“She must not have been dead when they took her,” I say.
“So, what, they were bringing her to the emergency room?” He chews over the possibility, shaking his head. “Then again, maybe she’s the reason they were there in the first place. Maybe they were trying to rescue her.”
“Maybe,” I say, not believing it.
I doubt this photo, grainy as it is, will be enough for a positive identification. The sketches attest to that. Thomson must have been trying to reconstruct the woman’s features from memory, using the cell-phone photo as a prompt. Looking at the successive attempts, there’s almost a desperation in the pencil strokes, a despairing black frenzy in the haphazard shading. He would have done the series in quick succession, frustrated at his inability to get the face right, perhaps unconsciously substituting the features of Jill Fanning, who might have been at work across the hallway as he drew. An hpd sketch artist might have been capable of doing the job, but of course Thomson couldn’t take this to any of his colleagues, not if they’d hustled the woman out of the house after lighting up the other occupants, rushing into the night as she bled out in the back seat.
“She died in the car, that’s my guess. He must have taken the picture afterward.”
Castro rubs his hands together. “Why?”
All I can do is shrug.
To remember her, maybe. The moment he leaned between the front seats and snapped her photo, he might not have had a clear intention in mind. Acting on impulse, the body sure to be disposed of somehow, the cop inside him insisted on some kind of documentation. And afterward, eating away at him like a slow-working acid, the logical next step: identification. Putting a name to the face, which required getting the face right first, prompting the futile sketches.
When he’d given up on identification, Thomson couldn’t let go. The dead woman must have haunted him, because his next move was irreversible, the kind of thing you don’t do if there’s any other option. He came to me, willing to give evidence against the people who’d been with him in that house, knowing that after that he could never go back.
To get her face out of his mind, he’d risked everything. It worked, I suppose, though not in the way he’d intended. He was dead now, too, his mind blank, erased by a fellow officer’s bullet. Either that or, lying in the bowels of eternity, his final sin inexpiable, her image tormented him still.
The seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, though solemnly anticipated, lacks the necessary immediacy to eclipse Hannah Mayhew’s ongoing plight, especially once the story of the missing girl metastasizes into that of a botched task force investigation. Stoked by rumors of a Fontaine lawsuit and steady leaks from the Sheriff ’s Department, the story grows more legs than a caterpillar, forcing a series of awkward press conferences in which Mosser and Villanueva stand awkwardly behind a cluster of microphones, fielding increasingly strident accusations from both the local and national press.
If not for Charlotte, I would remain blissfully ignorant of these developments. While I quietly labor away on the Thomson case, hoping the lack of closure will be taken by my colleagues as a sign that I’m overly thorough or perhaps a bit rusty, she spends each night in front of the television, switching from the local broadcasts over to cable, then back to the local stations when they wrap up for the evening. On the rare occasions I’m home, nothing I do can wean her off the remote control.
“There’s hardly anything about it,” she says, meaning the anniversary. “It’s like they’ve all forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”
“It’s Hannah Mayhew’s fault.”
She frowns. “Don’t blame her.”
We sit together in silence, bathed in the screen’s flickering blue light, not speaking of the anniversary’s private significance because we almost never do. Not that we’ve forgotten. Our omission signals many things, but not that.
On the day itself, we will keep our annual vigil, returning together to the graveside, leaving behind fresh flowers and tears and knee prints in the soft grass. Our grief will feel especially acute because it will be ours alone, unobserved by a world whose attention will be rightly fixed on commemorating the day’s larger tragedy. The Pearl Harbor of our generation will swallow up all the rest, including the random passing of a ten-year-old Houston girl, killed instantly when a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car.
“Dying that day,” Charlotte once said, when the event was still fresh enough to talk about, “it’s like being born on Christmas, isn’t it?”
Meaning people have bigger things on their minds. There’s only so much room in the ledger, and some entries require it all, leaving no space for smaller tragedies, even as footnotes.
Tonight something has changed, though. As Charlotte flips through the channels, instead of Hannah, everyone’s talking about the latest hurricane brewing out in the Gulf, picking up speed as it approaches. Since Katrina, every swirl of clouds on the Doppler screen merits reverent attention, and the weathercasters speak almost hopefully about the potential for a Category 5 landfall, putting the New Orleans debacle to shame.
“It’ll fizzle out like all the others,” Charlotte says.
“Maybe.”
Deep down, I find myself rooting for the storm, or at least for the breathing space it will afford people like Wanda Mosser and Theresa Cavallo. Fewer press conferences would mean more time for investigation, not that I hold out hope that any amount of extra effort will produce Hannah Mayhew, safe and sound or otherwise.
To my surprise, Cavallo’s pledge to devote her free time to spadework on Salazar pays quick dividends. He rents a thirty-foot slip at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, housing an old but well-maintained cabin cruiser, a more substantial and significantly pricier boat than I’d imagined. A call to the marina confirms the whole place is monitored by video cameras. After explaining who I am to the head of security, who has his hands full preparing for the impending hurricane, I get an open-ended invitation to review the footage.
“You have Labor Day weekend on tape?”
“I’ll spool it up for you,” he says. “But do me a favor and leave it till next week, huh? We’ve got our hands full at the moment.”
“I wish I could oblige, but… How about tonight?”
He pauses long enough for me to consider the various ways he could make my life difficult, like demanding a warrant or hitting the delete key to save himself the inconvenience. But some people will bend over backward to cooperate with the police, and he happens to be one of them. We agree on a time and I drive down to Kemah full of hope, imagining a video image of Keller and Salazar hoisting a shrouded corpse aboard the boat.
The fantasy is dashed the moment the security chief, a gray-haired man in white shorts and a potbellied polo shirt, cues up the appropriate footage. Like the surveillance tape from the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, like Joe Thomson’s cell-phone snap, the image is grainy and indistinct.
“Is there a particular slip you’re interested in?” he asks, stroking his chin.
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
He’s disappointed, but in spite of the man’s willingness to help, I don’t want to single out Salazar’s boat. There’s always the chance they know each other, and the last thing I want to do is put my suspect any more on guard than he already is.
We buzz through the footage, which is displayed in split screens on a computer monitor, starting midday on Thursday even though the shooting off West Bellfort didn’t go down until later. Approaching ten, the chief pauses.
“The marina lights go off at ten,” he says, and sure enough the screens go black.
After that, the only usable footage is of the well-lit parking lot. We fast-forward through a whole lot of nothing, and then he stops just after three in the morning, running the tape back a bit.