8

“YOU’RE NEVER HOME,” a thickly accented, gravelly voice said.

Coltrane’s skin tingled. “What? Who is this?”

“The judge.”

“Mitch?” Jennifer was alarmed by the look on Coltrane’s face. “What’s the matter?”

“Now listen to me, you sick bastard,” Coltrane said into the phone. “Quit calling me and-”

“There’ll come a time when you’ll wish with all your heart that the only thing I had done was phone you.” The voice sounded like pebbles being rattled in a cardboard cup. “Jennifer is correct about saying her prayers more often.”

Coltrane’s scalp prickled. “How did you know she said-”

“The day of wrath will dissolve the world in ashes when I appear and all things are scattered.”

Coltrane’s entire body felt as if an electrical current had surged through him. He spun to stare at the living room, his alarmed expression making Jennifer and Daniel more startled. “You’ve got a microphone in here?”

The voice chuckled, its crustiness reminding Coltrane of a boot stomping dried mud. “Oh, I’ve got much more than that in your apartment. Go up to your bedroom. I’ve left you some souvenirs.”

The connection was broken.

9

COLTRANE FELT SUSPENDED BETWEEN HEARTBEATS. Abruptly he dropped the phone and raced toward the stairs in the kitchen.

“Mitch, what’s the matter? Who was that?” Jennifer’s urgent questions overlapped with Daniel’s, their footsteps pounding on the stairs behind him.

He reached the upper corridor and ran past the door to his darkroom, then the door to the bathroom, at once slowing, afraid of what he would find in his bedroom. When he looked cautiously in, what greeted him made him feel as if a hand was pressed against his chest and was shoving him backward.

The bedroom was arranged in a parody of the display he had set up for Jennifer and Daniel downstairs in the living room. Photographs were everywhere, on the floor, the bureau, the bedside tables, the bed itself. Eight-by-tens, the same dimension as the photographs from Packard’s view camera. But even at a distance, Coltrane could tell that these photographs were too grainy to have been taken with a view camera. They were blowups from a 35-mm negative. What they depicted, though, made up for their lack of detail.

Jennifer and Daniel crowded behind him.

“What’s going on?” Daniel asked. “Who was that on the phone?”

Coltrane didn’t answer. Muscles compacting, he entered, stepping between photographs, staring down, then all around.

“This is insane,” Jennifer said.

Image after image showed Coltrane setting up the view camera, taking photographs of the houses in Packard’s series or of the people and places he had encountered as he followed Packard’s route. There was even a photograph of him and Jennifer saying good-bye to Diane in the rhododendron-lined driveway of her parents’ estate. Another showed Coltrane at the trailer court in Glendale as he photographed the young black woman pushing the boy in the swing. Wherever he had gone in the last two weeks, someone had been following him, taking his picture.

“When we said good-bye to Diane, I didn’t notice anybody on the street taking pictures of us,” Jennifer said.

“With a telephoto lens, the camera could have been a block away.”

He turned toward the bed, toward images of a backhoe dropping jumbled bones into a rock pulverizer while a bandy-legged, barrel-chested, beefy-faced man watched, his huge hands braced on his hips, his drooping mustache raised in a smile of satisfaction.

“These are the photos I saw in Newsweek,” Daniel said.

“No,” Coltrane said. “You never saw these photos. This set was never published.” Fearing he might throw up, he took a tentative step toward a dismaying object braced against the bed’s headboard – all the photographs seemed to be arranged to draw attention to that spot. “They couldn’t have been published. The negatives were in a camera I lost on a cliff while I was trying to escape from… This camera. Someone found it and developed the negatives.”

He stared again at the photographs of the barrel-chested man watching with delight as the rock pulverizer spewed out chunks of bones. The freshly healed wound in his side throbbed.

“Dragan Ilkovic,” Coltrane said.

“What did you say?” Daniel asked.

Fire seemed to shoot through Coltrane’s nervous system. “We have to hurry. Jennifer, grab all these photos. Daniel, get the ones downstairs. Now! It isn’t safe in here! We have to get out!”

10

THE CRIMSON RAYS OF SUNSET haloed six sweat-slicked men playing basketball. They dodged, ducked, and pivoted with amazingly deft precision, throwing, leaping, dunking, matching one another’s points. Four of the men were black. All were approximately Coltrane’s age – mid-thirties. They played with such concentration and enthusiasm that the past and the future didn’t matter, only now and only the game.

Coltrane watched from concrete bleachers on the street side of one of the many basketball courts at Muscle Beach in Venice. Behind him, bicyclists and roller skaters floated by. Ahead, the sunset-tinted ocean silhouetted the players. It was like watching expressionistic dancers on a stage. A moment later, the sun slipped a degree too low, shadows deepened, and the players faced one another, bending forward, hands on their knees, chests heaving as the ball rebounded off the backboard, missed the hoop, and bounced among them.

“Can’t hit a hoop I can’t see.”

“Never mind the hoop. I can’t see the ball.”

“Hey, you can’t quit now. We’re only two points from beating you.”

“Next time, bro. It’s your turn to buy the beers.”

“It’s always my turn.”

As the group headed past a palm tree toward the walkway, one of the black men said, “Go on without me. There’s a guy over here I have to talk to.”

“See you next week.”

Joking with one another, comparing shots, the group avoided two skateboarders and headed toward a café along the walkway.

Coltrane stood from the empty bleachers and approached.

The black man reached into a gym bag, pulled out a towel, and dried the sweat on his face.

“Greg.”

“Mitch.”

They shook hands.

Coltrane was six feet tall. The man he had come to see was two inches taller. They were both about the same weight – two hundred pounds. Coltrane’s hair was curly and sand-colored, long enough in back that it hung to his collar. In contrast, the man he spoke to had wiry dark hair cut close to his scalp. Both had strong, attractive features, but the black man’s were broader and gave the impression of having been carved from ebony, whereas Coltrane’s seemed chipped from granite.

“Just happened to be passing by?” Greg looped the towel around his neck and tugged his sweatshirt from his chest.

A cool December breeze gusted off the ocean and made Coltrane shiver. “Don’t I wish. I phoned your house. Your wife told me where you’d be.”

“I get the feeling you didn’t drop by to catch up on old times.”

“Afraid not.” Coltrane held up a box. “Got something I want you to look at.”

Greg frowned at the box, redirected his attention toward Coltrane, and sighed. “Come on up to the house. Lois will be glad to see you again. You can stay for supper.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Oh?”

“The kind of trouble I’ve got, you don’t know what I might bring with me to your house.”