ONLY.
There was no return address on the label. I flipped the envelope to see if the other side provided any clue about the sender or the contents, but all I found there was another label, identical to the first, and a strip of mailing tape sealing the flap. Could it be something else from Isabella? I exited the departmental office without opening the envelope, leaving both Peggy and myself in a state of suspense. When I got to my private office at the other end of the stadium, I closed the door and locked it—something I could never remember having done before. I took a letter opener from the desk drawer and slit the top of the envelope, bypassing the tightly taped flap altogether. Just as I was about to reach inside, I remembered Jim Emert’s disappointment when he learned that I’d handled the origami crane Isabella had mailed me. I laid the envelope down long enough to don a pair of latex gloves, then picked it up again and carefully slid the thin sheaf of pages onto the desk.
The top page was a two-line note, printed in the same font as the envelope’s label.“Let’s talk risks and benefits,” read the top line, and it told me that the envelope had come not from Isabella but from Raymond Sinclair. I was puzzled by the second line—“You look like a man with a stiff overdue fine”—
but only until I flipped to the next page in the stack. Then I was overcome by a wave of dizziness and nausea. The rest of the pages were photographs, and they showed a young woman stripping off her clothes—a white blouse and a tight gray skirt—and dancing naked in front of a middle-aged professor sitting on a sofa. The professor’s face changed from photo to photo, moving from shock and dismay through a series of more complicated and conflicted expressions, ones it disturbed me to see. As I studied the sequence, I remembered the night not that long ago when I’d studied my face in the mirror, the night after I placed Maurie Gershwin on the ground at the Body Farm and began photographing the sequence of changes in her face.
Maurie’s steady decline, documented in hundreds of pictures by now, was inevitable and irreversible. I wondered if mine was, too.
Locking the photos in my desk drawer, I locked the office and went outside, into the bracing breeze of the early-April afternoon.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER I FOUNDmyself striding into the Duncan Federal Building, demanding that the startled lobby guard send me up to the sixth floor. “Who are you going to see?”
“Special Agent Ben Rankin,” I snapped.
“Just a moment, sir,” the guard said warily. “I’ll need to call and make sure he’s expecting you. What’s your name?”
“Bill Brockton,” I snarled, “and I’m sure he’s not expecting me.”
He picked up a phone from the counter and dialed, then murmured into it, keeping his eyes on me as he talked and covering his mouth with his hand so I couldn’t hear what he said. “I’m sorry, sir, he’s not in.”
“Damn it. What about Angela Price?”
He murmured into the phone again, then paused to listen. He looked me up and down, then murmured some more. He hung up, eyeing me doubtfully, but motioned me through the metal detector, then escorted me to the elevator and pushed the sixth-floor button.
When the elevator door slid open, Price was standing in front of me. She held out a hand. “Dr. Brockton, good to see you. What can I do for you?”
“You can give me back my reputation,” I said.
“Here, step into my office.” She led me through the lobby, past its reception window of bulletproof glass and down a hall to an office whose windows offered a view of the Knoxville Convention Center and the eastern edge of the UT campus. Ben Rankin was sitting in one of the two chairs facing Price’s desk.
“I thought you weren’t in,” I said accusingly.
“I wasn’t. Just got back.”
“Have a seat, Dr. Brockton,” urged Price, “and tell us what’s bothering you.”
I told them about the envelope I’d just received, blushing as I described the photographs. Price asked, “Did you bring it with you?”
“No. I locked it in my desk drawer. I started walking to clear my head. I didn’t realize I was going to end up here.”
She nodded slightly, then looked at Rankin. He glanced at me, then looked back at Price. A slow smile spread across his face.
She smiled slightly, too.
“Please clue me in,” I said. “What do you see here that’s worth a smile?”
“Blackmail,” responded Rankin happily.
“Or extortion,” added Price. “Maybe. If we’re lucky.”