by Greg Rucka
And Tommy had gotten all weepy at the end of the song, and I’d asked him why someone would make a song like that, about something so horrible and sad.
“Because sometimes making a song about something sad is the only way to understand it,” he’d told me.
It made me wonder if Tommy ever had a song he wanted to write.
Chapel and Burchett came outside together a little before three that afternoon to give me the joy.
“We’re done with the sweep, miss,” Burchett told me. “If you want to see what we’ve found?”
“Not if I’m going to be photographed doing it.”
He grinned big. “Made sure that won’t happen, miss.”
“You should see,” Chapel told me. “It’ll help you decide what you want to do next.”
I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, but I kept them to myself, since mostly they consisted of violence and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. I got off the steps and dusted my butt off, then nodded for them to lead the way.
We went through the kitchen, where Burchett’s colleagues were packing their gadgets into shiny metal containers not unlike my flight case. The scary woman watched me as I followed Chapel and Burchett, and I wondered what her problem was, then wondered if it was that she’d seen the pictures, and so didn’t ask.
Burchett led the way to the music room in the basement, and we started there, working the same path they’d presumably taken in their search. He pointed out each pink flag, even though they were easy enough to spot. It was an alarming education.
One flag in the music room. One flag in the downstairs bathroom, in the medicine cabinet over the sink, so that anyone looking—or grooming—in the mirror would be seen. One flag in the downstairs guest room, positioned so it could catch anything or anyone that happened onto the futon. Two flags in the kitchen, presumably in case things got exciting while I was fixing a late-night snack. Two more in the living room. Two in the master bathroom: one of them angled to catch anything happening in the shower or tub; the other one, and Burchett was impressed by this, set in the outlet between the mirrors over the sinks.
The last three flags were all in my bedroom. One directly over my bed. One in the wall just over the headboard. The last one in the outlet by the bureau, to catch me in the mornings when I picked out my day’s lingerie.
“And you know what the irony of this is?” I said to them, standing in my bedroom, looking at all of the little flags. “I fucking hate pink.”
Chapel smiled thinly, but Burchett laughed out loud.
“Fred says that some pervert pulled a gun on you when you got into town Monday morning. Says he got you into his truck and had you give him your clothes, that right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think that same guy was in your house last night?”
“Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“Any sign of a break-in?”
I shook my head.
Burchett scratched his beard, craned his head back to look around my bedroom again. “You started renovating about when?”
“When I left on tour.”
“And they finished when?”
“Last month, the beginning of September. I’m not positive of the date.”
Burchett looked at Chapel. “That’s when this was done, Fred. Our pervert must have gotten himself onto one of the crews working here, maybe working with an electrician. Hell, he could be the electrician. Gives him access to the whole house, lets him wire everything just the way he wants. He probably got a copy of the house key from the contractor or someone.”
“Then why the hell did he do all that stuff Monday morning?” I asked.
Burchett reached for the Leatherman on his belt, snapping out the Phillips head, then leaned past me and began unscrewing the cover to the outlet by my bureau. Chapel and I waited, watching. It didn’t take him long, and he hummed while he worked. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.”
When he removed the cover, he pointed to a portion of the wall, just above the lower outlet. There was a black smudge on the paint, a teardrop shape.
“Scorch mark,” Burchett told us. “The camera shorted. He must have been trying to replace it.”
“And if he’d been listening for news of when she was going to return home, he’d have known she was on her way,” Chapel said.
“But he got me outside,” I said. “He wasn’t inside.”
Burchett began replacing the plate over the outlets, his brow furrowed. “Maybe there were two of them, working together. You get one in the house when you come home, the other is outside waiting. He sees you, panics, thinks he can’t let you go inside. That would explain why he dropped you off here when he was through. All he wanted to do was keep you occupied for an hour or so.”
“There’s the little detail where he had me strip for him.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t touch you, right? And if he has your clothes, you’re less likely to make a break for it, irrational modesty being what it is. He takes your clothes, you’re going to stay put until the danger is so great your modesty comes second. For most people, by the way, the point when their modesty stops being first is normally right after too late.”
“Could the partner be the one you saw last night?” Chapel asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. But if one of them was fixing the camera Tuesday morning, then why’d he come back last night?”
“Well, could’ve had another short, maybe. Might’ve forgotten something, something that he thought would incriminate him.”
“Or maybe he wasn’t here to work on the cameras,” Chapel said.
Burchett frowned at him, then glanced at me. He looked embarrassed, and it took me a second longer to realize why, that he’d been thinking the same thing Chapel had, but hadn’t wanted to say it.
So I said it for them both. “You think last night he came here to rape me.”
“We don’t know that,” Burchett said, replacing the Leatherman in the pouch on his belt. “Got one more thing to show you.”
“I think I’ve seen enough.”
“We’re almost through.” He smiled reassurance at me, then opened my closet and stepped inside, sliding my clothes down along the rod and revealing the access door into the attic space. He shoved it open and crawled through, then called back for me to follow. I ducked and shimmied after him.
