Next stop: Andy's. He and Paul were already out by the end of the driveway, goofing around on skateboards, when my headlights swept around the corner and caught them. Paul grabbed his stuff out of the back seat and wasted as little time as possible on conversation. I think he was afraid I'd change my mind, tell him to get in the car and come home.
I was well over the limit heading back to our house, but I slowed the last half-block, looking for unfamiliar cars parked at the curb, people crouched in the bushes. I parked, locked the Civic, and scooted into the house, looking over my shoulder as I pushed the door in, expecting Rick to suddenly appear, leaping onto me like a wild beast.
But he wasn't there, and once I was inside I threw the deadbolt. And stopped, holding my breath, listening for sounds. Was he back in the house somehow? As someone who worked for Valley Forest Estates, did he have some sort of master key? Could he get into any house he wanted, any time he wanted?
All I could hear was the blood pounding in my temples. I shouted, "I know you're here, asshole! And that cop's back, right out front! So if you're smart, you'll get the hell out!"
Nothing.
Tentatively, I moved into the house, turning on every light switch I passed. The broadloom, with its upgraded underpadding, allowed me to roam about noiselessly. I peeked into the kitchen, the living and dining rooms, the family room where we watched TV. Then I eased the door of my study open, my crumbled Robot still on the carpet. So far, no guests.
I turned the knob on the door to the ground-floor laundry room where I had stashed Stefanie Knight's purse in the washing machine. I opened the lid, worked the purse out from around the agitator, and took it back into the study. There, just as Rick had done, I dumped its contents out onto the floor, just beyond the range of Robot debris. On my hands and knees, I started sorting.
I put the envelopes to one side. Ditto for makeup items, tampons, car keys, change, expired coupons.
And my eyes settled on the black plastic film canister. I gave it a shake to see that it wasn't empty. A roll rattled inside. I popped the gray plastic lid off and dumped the roll into the palm of my hand.
There was no strip of film extended from it, so it was clearly one that had pictures on it. It was high-quality, black-and-white film. Twenty-four exposures.
Time to go downstairs and develop some pictures.
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
By the time I had the negatives developed and hanging up to dry, I had some sense that this film was, in fact, what Rick might have been looking for. These were not pictures from someone's trip to Disney World. The twenty-four images were not from an excursion to Mount Rushmore. While I couldn't yet see who, exactly, was in these images, I could tell that there were two people, and that one of them was a man, and the other was a woman. And that these were not taken out on the street, or looking down from the Eiffel Tower, or at a baseball stadium. These were definitely indoor shots.
I had a lot of time to think in the darkroom while the negatives developed. My eyes adjusted to the near-total absence of light and sound, and I thought back to the trip Sarah and I had taken to the grocery store only a few hours ago, and how much our lives had changed since then. So far, only I was aware just how much.
My guess was that Rick's version of the events of the evening were not entirely as he'd related them. I believed he had gone to Stefanie's house. And it was obvious that he had been to Stefanie's mother's house. But I didn't believe that when he went to Stefanie's house, she hadn't been there. My guess was that he went there to get back this roll of film. That he had been waiting for her to get home. That would explain the second broken window. And when Stefanie finally showed up, probably on foot, and hadn't been able to produce the film because she'd lost her purse, he ended up whacking her in the side of the head with a shovel. But he didn't believe her story about a stolen purse, so he went looking places where he thought Stefanie might have been. Where she could have left that film. That led him to her mother's house, and the slip of paper I'd left behind had led him to me.
It was hard not to feel that I had, as they say, blood on my hands.
I exposed one neg after another and started dipping the photographic paper into the various trays. As the images became less soft, as graininess gave way to definition, I could see that these pictures were all of the same two people, coupling away on what appeared to be a king-size bed in a well-lit bedroom. The camera had been mounted overhead somehow, perhaps behind a two-way mirror, so the shots in which these two were engaged in the traditional missionary style of lovemaking afforded few clues as to the man's identity. I could see that he was overweight, and balding, but with enough hair on his back and butt that he should be considering some sort of transplant. (A comb-over was definitely out of the question.) It was not the kind of picture that would be useful in picking a guy out of a lineup.