The Dark Room(6)

The photograph showed the woman, this time from the knees up. She was still wearing the black cocktail dress. Her back was against the wall, the nightstand at her left hip. She was drinking from the silver flask, her features caught in a painful wince. Her eyes were focused to her right. Someone must have been standing over there, out of the shot. Cain took the photograph and held it up, tilting it toward the light. He took off his glasses and leaned close to look.

“Did you look at these?” he asked. “All these pictures?”

“I saw everything in the envelope.”

“You understood what’s happening here?”

“I don’t know.”

Cain slipped his glasses back on, then set the photograph with the other two.

“The pills—they were on the nightstand before. Ten, twelve of them,” he said. He pointed to the empty space where the pills had been in the second picture. “They’d be right here.”

“Okay.”

“They made her swallow them,” Cain said. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any idea what they were, those pills?”

“Of course not.”

“You see her eyes, how she’s looking to the right?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think about that?”

“She was looking at something. Or something caught her eye.”

“Does she look scared to you?”

“I guess,” the mayor said.

“Come on,” Cain said. “We’re cooperating. Right?”

“She looks pretty scared.”

“Could someone have had a gun on her?” Cain asked. “Outside the shot?”

“Inspector—I don’t know what you want me to say. I can’t tell you what’s happening outside these pictures. Not what she saw, or what she thought about it. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what they paid her to pose for them, what they told her she was doing. Maybe she thought it was nothing—spread for some magazine, get a little cash.”

“You think it’s staged? That’s what you think?”

“I don’t know anything,” the mayor said. “Except that it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“It does now,” Cain said. “Sir.”

The final photograph in the folder was turned face-down. Cain picked it up.

“I’m telling you—”

“You don’t know anything,” Cain said. “Right?”

“I just want us to be clear.”

“I heard you the first time.”

Cain turned the photograph over.

Now the woman was on the bed. Either she’d taken off the dress herself, or someone had taken it off for her. She lay on her back, her head on a pillow. She wore nothing but a pair of black panties. One knee was bent, so that her left foot was hooked across her right ankle. She’d painted her toenails. The polish looked black, but it was a black-and-white photograph. Cain supposed it could have been any dark color. Her right arm came up past her head, her hand shackled to the bedframe above her. There was no cuff on her left arm, which rested across her chest. If she’d been conscious, it might have been a gesture of modesty, of defense. An attempt to shield herself from the men in the room with her. But she wasn’t conscious. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were slightly parted.

Cain studied her, and then looked at the nightstand next to her. It had been cleaned off. There was just the empty tumbler, the dark lipstick stain on its rim. He looked back at the woman. He’d seen enough death in the last eight years to guess he wasn’t looking at it right now. It was just a photograph, and a poorly developed one at that. But he could almost see the rise and fall of her chest, could feel the warmth coming off her. She wasn’t dead; he was sure of that. But she wasn’t asleep, either.

There was no way to gauge how much time had passed between the third photograph and the fourth. Enough to put her in the bed, to clean the room up a bit. They’d stripped off the dress and maybe put a comb through her hair. She’d taken at least twelve of the pills, and she’d had whatever they’d put into the flask. By the time they took the picture, the drugs were working on her.





3


CAIN LOOKED UP from the photograph. Castelli was no longer across from him but had gone over to the window. He’d parted the curtains to look down at the street. He stood sideways at the window, his body hidden from the exposed slit of glass. As if someone out there might take a shot at him. Or snap a photograph to run in tomorrow’s paper: Beset by a blackmailer, Mayor Castelli peers from City Hall. The problem was only a few hours old, and it was the middle of the night. But the mayor had to be worrying about leaks. The moment he’d picked up the phone, letting someone other than Melissa Montgomery know about the letter, he’d become vulnerable.

“When you read the letter, did you have an idea who wrote it?” Cain asked.

“No.”

The mayor let the curtains fall back into place. He came back to his desk and stood behind the chair.

“What about enemies?” Cain asked. “You’ve probably got a few.”

“Which kind?”

“There’s more than one kind?”