It was dusty and dim, the only illumination the sunlight slanting through the small vent at the front of the house, and it smelled of insulation and wood and stale air. Cobwebs hung off the rafters, and I swiped at them uselessly as I got to my feet. There was just enough room to stand, hunched, if you were short like myself or Burchett. Chapel, when he came through, stayed on his knees.
Burchett had moved forward and when I reached his side, he indicated the vent. Through the slats I could glimpse the street out front of the house, the tops of the apple and elm trees in my yard.
It took me another second before I could make out the antenna, short and stubby and rubber and black, attached to the underside of one of the slats. From outside, in the shadow of the house, it would have been invisible. Burchett had crouched and was fumbling beneath the crossbeams, and then he came up with what looked like a thin rectangular box, also black plastic. It had another antenna attached to it, even stubbier than the first, and a row of three lights, all of them off. A power cord ran away from it, disappearing in the insulation at our feet.
“The transmitter,” Burchett explained. “Broadband wireless; you can get one at just about any computer hardware store for a couple hundred bucks. All of the cameras in the house send to this little guy here, you see? Then this fella, he beams the signal to another unit somewhere, maybe only a couple blocks from here, maybe up to a mile away, and it downloads the signal onto tape or maybe even direct to a hard drive.”
“Tape?”
“The cameras, they’re video, Miss Bracca, not still-image. Those pictures of you, they’re not photographs, they’re video captures. This guy is taking v
ideos of you, selecting the image he wants, pulling that, and cleaning it up. You see?”
I did see, and it alarmed me enough that I shot a glance back to Chapel, where he was wedged just inside the access way. From his expression, I knew that he’d seen it, too, was probably a lap ahead of me.
“There’s a fucking tape?”
“It’s possible.” Burchett looked at the unit in his hands, then back to me. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Is it off?”
“Yes, ma’am. We did a frequency trap before disconnecting it, so there’s no need for it to ever get switched back on.” He moved the box to his left hand, went into the coin pocket on his Levi’s with his right, coming out with a thin and short metal tube that he held between his thumb and index finger for me to see. “This is one of the cameras. Not much to look at.”
There was a bead of glass on one end of the tube, two tiny wires running from the other. In the light I wasn’t sure, but the wires looked white and black. The whole thing wasn’t much longer or thicker than a matchstick.
“Easy to place, easy to hide, gives a stable enough image,” Burchett continued. “You have the right software, you can clean up whatever it provides pretty nice. Not terribly expensive, either. The technology’s gotten to the point that this is bush-league stuff.”
“Hurrah for technology,” I said.
Chapel finally spoke up. “Rick? How long to get this stuff out of her house?”
“Take us maybe an hour to disconnect everything, get it all pulled and all the little holes spackled so that you can’t much tell they were ever here.”
“Then do it,” I said.
“Then what?” Chapel asked.
“Then what what?” I asked.
“There’s a question of the tape.”
“Potential tape,” Burchett said. “Miss Bracca got home four days ago, that’s nearly a hundred hours of video if the perv who did this kept it all. That’s not likely, Fred. Gets expensive.”
“Just one tape is a problem, Rick. None of us wants to see a ‘Bracca Uncovered’ video hitting the Web.”
“No, don’t suppose we do.”
“Then I want to know who did this. And I want to make sure they don’t have anything damaging to my client.”
“More damaging,” I said, but I said it softly, and neither of them heard me.
Burchett was nodding. “With the frequency, we can track back to the receiver. But we’ll have to move on that fast. Our perv here most likely already knows his system’s gone down. He might guess we’re on to him.”
“Then get on it.”
“We could call the police.”
“No,” I said. “No cops, no publicity. Bad enough the pictures are out there, I don’t want the whole world seeing me like that.”
“Rick, you’ll have to handle this yourself,” Chapel said.
Burchett smiled, nodded his head at me as if tipping the brim of a hat, and I realized what it was that made him so disarming, and that maybe made him as good as Chapel said he was. A man he might be, but in that gesture, you could see the kid who wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up.
As if to prove me right, he said, “We’ll get saddled up.”
Burchett left with the scary woman, leaving the other guy to remove all the pink flags and the cameras they marked, and Chapel told me that he needed to get back to the office, but that I should call him if I wanted anything.
“You going to call Graham?” I asked him.
“That was my intention.”
“You’re going to tell him about the other pictures?”
“I don’t see how I can’t.”
I nodded, not liking it. It was stupid, maybe, but I knew what would happen as soon as Graham got the news. He traveled with a laptop, and it wouldn’t take long before Click and Van saw the pictures. Click would be bad enough, but the thought of Van staring at those images was hard to take. She’d see it not so much as my humiliation, but proof that she’d been right about me all along.
