”
“You have used that word before. What does it mean?”
“Photographs. Usually quick, informal ones.”
“I see. Something quick, dashed off. But one usually sits, even for sketches.”
“Poses.”
“Yes. And even a natural pose is often unnaturally formal. Contrived, you see. Though Anne sometimes drew me as I sat at my desk or played with the children. Still these—” he gestured to the photographs, “are so curious. To see oneself without the least artifice, as even one’s mirror is incapable of showing.”
“What should we do with them?” I asked.
“Burn them, of course,” he said, and I knew that he was right. “We’ll do it tonight,” he added, handing me back the print. “In the fireplace — or out on the beach, if you like.”
Bonfires on the beach were not (as we had discovered a few nights earlier) exactly legal, but I didn’t think anyone would see a small fire near our deck, particularly if we didn’t invite thirty or forty drunken revelers to join us.
“Do you suppose,” I asked, tossing the photos back on the table, “that we could keep the guest list to a minimum?”
“Hmm?”
The joke wasn’t worth explaining. I lifted my fingers dismissively, a gesture I learned from him, and leaned my head wearily against his shoulder.
And then I thought of something. “The break-in,” I said.
“I’ve thought of that, too. It was Monday night. Last Monday, before Alfred came.”
“Before he said he came.”
“True enough.”
“He said Cameron didn’t call him until Friday night, which was the night Cameron first called me. So it does fit — Alfred’s story, I mean.”
“Unfortunately, it does. I’d like it to be him. I’d like to know who broke in and it would be convenient if it was Alfred.”
“Maybe
it really was the dog.”
“We’ve been back and forth over this ground. Had it been a human, an actual thief, there would have been signs of a search, some slight disturbance, even if nothing was missing. And we found no signs of search.”
I nodded. “The dog, then.”
“Yes. It’s plausible. More than plausible.”
“Of course, there’s still the issue of the hang ups,” I went on. “The nonsense with the phone. Alfred said he didn’t do it, and there was no record in the memory of his cell phone that he did.”
“Could he have used another phone?”
“Oh, good point! He’d have used a pay phone in case I had Caller ID.” I paused. “But on the other hand—” (why was there always the other hand?) “ — what’s the point in denying it? He was pretty forthcoming with everything else.”
“After a fashion and a couple of twisted arms.” Robert paused. “I don’t know, Kitty. Maybe he was annoyed because you so easily connected him with the calls, or perhaps hang ups, as you call them, are considered bad investigator form, amateurish strategy. There could be any number of reasons why he wouldn’t own up. Bye the bye, sweetheart, how many of these hang ups did you receive, anyway?”
“Two, maybe. And I think a couple of others I paid no attention to. The truth is, I’m not even sure when they began,” I admitted, “or if I can connect them, time-wise, to when Alfred was here. But they bother me. They’re just one more loose end.”
“Well, there’s the open door, but I think the dog accounts for that, Kitty.”
“And then there’s your pal … your traveling companion.”
Robert drew breath to argue, but I cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say, that it’s just a fragment of memory, an impression, that he may not exist at all. And I’d be more likely to agree with you if you hadn’t had that impression about your friend Peter Finch and the inn, that he was really leading you there all the time.” I closed my eyes, realizing how hysterical I sounded.
“Do you think they’re related?” Robert asked quietly. “ My feeling about Peter and then later, that someone might have been with me at the wall?”
“Aren’t they?”
Out of Time Page 28
