CHAPTER 21

Just inside the door, Vance Balinski crouches on a café chair, head ducked between his knees, attended by a semicircle of alarmed women including the one who’d worked the counter on my last visit. Everyone turns when I call his name, a few even jump. He straightens, casting around blindly for the sound of my voice, eyes clenched tight, a wadded towel pressed to his nose. When he takes it away, the fabric glistens with fresh blood. Blond curls frame his punching bag of a face, perfect as a wig fitted after the fact. One eye opens, the blue cornea bright in a red sea of burst vessels.

“You cops,” he says, choking on the words. “Never around when you’re needed.”

After confirming with the shell-shocked women that the police have been called, I crouch down for a closer look at Balinski’s injuries. In addition to the facial trauma, his rib cage has been kicked to shards, so bad that he winces with every labored breath.

“Who did this to you?” I ask.

“Some Mexicans.”

“What did they look like?”

He coughs a plug of bile into the towel. “They looked like Mexicans.”

“What about the box,” I ask, already knowing the answer.

He shakes his head. “That’s what they wanted.”

Between coughing fits and interruptions from well-intentioned bystanders trying to get him to lie down or drink some water, he manages to communicate the gist of the story. He pulled up outside the Morgan St. Café, popped his trunk to retrieve the box Thomson had given him, then heard footsteps rushing up. Before he could turn, they were already on him, hammering away with their tattooed fists. He flailed defensively, slipping backward into the trunk, only to be pulled out by the ankles. Twisting on the concrete, balled in the fetal position, he endured a flurry of bootheels until a stray steel-capped toe connected with his chin, knocking him out. He awakened in the hot dark confines of his own trunk, using the glow-in-the-dark release lever to get out.

“Funny,” he says, showing me what could pass for a child’s juice-stained teeth. “I never thought that release lever would actually come in handy.”

The Mexicans were gone, and so was the box. He tipped himself onto the pavement and managed to get inside, where his mangled appearance rendered him momentarily unrecognizable in spite of his being a regular.

Losing that box is enough to make me want to kick Balinski, too. Given his injuries, I’m forced to restrain myself in the questioning, keeping the tone civil if not solicitous, but I can’t seem to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

“You couldn’t just give me the box?” I ask. “What was the point of bringing it back here?”

He studies his bloody towel, looking for a clean patch, then reapplies pressure to his swelling nose. “When Joe first gave it to me, I just stuck it in the trunk and forgot. But then you called, and I got all curious and took a look inside. The moment I did, I panicked. I didn’t want anything to do with this.”

“So you saw what was in there?”

“Cocaine,” he says. “Just like the movies. Plastic bags full of powder, stacked like gold bricks at the bottom of the box.” He uses his free hand to sketch the size of the box in the air. “And I’d been driving around with this stuff the whole time, not even realizing.”

“The box was full of drugs?”

He nods. “And these blowups. Big pictures, I mean, output from a color printer or something, big tabloid-sized sheets folded over.”

“Pictures of what?”

“Some woman. Not the best resolution, but a naked woman kind of laid out on a couch or some kind of seat, with sort of a sheet, some kind of fabric wrapped around her.”

“With her eyes closed?” I ask, thinking of the repeated portraits in Thomson’s sketchbook. “It was Jill Fanning in the picture, right?”

“Jill?” His red eye blinks. “It wasn’t her. The image was jagged, you know? Pixelated. But definitely not Jill. He wouldn’t have a naked picture of Jill, anyway.”

“They weren’t -?”

He dismisses all possibility of an illicit relationship with a wet huff, setting off another coughing fit. Someone hands me a fresh towel. I wait until he regains his equilibrium, then gingerly switch it out.

Then a couple of uniformed officers enter, followed closely by an emt. I back off, giving them space to do their job, my mind busy making the necessary connections. If what he’s saying is right, maybe in losing the box I haven’t lost everything. First, using Thomson’s studio keys, I retrieve the sketchbook, tucking it under my arm. That done, I get Edgar Castro on the phone, figuring there’s no point in swearing somebody else to secrecy when I already have a willing accomplice in the crime lab. I explain about the photo on Thomson’s cell phone, asking him to extract it discreetly and make me a couple of prints.

“Should I try and up the resolution?” he asks, his voice trembling with excitement.

A mental image of Castro clicking away in front of a computer screen for the next twenty-four hours, burning time in pursuit of near-invisible photographic enhancements gives me pause. I tell him not to bother with anything fancy. I just want to see the same thing Joe Thomson did.

The dim lighting makes her white skin gray, and all the details punctuating the monochrome bareness are rendered indistinct, a blurred lip, a smudged eye, the vague shadow of an exposed breast. And like a classical nude, some kind of winding cloth envelops her. Not the casual disarray of bedsheets as I’d first assumed, glancing at the photo on the tiny phone screen, but a more deliberate wrapping, a makeshift hammock for quick transport, an improvised shroud.

And although the sketches still resemble Jill Fanning and the photo resembles the sketches, somehow the photo does not resemble the woman herself. For Balinski, who knows her, that much would have been obvious. It takes some back-and-forth scrutiny for me to arrive at the same conclusion.

She is not sleeping, either, as I had supposed. Her eyes are closed, but there’s a pallor to the face, a slackness to the expression. Perhaps I’m seeing what isn’t there, reading details into the pixels, but I have no doubt the woman in the photo is dead.

Try as I might, I can’t match the image to Hannah Mayhew’s features. The cheeks are rounder, the skin pale, the hair apparently raven black, though the darkness might be the result of poor lighting.

“What are we looking at here?” Castro asks.

He’s been sitting so quietly at my elbow that I’d forgotten his presence. I place the photo facedown on my desk, overtaken suddenly by an impulse of modesty, not wanting her to be exposed to eyes other than my own, to anything but a clinical gaze.

“I think this is the missing victim from the Morales scene, the woman who was strapped to the bed.”

“Then what’s her picture doing on Detective Thomson’s phone?”

I give him a chilly stare. “I assume Thomson took the photo. After they removed her body from the scene.”

His lips part, but he doesn’t speak. I can hear his breathing, suddenly coming fast and heavy, like he’s just finished a sprint. After glancing through the cubicle entrance to make sure no one else is watching, he leans forward, flipping the photo faceup, and traces his finger along a series of vertical lines on the dark background, just over the woman’s bare shoulder.

“See that?” he whispers. “You know what I think that is? It looks like a leather car seat, doesn’t it? Those stitched seams right there. She was lying in the back seat.”

I examine the photo, then nod. He might just be right.

“Only why would they take the body?” he asks.

That’s the question. Assuming Keller led the crew and Thomson was there, assuming they’d come for drugs or money, what purpose was served by taking the dead woman with them? If she was dead before they arrived, assaulted and killed by Morales and his entourage, removing her body would make no difference. Same thing if she’d been killed during the shooting, either by Morales or by someone on Keller’s team. Only one scenario makes sense to me.