Chapel left me with his home number, and the number for his mobile, as well as the number for Burchett. He told me he’d get in touch as soon as he heard anything, and that I shouldn’t worry, things were well in hand, now. I walked him to the door, and when he was gone I went to the kitchen and got myself a beer, not really giving a damn what the remaining member of Burchett Security might think of that behavior.
I was halfway through the bottle when I realized just how set up I had been, and that brought some dark thoughts running home. Whoever had done this, they’d done it with a lot of time to spare. They’d done it easily, and covered themselves well.
Which made me think it had been an inside job, someone working with the carpenters or the electricians or someone.
There was only one person who had been inside while I’d been on tour, who could come and go as he pleased.
There was early rush-hour traffic on the bridges crossing the Willamette, and it took me close to twenty minutes to get from my place in Irvington to Mikel’s in the Northwest Hills. His condo was in a cluster of similar units, designed to look like Victorian town houses, off Westover. It was high enough that, on a clear day, you could see all of Portland spreading out to the east, with Mount Hood’s snowcap glistening in the far distance, and to the north, the broken top of Mount Saint Helens.
On a clear day. Not today, not with the evening clouds rolling in, heavy with payloads from the Pacific.
I parked on the street and strode to his front door, trying to think of what I would say if Tommy was there. Probably tell him to get the hell away from me, that I didn’t want to see him, that what I had was for Mikel’s ears alone. I’d seemed able to bully Tommy pretty successfully once already, so maybe it would work a second time.
All of the tenant spaces were empty except for Mikel’s, which was filled by his Land Rover, so I knew he was home, and I figured none of his neighbors were, yet. Tommy hadn’t brought a car when he’d visited me, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.
I knocked and didn’t get an answer, so I knocked again, harder, and still didn’t get an answer. It was starting to tick me off, to make my suspicions seem all the more grounded.
All of his alarm about the picture when he’d shown it to me, his need to hear me say that I hadn’t posed. I’d taken it as concern, but maybe it wasn’t concern as much as guilt. Maybe the cops had been right all along, that Mikel had let one of his friends crash at my place. And maybe that friend had made me his personal hobby, his cottage industry.
“Dammit, Mikel, open up!”
I pounded harder and even threw the toe of my boot, just for the added noise. No response.
I stopped banging the door, mostly to give my hand a rest. A wind had kicked up, making the trees along the hillside whisper. Distantly, I heard the whistle of an Amtrak train sliding into Union Station.
“Fucker,” I muttered, and tried the knob for the hell of it, and it turned easy, and the door came open.
From where I was standing in the doorway, I could see somebody’s leg at the end of the hall, sticking out from the living room. A whiff of alcohol and vomit, the scents of my bathroom, brushed my face.
I moved a couple steps forward, across the threshold. Everything in my chest felt like it was compressing, crumpling under pressure.
“Mikel?” I asked.
This time, when he didn’t answer, I knew why.
My brother lay on his side, the way he must have fallen, and there was dark blood down his front and his back, seeping into the white carpet. His eyes and his mouth were open, and I knew he had been in pain when he died.
I took it in, then saw the rest. The empty cans scattered on the carpet, the overturned chairs, the broken lamp.
My vision started to swim. I put a hand out on the wall, caught myself, tried to remember to breathe. The alcohol and puke smell was stronger. Something cracked, vibrating in my body, through my chest. Like I was the wishbone at somebody’s dinner party, like I
was the losing end.
I heard myself moaning, though whether that was in my head or out of my mouth, I’m not sure. The wind outside got louder.
And again, it started to rain.
CHAPTER 15
Somehow I kept it together long enough to make it home, but I was fighting panic when I came through the door, and I nearly forgot to turn the alarm off before it started screaming. I shucked out of my jacket and went into the kitchen, and I cracked the seal on a new bottle of Jack and drank from it standing there, pulling again and again until the burn was too much and I had to stop for air.
I didn’t even bother with a chair, just slumped to the floor, bottle in my hand, feeling eleven again, feeling the world spinning out of control once more.
Not again, I thought. Not again, please not again.
I was in the backyard, face up to the falling rain, a new bottle in my hand, when the cops arrived. I’d been out there for an hour or so, singing to myself, and when I heard the car stop and the doors slam, I knew it was them, and decided to be a model citizen and go around front to meet them.
At the side of the house I leaned, turning my head so I could peek around the corner. The car was one of the Portland PD unmarked ones, white but glowing a little orange in the light from the street. It had a radio antenna mounted on the center of the trunk.
There were two of them at the door, up on my porch, a man and a woman. Both of them were white, and I couldn’t tell their age. The man was saying, “. . . know who she is, right?”
“I don’t fucking care who she is,” the woman said.
The man grunted and leaned on my doorbell again.
I said, “Over here.”
They turned and looked at me, doing a good job of not acting like I’d surprised them. Objectively, I must have looked like a drowned rat, my T-shirt and jeans soaked, my hair stuck to my skull. The woman came off the porch first, reaching into an inside pocket, the man following her.
