By the time Verraday had gotten home from his outing with Penny, he was too tired to do any work on the midterm or any reading for his next paper. He checked his e-mails and saw from the addresses that it was mostly the usual stuff: half a dozen or so from his students, which he decided to put off reading until the morning.
One e-mail caught his eye, however. The subject line promised that new preview material had been added on the Bettie Page MoMA exhibit website. Verraday opened it and saw a color picture of Bettie wearing a leopard-print bikini, striking a claws-out cat pose. It was pure kitsch, not the sort of thing that excited him. Just like the serial killers, he realized, he had a specific range of things that turned him on and things that did not. This did not. However, there were three new thumbnail photos of Bettie.
Like the shots in the previous e-mail, the thumbnails were ones he had never seen before and were taken with much greater artistry than the standard Bettie photos. He clicked on the first one, which showed Bettie from the midriff down, wearing knee-high, black leather boots, seamed stockings, and a cinched corset that peeked into frame. The next shot was of Bettie’s chin and teeth, smiling seductively as she bit into a leather whip. The final photo was a view of Bettie from behind, lying on a bed, wearing nothing but a black bustier, fishnet tights, and stiletto heels.
He remembered when he had felt passionate enough about a woman to create photographs like these. With Nikki. He had taken the time to learn about exposure, depth of field, and lighting. He’d even made his own prints so that no eyes other than his own would ever see the erotic images he created of her. He’d kept them despite his conflicted feelings. The photos of Nikki were the most artistic thing he had ever created, technically accomplished and, he had to admit, extremely erotic. But he could never look at them without being reminded of his own naiveté, his misplaced belief back when he’d clicked the shutter that he’d found the love of his life.
That last thumbnail on the web page of the MoMA exhibit had triggered a memory of one of those photos. He knew he shouldn’t take out the images of Nikki to check, but his curiosity got the better of him. The last time he’d looked at the photos of her was four years earlier, when he’d bought this house and was packing up his apartment. At the time, he had thrown them into the garbage as part of the past that he was casting off. Then at the last minute, he had retrieved them, not quite able to break the connection. He took a key out of his desk now, went over to his filing cabinet, and unlocked it. He pulled the drawer out and at the very back, filed behind mortgage information and tax records, he found the folder containing the photos of Nikki.
He took one of them out. It was black and white, Verraday’s favored photographic medium. In it, Nikki was lying on her belly atop a duvet on Verraday’s sleigh bed, grinning that seductive Cheshire-cat grin at him. One of her long legs was stretched out behind her on the bed. The other was chambered above her, a stiletto pump dangling seductively off the end of her toes. His memory had been correct. The outfit Nikki was wearing was virtually identical to the costume that Bettie Page was modeling in the last thumbnail photo. He supposed that he had seen that picture of Bettie years earlier, had forgotten it on a conscious level, yet unwittingly recreated it when he had bought the lingerie for Nikki that she was wearing in the photo that he now held in his hand.
Gazing at it now, he grudgingly understood how Kyle Davis had been so unable to resist Rachel Friesen. He had an impulse to toss this photo and all the other Nikki photos into the wastebasket but then felt a pang of regret and placed them back in his filing cabinet. He still had more in common with Kyle Davis than he cared to admit.
CHAPTER 22
As Verraday and Maclean walked through the Science Quadrangle past the Drumheller Fountain, he noticed that the first dead leaves of the season had fallen into the water. He watched them swirling about on the surface, some caught in eddies, moving together, others alone, traveling in erratic trajectories. He wondered whether, if you tracked it all long enough, a pattern would emerge, some master Newtonian clockwork, or if it was all just chaos, the random influences of a fickle universe.
“So we didn’t find anything interesting in Helen Dale’s apartment,” said Maclean. “Not yet at least. There were no signs of any struggle, no blood, no disturbance, not even a magazine out of place. And no cell phone or datebook.”