Thirty minutes until Leo usually arrives home from her office on a Tuesday. Since I can't get inside her brain, I'll do the next best thing and spend every one of those minutes going through her personal effects.
Leo's apartment is small but luxurious; set on the fourth floor of a small art deco building, complete with twenties-style chandeliers and a purple velvet chaise-lounge in the lobby. Off the hall, there are doors to a single bedroom, a bathroom, and then a kitchen living area with double doors to a terrace. The whole place smells like mulled wine and old candle smoke, as if Leo left just moments ago and blew herself out in the hall.
I hit the bathroom first—specifically the medicine cabinet, which hangs over an opulent marble sink. Above the bottom shelf, lined with skin creams and dental floss boxes with their lids half-cocked, is a constellation of pill jars and packets. After Tuija's report, this is what I'm most interested in.
Tylenol. Contraceptive pills. A half-finished antibiotic and a barely touched anti-sickness med. There are no mood stabilizers, no anti-depressants; nothing to suggest Leo is anything other than normal these days. A part of me is disappointed in this. It's so much easier to take a girl apart when she hands you the strings to pull; not that I prefer easier, but Leo has shit on me. Taking her apart will be necessary at some point.
Next, I head to the kitchen living area. Silver and white cabinets line the walls beside a retro refrigerator and several plants in desperate need of watering. The living area has been turned into a home office, with stacks of SilentWitn3ss boxes sitting in scattered heaps on the carpet. A laptop is splayed open on her cream sofa, its screen bent back, and a plastic basket of tangled wires sits beside it like some kind of garnish. Near the stove, there's a copy of New Scientist open, its pages marred by the charred halo of a coffee cup ring. The only real colour in the room comes from a bowl of apples and bananas on the breakfast bar.
A couple of sun-bleached Polaroids are stuck to her refrigerator: Leo between a man and woman I assume to be her parents, beaming into the camera at a restaurant. Leo lying on the floor next to a golden retriever and pulling a stupid face. A shot of a group of girls in a bar, all holding up their cocktails and pouting; Leo stands on the edge, eyeballing her friends with good humour.
I peer into her refrigerator; she keeps eggs, beer, roast chicken and salad. There's popcorn in the cupboard, ice cream in the freezer. A glass dish on the counter holds a half-finished bar of cherry dark chocolate, carefully rewrapped. These are the kinds of foods a girl stocks if she comes home most nights; if she watches television and works instead of going out to see friends or lovers. Not that this is anything useful. I slam the freezer shut, impatient...and that's when I spot it.
There's a camera mounted on the side of one cabinet. A SilentWitn3ss model with its pale grey casing and tiny blue light. My pulse skitters, and then I raise a hand, my dimpled grin flashing at the lens as I wave.
Hello, little lion. Are you watching me?
Of course you are. It's what you've built your career on. It's what you do.
But Leo won't be at her office to watch, not right now. She'll be on the subway. In transit. Before long, she'll be opening the door and wondering why the hell her alarm isn't wailing. My whole body pulls tight with anticipation at the thought.
Other thoughts creep in as I stalk through to her bedroom. Useful thoughts. The question I should really be asking about Leontine is why she's preoccupied with surveillance in the first place. With watching, learning. Why are you so paranoid? What are you afraid of?
It pains me to give kudos to Lincoln Warner. The jackass. But maybe Leo's not so much afraid of something as ashamed. Fearful girls don't look you in the eye the way Leo looks at me; they don't hire private security companies to fuck with you. She's too brazen to be some frightened lamb.
What are you hiding...?
Her room is the nicest of the lot. More personally decorated. A cream feature wall is dissected by the black outlines of hexagons; the bed is piled high with cushions in red velvet and pale silk. Her walk-in closet hangs open, revealing shelves of pretty heels, and a red lace bra is slung lazily over the corner of an art deco dresser. I take the bra in my hand as I walk past.
Squeeze it.
Bring it to my nose, breathe her in.
I find honesty in the scent of her body. On underwear, it can't hide behind perfume, and the clean laundry smell is long gone; it's just flesh and heat and something almost lemony.
There's a diary splayed on her nightstand, its pages taunting from beneath the beaded glass canopy of her chandelier-style lamp. I flick the lamp on, let it illuminate the room. Maybe I'll flick through the diary too.
Or maybe I'll look for more of her clothes. Her panties. Bury myself in the honesty there, take—