The wall above the bureau was covered with good art photography. He moved closer. Black-and-whites. Chemical prints, not digital. All matted and identically framed in black. A dozen pieces in all. Half were abstracted visions of a derelict urban landscape. Abandoned mills and factories. Broken bridges. Rotting piers. Hard black shapes crisscrossing in starkly graphic depictions of ruin and decay. The photographer had talent. Whoever he was. None of the shots was signed. All but one of the rest were female nudes. Erotic images of a single model, white body caught in angular, athletic poses silhouetted against an even whiter seamless background. In each, delicate patterns of light and shadow played against the model’s pale flesh. All were beautiful, all anonymous. In three of the shots, dark hair covered the model’s face. In two, head and face were cut off from view.
One image in particular held McCabe’s gaze. Here a naked torso arched backward across a large black exercise ball. White legs were parted and thrust forward, knees bent, feet on the floor. Pubis, stomach, and ribs formed a smooth runway rising away from the camera to a far horizon of breasts and nipples, behind where both head and arms disappeared from view. Gazing at the picture, he felt a familiar stirring. Odysseus drawn by a siren’s song. Was he lusting for a dead woman he’d never met? Or was it the wife he hated, yet still longed to possess? Awareness of desire brought revulsion. He turned his eyes away.
The one photo that didn’t show Lainie’s body showed her face, a silhouetted oval, luminous features emerging, seemingly disembodied, from the inky blackness of the background. Her eyes, light blue in life and gray in the black-and-white of the photograph, seemed to follow him as he moved from left to right in front of the picture. He closed his own eyes, not wanting to let what he was feeling overtake him. Like an addict resisting an alluring display of the opiate that once held him captive. Like a dry drunk hanging out in a bar. No. He couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t. Yes, Goff was dead. So, in her way, was Sandy. He knew he had to keep it that way.
Four o’clock. Hours until dawn. Feeling nothing inside but an aching weariness, McCabe went back to the kitchen. Except for the evidence of the search, the room was both empty and ordinary. Cupboards, cabinets, and appliances lined the wall to the right. An oak table with two chairs sat against a single window to the left. A pile of dirty dishes was stacked on a counter above an open and half-filled Bosch dishwasher. A dirty bowl and spoon sat on the table, contents dry and crusted – the remains of breakfast cereal eaten two weeks earlier. It was unlikely Goff would have left it this way before leaving for Aruba. Further evidence she never made it home that Friday night. McCabe squinted at the fridge door. A Concord Trailways timetable, held in place by a magnetized version of Slugger, the Portland Sea Dogs mascot. The 8:30 A.M. departure to Logan Airport was circled in red. He opened the fridge a crack, squeezed his arm inside and unscrewed the lightbulb, then opened the door wider and shined his own light in. Looked like Lainie was a fan of Stonewall Kitchen, a local purveyor of high-end jams, jellies, and sauces. There was also a plastic box of eggs laid by free-range hens fed, according to the label, a strictly vegetarian diet, a half-empty bottle of Vouvray, a bottle of skim milk with a use-by date of January 2, and two cardboard cartons of Chinese takeout. McCabe opened one. The chicken and pea pods inside had developed a serious case of fur. Had Goff ordered this stuff after leaving the office on the night of the twenty-third? No. Cleary said she used her Visa card at a Chinese restaurant on the twenty- second. If she’d made it home Friday, she would either have eaten or tossed any leftovers, knowing she’d be away for the next two weeks.
He closed the fridge and rooted around until he found what he was probably really looking for in the first place. A mostly full bottle of Chivas Regal. He looked at the amber liquid inside. He found a glass, poured out a couple of inches, closed the top. Then he reopened it and poured the whisky back, washed and dried the glass, and returned both bottle and glass to the pantry, exactly in the position he found them. He wasn’t so far gone that he had to start drinking a murder victim’s Scotch.
He went back to Goff’s bedroom, moved the pile of clothes from the tub chair to the floor, and sat. Empty stomach or not, the whisky would’ve felt good going down. Just what he needed. Just what he didn’t need. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. Why had Lainie posed for the nude photographs? Why had she hung them here? If she was an exhibitionist, she was a careful one, exposing herself only in the most private of places. Whose eyes were the pictures intended for? Lovers and potential lovers? If so, why? To arouse them to a higher level of excitement? That idea seemed both ridiculous and redundant. Lainie in the flesh would arouse far more powerfully than any framed image, no matter how erotic. No, he decided. The pictures weren’t for her lovers. They were for her.
He looked across at the bed and saw Lainie, or Sandy, he wasn’t sure which, lying under him, dark hair fanned across white pillows, pleasure skittering across her face, shallow and transitory like cat’s-paw ripples on the surface of the sea. From a vantage point of years, McCabe the auteur observed McCabe the lover’s urgent thrusts, trying always to reach something deeper in the woman he married. Trying but failing. He knew their lovemaking was an act. It had always been an act, but it was an act that for years he couldn’t resist. He looked into her eyes, preposterously blue, filled with love, but not for the extraneous, if sometimes useful, appendage she had married. Instead she focused on the images on the opposite wall. Narcissus at the pool, utterly enchanted with the perfection of her reflected self.
McCabe was jarred from his reverie by the sound of the apartment door opening and closing. Had the searcher returned to finish the job? McCabe slid the .45 from the holster to his hand, switched off the light, and felt his way through the dark to the other side of the room. He pressed himself into a corner between the bedroom door and the wall of photographs. He heard a soft thump, a whispered shout of ‘Shit.’ A dim light came on, leaking under the closed bedroom door. Not a steady light but moving like the beam of a flashlight in someone’s hand. He heard steps coming closer. He held his breath.
The bedroom door opened. The searcher stood there, moving a circle of light across the wall above the bed. He paused on the chair where McCabe had been sitting, then moved on. Seconds passed. A small man advanced into the room, his back to McCabe. He was no more than five-three or -four and slender. No, not slender. Skinny. One thirty, one forty tops. Thinning hair. Maybe the oddest thing about him was that, with ten-degree temperatures outside, the searcher wasn’t wearing a coat. Just a checked shirt and an open cardigan. Mr Rogers visits a murder. He supposed the guy could have left his coat in the hall or taken it off in the other room, but why would he? Maybe he lived in the building.
The intruder had no sense he wasn’t alone. No sense someone was standing less than four feet away pointing a .45 at the center of his back. Most people can tell. This guy couldn’t. McCabe watched as he continued moving the beam of light around the room. He stopped when he got to the nude photographs. He moved closer and gazed at them, transfixed. Then he looked down into the open dresser drawer. Instead of continuing to rifle through the contents as McCabe expected, he pulled out a pair of Lainie Goff’s lacy black thong panties and pressed them against his cheek. Finally McCabe raised the .45 so the guy would see it. ‘First I’d like you to put the flashlight on the bureau,’ he said, ‘nice and slow, beam up. Then drop the panties.’