“What the hell is that?” Maggie asked.
It was a small package of plastic wrap, no more than two inches by two inches, that Peach had secreted inside the spinach and then resealed. Still using the forks, Cab carefully peeled back the folds of the plastic until it was open on the counter. Inside was a rhinestone button shaped like a crystal flower, the kind that might appear on a woman’s dress.
Maggie began to feel sorry that she’d never had a chance to meet Peach Piper. The girl was clever.
“A button,” she said. “I wonder where she got it. And who it belonged to.”
“I have no idea, but Peach obviously thought it was important.”
“Do you think there’s anything else in the apartment?” Maggie asked.
“Yes, I do,” Cab said.
They left the kitchen and went into the bedroom, and this time Cab didn’t even hesitate or look anywhere else. He went straight to the white mannequin standing behind the door with her arm cocked seductively behind her head.
“Sexpot,” he said, as if talking directly to the mannequin. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry, what?” Maggie asked.
“Peach had a collection of mannequins,” Cab explained. “It was a little weird, and she’d be the first to say so. She had six of them in her bedroom in Florida. Ditty, Petunia, Harley, Bon Bon, Rickles, and Sexpot. I don’t know how the hell she got Sexpot up here with her, but there was very little that Peach couldn’t do.”
He put his hands on his hips and studied the mannequin, which was made of fiberglass and was connected to a heavy glass stand by a jointed metal rod. He began to undress it.
“Something you want to tell me about your fetishes?” Maggie asked.
Cab winked at her.
When Sexpot was naked, he carefully detached the mannequin’s cocked arm from the rest of the body. He studied the metal plates on both sides, then reattached the arm and did the same thing on the other side. Then he removed the head and segmented the torso from the legs. When he found nothing, he lifted the entire mannequin off the metal rod that secured it on the glass base. Two screws with plastic caps held the rod in place on a metal pole that jutted out of the base, and Cab loosened both screws and separated the rod from the base. It was hollow.
He peered inside the small square tube.
“Can you grab me a wire coat hanger from the closet?” he asked.
Maggie found one and handed it to Cab, who straightened the hook end and stretched the rest of the hanger until it was no wider than the mouth of the rod. He shoved the hook end inside the rod and wiggled it around. Then he yanked. The coat hanger slid out of the rod, and so did a wad of gum. After that, a small piece of plastic and metal dropped into Cab’s hand.
A flash drive.
Maggie smiled. “I like this girl.”
“So did I,” Cab replied. “Do you have a laptop in your car?”
“I do.”
Maggie left the apartment and jogged back to her Avalanche and retrieved a laptop from underneath the backseat. She came back and found Cab sitting at the weathered oak desk near the window. She dragged another chair next to him, and together they booted up the laptop. The wallpaper on Maggie’s computer screen showed a photo of Troy Grange with his bulging squirrel cheeks and shaved head in the cockpit of his time-share Cessna, wearing pale green headphones. He grinned at her from the computer, and Maggie winced.
“Guess I better change that,” she said.
Cab said nothing. He inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports. A few seconds later, the drive opened and spilled a list of dozens of JPEG photos down the screen across Troy’s face. He switched the view to thumbnails, and when he opened the first of the photographs, he saw the double front doors of a house. The picture had been taken at night, with the faces of two women dimly illuminated by a porch light.
“Do you recognize this place?” Cab asked.
Maggie squinted. “Looks like the house Casperson is renting.”
“What about the women?”
“I don’t know them.”
Cab clicked to the next picture, which showed the same angle on the house, with a man on the porch with his back to the camera. Each of the next several photographs showed different people entering the house. Maggie spotted a couple of individuals she recognized from the film set, but most were strangers or their faces weren’t visible in the pictures.
“Looks like she’s documenting a party,” Maggie said. “What’s the date on the files?”
Cab checked. “A week ago Saturday.”
He went slowly through the photographs one by one. Maggie studied the faces where she could see them, but they told her nothing. After fifty nearly identical pictures, the people began to blur. Then, as Cab clicked to the next picture, her mind caught up with her eyes.
“Hang on, go back one,” she said.
Cab used the touch pad to return to the earlier photograph, which showed a man just inside the open door, slipping off a coat to reveal the shoulders of a red dress shirt. He was partly blocking a tall young woman next to him, who was in profile. She caught a glimpse of long reddish hair covering most of her face, but she could also barely make out a hint of her glasses. They were turquoise blue.
“I think that’s Rochelle Wahl,” Maggie said. “She was there, just like Serena thought.”
“Who’s that with her?”
“I can’t be sure from the back, but it looks like Jungle Jack to me.”
Cab enlarged the photo and studied the man. “I think you’re right.”
“Skip ahead. Is there anything with Casperson?”
Cab scrolled through the array of photographs. He opened up several with different angles, but they were mostly dark exterior shots of the house. Peach had zoomed in on a second-floor room where the lights were on, but it was impossible to make out any details behind the curtains.
“That’s Casperson’s bedroom, but we can’t see inside,” Maggie said. “What about photos of people leaving? If the girl Curt Dickes saw was really Rochelle Wahl, she had to be helped out of the party.”
“They wouldn’t have taken her out the front door,” Cab said.
Maggie nodded. “You’re right. Are there any photographs that focus on the side of the house?”
He enlarged the window and leaned forward to get a better look at the thumbnails. At some point during the evening, the photographs shifted, showing people heading out the house’s front door. Peach had shot all of them one by one, but Maggie didn’t see Rochelle Wahl, and she didn’t see a man wearing a burgundy shirt. Then, near the end of the array, the camera switched to a different angle.
“There,” she said.
The photograph showed a sedan parked in the driveway beyond the main entrance, in the shadows of the north wing. There was only low light glowing through the house windows, making the details hard to distinguish as Cab enlarged the picture.
“I’m pretty sure that’s John Doe’s Impala,” Maggie said.
The next picture confirmed it. The driver’s door and a rear door were both open, lighting up the car and two people around it. She saw John Doe loading an unconscious woman into the back of the Impala. Peach had taken several photographs one after another, catching the action in progress; she knew she was witnessing something important. Most were out of focus. One photograph, however, caught the girl’s face turned toward the camera, eyes closed, hair spilling across her face, blue glasses dangling off one ear.
“That’s definitely Rochelle,” Maggie said. She added in a subdued voice, “She doesn’t look fifteen, does she?”
“No.”
“I wonder if they found her school ID in her purse and panicked,” she said.
“Look at her dress, too,” Cab added, zooming in as far as the resolution of the photograph would take him.
The dress was hard to make out in the enlargement, but it was either navy or black. At first, Maggie didn’t understand what she was looking for, but then she spotted tiny silver glints running in two rows down the front of the dress.
“Are those buttons?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Is that what Peach hid in the freezer?”