“Hey buddy,” Jake called to the dog, then hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time, his tie flying. He reached the second-floor landing, slid out of his jacket, and hurried into his home office, where he tossed his jacket onto the couch, plopped down in his desk chair, and hit the mouse to power up his computer.
He opened his email, watched his incoming pile onto the screen, and scanned the countless client emails for Pam’s name. Moose trundled into the office, panting from the effort of going up the stairs, in his characteristic huh-huh-huh. The golden lumbered over to the desk, and Jake palmed his big head before the dog could start his nudging routine.
Jake found Pam’s email, scrolled to the attachments, and clicked OPEN. There was a list of ten photos and he opened the first one. The photo must have been taken from the door to the apartment, and it showed scenes of a tiny galley kitchen next to a small living room, with an old black futon and a wooden coffee table. There was no other furniture in the room, nor were there any books or newspapers. Two windows on the far wall had broken blinds and between them, oddly, was a poster series of tennis player Anna Kornikova.
Jake opened the next few photos, scenes of Voloshin’s apartment, messy and nondescript. The following few photos were of a massive black monitor affixed to the wall and surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling entertainment center, also in black, with plastic video games shoved every which way in its crammed shelves. There was a photo of large black speakers and consoles that lined the top shelf, mixed with an array of weird pornographic figurines.
Jake shuddered. He opened the next photo, which was of a black laminate desk cluttered with Red Bull cans, cellophane Tastykake wrappers, and bags with multicolored Skittles strewn amid a dark tangle of joysticks, headsets with microphones, controllers, wires, a mouse, and a large silver laptop.
Jake eyed the laptop, wondering if it had contained the pictures of him and Ryan on Pike Road. Either way, he assumed the killer had taken the laptop. The right edge of the photograph showed a doorjamb that must have led to a bedroom, but that wasn’t what caught Jake’s eye. What he noticed was the brownish cork edge of a bulletin board on the wall, which must’ve been the one that Pam mentioned.
Jake clicked open the next photograph and sat back in his seat, trying to absorb the shock. It showed the bulletin board full of curling photos of Kathleen, which looked like they had been printed from the computer; Kathleen at work, company picnics, and softball games, hitting the ball, eating a chili hot dog, or smiling with her arm around her mother, who sported an identical grin. Jake cringed at one of the mother-daughter photos, in which both Kathleen and her mother were wearing matching bunny ears.
“I’m so sorry,” he heard himself say, realizing he said it aloud only because Moose nudged his leg. Jake could never begin to imagine the depths of that mother’s pain at losing her daughter, and he knew he could never forgive himself for his responsibility for Kathleen’s death. Everything that had happened since the hit-and-run followed as inevitably as one domino knocking down another, except that the dominoes were the people he loved the most in the world and the mess was their life as a family.
Jake told himself to get a grip. He scanned the photos again to see if he’d missed anything, but he hadn’t. It only confirmed that Voloshin had a crush on Kathleen and that both mother and daughter trusted him as a friend, or they never would’ve posed for the pictures.
Jake clicked on the last attachment and opened the photo. It showed the left-hand side of the bulletin board, and oddly, it was different from the right-hand side. The pictures were darker, printouts of photos taken at night, and they showed Kathleen running alone or with the track team down Pike Road. In the background was the corporate center and the road that came off of Pike, Dolomite Road. A few of them had thumbtacks in the corner and photos underneath, as if they were a series. One of the photos was taken at twilight in the summertime, with the girls running back toward the school in sweaty Chasers singlets and skimpy shorts, a sight that must’ve given Voloshin quite a thrill.
Jake noticed two photos on the far right, mostly hidden under the others. They had also been taken at nightfall, but there were no runners in the foreground; one had a woman with a ponytail getting into the passenger side of a dark car parked along the brush on Dolomite Road, its back bumper facing out. The second photo showed two figures sitting in the same car, the driver taller than the woman with the ponytail, more the height of a man. Their heads bent together as if they were kissing, indistinct silhouettes in the front seat.
Jake didn’t get it. He moved the mouse and clicked on the photo to enlarge it, but couldn’t see the people in the car, whose backs were to him. He squinted at the license plate, which was a Pennsylvania plate, and he could make out only the first three letters, HKE, and none of the digits. A red plastic thumbtack in the corner of the photo suggested, as before, that it was one of the series, but it got Jake wondering.
Who were the people in the photo?
He thought about it, and tried to reason it out. This was a bulletin board about Kathleen, so if Kathleen wasn’t one of the people in the car, that would be the only photo not of her. So did it mean that Kathleen was meeting a man in a car? Jake enlarged the photo on the screen, trying to read the rest of the license plate, but he couldn’t. He scrutinized the silhouette of the man, but couldn’t see anything other than he was in the driver’s seat and seemed to be of average height and build.
Jake squinted at the car, which looked long enough to be a four-door sedan of some type, and it was navy blue or black because it blended with the background. He enlarged it further, and after a few clicks, was able to read some chrome lettering on the upper left side of its trunk—535.
It was a BMW.
Jake thought about deleting the photos, but hesitated. He was already planning his next move.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Jake turned left onto Pike Road, approaching it from the opposite direction than he had the night of the hit-and-run, when Ryan was driving. There was no car on the street, which ran single lanes in both directions, and no police, runners, or dog-walkers were in sight. His dashboard clock read 1:30, so he was assuming that most of the employees at the corporate center had already gone back to work, and there were no students out yet because school was still in session.
Jake decreased his speed short of the blind curve ahead, with its makeshift memorial. The flowers, candles, and sympathy cards sat in a forlorn pile by the side of the road, and he felt a familiar tightness in his chest at the sight, but he pressed his emotions away. It was strange and risky to return to the scene of the crime, but he wanted to see if he could figure out what Voloshin had been up to, as well as the identity of the people in the BMW sedan.
Jake braked, getting the lay of the land. The blind curve was probably five hundred feet up ahead, then Pike Road jogged to the right, then the left and continued straight. Dolomite Road ran perpendicular to Pike Road, about a hundred feet down from the blind curve, and from where he sat, he could see the corner of Dolomite and Pike Roads. He couldn’t see beyond that, farther down on Dolomite Road, because he was at too oblique an angle.
He picked up his iPhone from the passenger seat, scrolled to the camera roll, and retrieved the photo of the sedan from the bulletin board, which he’d enlarged before he left the house. The picture was too dark and unfocused to reveal anything going on inside the sedan, but it did show the sedan’s location and orientation on Dolomite Road, which was all Jake needed.