Mary laughed along with her, and when she finally stopped her stomach muscles hurt from the unfamiliar workout. It's the alcohol, she told herself. There was a good reason she never drank—it skewed her perspective. Laughing her ass off, brought to her knees by a kiss and some wine. And it hadn't even been a real kiss. What would a real kiss have done? she wondered as she took Gillian's arm. "Come on. Let's go harass Mom."
Together they returned to the house.
Chapter 24
Two days later, Mary was in the bedroom of her mother's house, typing up the final pages of her report, when her mobile phone rang. It was Elliot.
"Just got a call from Homicide," he said in a breathless, excited voice. "One of their guys is at a darkroom in Seward. Guess whose name is in their guest book?"
"Hitchcock?"
"Right. The date would fit too. He was there in late October."
She grabbed a pen and a piece of paper. "What's the address?"
"Take 35 West north, get off on Cedar, east on Franklin. It's two blocks south of the co-op. I'll meet you there."
She hung up and turned off her laptop. She slipped on her gun, grabbed her phone and coat, and ran down the stairs and out the door.
Seward was a neighborhood of Minneapolis located north of Powderhorn and just south of the West Bank campus of U of M. It was one of those places like Frogtown in St. Paul, where the crime rate was still higher than city officials and police liked, but was improving.
Mary didn't have any trouble finding the photo lab.
Three police cars were out front, plus Elliot's silver Taurus. She turned onto a side street and parked near a two-story Victorian with a chain-link fence and a yard that had been run bald by the German shepherd that was barking at her.
She locked her car with the remote, then hurried around the block to the photo lab. Inside the door and to the right was a coffee shop. Directly in front of her, curved cement steps led upstairs to a counter where Elliot stood talking to a young man of about eighteen. Elliot made introductions—the kid was a volunteer who worked there in exchange for free lab time.
On the counter in front of them was the sign-in book, open to the page with Hitchcock's name, date, and time of arrival and departure. "I wanted you to see it before we bagged it up," Elliot explained. "We'll send a photocopy to our handwriting expert. The rest will be checked for fingerprints."
"I doubt there will be anything left of Hitchcock's," Mary said.
"I doubt it too." Elliot slid the book into an evidence bag, stuck on a chain of evidence sticker, then signed and dated it. "Now for the fun part."
He led the way down a hall and through a narrow red door to a myriad of rooms and a winding, haunted-house-type maze that was meant to keep light from the developing and enlargement areas without the hassle of doors.
The overhead white lights were on, and police personnel were sifting through boxes of poor-quality photos that had been abandoned by patrons. With gloved hands, two women held strips of developed negatives to the light. Others went through trash containers.
"Ever taken a darkroom class?" Elliot asked.
"No."
"When it's dark in here, and there's nothing on but the red lights, it can be hard to keep track of all your prints and negatives. Especially if there are a lot of people using the lab at one time. It was a full house the day Hitchcock was here. One person for every enlarger."
"But wouldn't the others in the room have noticed his photos?"
"Not necessarily. He may have only made a contact sheet. The photos would have been too small for anyone to see. Or he could have kept his paper upside down in the developing bath. And if he was only taking pictures of half-nude girls, maybe nobody would think anything of it anyway. You know how artists are. The body is a work of art and all that."
Mary nodded, thinking darkly of Sebastian Tate. "What about fingerprints?"
"Crime lab says it's been too long and too much traffic through here to bother."
"Okay, where do you need me?"
One of the women working with the negatives offered her a strip. "This is the most tedious job," she said apologetically. "Here—" She handed her a small magnifier. "This helps."
Mary took a seat near a lamp, turned it on, and got busy. "Family vacation to Disney World." She groaned. "Why would somebody want black-and-whites of a vacation to Disney World?"
"People do weird things," Elliot said. "As you well know."
"Right."
It didn't take her long to go through the strip of thirty-six. There was the castle. There was the ever annoying It's a Small World.
"What are you smiling about?" Elliot asked, sitting across from her, a negative strip in his hand.
"I was thinking about a trip we took to Disney World. Gillian must have gone on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride six times."
"I heard they closed that," Elliot said, his voice distracted as he concentrated on his own negatives.
"No!" Mary couldn't believe it.
"Not exciting enough or something."
"Closed Mr. Toad's Wild Ride? That's sacrilegious!"
Others got into the conversation, the way people do when working on something monotonous. One person admitted she thought it was past time for the ride to go, and two others agreed.
"Gillian will be devastated." Mary marked the negative strip with a small piece of white tape to show it had been examined. She hung it back up in the drying closet and pulled out another strip.
"I think I may have found something," said one of the investigators who'd been sifting through the trash. He held up a piece of a negative with a pair of tweezers. He moved closer to the light. "It's a woman, anyway. At least partially nude."
"Let's get a print."
They shut off the white lights and turned on the red overheads. Elliot set the negative up in the enlarger. "Anybody see any paper around?" he asked, opening drawers.
"Here—" Someone handed him a black package. "Feels like glossy."
"That'll be fine. Just so it's not fiber, or something that takes too long to develop." He opened the light- safe sleeve, slid out a contact sheet and placed it in the holder, glass on top. "I'm just going to guess on the time. Six seconds is middle of the road and should give us a readable image." He flipped the toggle switch on the timed light. When it automatically clicked off, he lifted the glass, carried the blank white paper to the solution area, and slid it into the developing tray. The group crowded around as the image slowly materialized.
It turned out to be a close-up of a woman from her navel to her thighs, nude, pubic hair exposed. After waiting a minute and a half, Elliot picked up the eight- by-ten with wooden tongs, dropped it into the adjoining stop bath, and then followed with the rinse.
"Turn the lights back on, and let's keep looking," he said. "Maybe we can find the other pieces."
Four hours later, they'd gone through the trash in the entire building, plus the Dumpster in the alley. Elliot called the research department and explained the situation. "I need you to find the name of the landfill where Gabe's Garbage takes their trash. Then get some people out there to go through it if it's in any way feasible."
The person on the other end must not have liked the sound of that.
"I don't know," Elliot said with obvious irritation. "Get some protective gear from the toxic waste crew or something. Listen, on NPR I heard about a guy who flew back home, found out where his trash had been taken, went to the landfill, and rescued his son's teddy bear, so I know it can be done." With that, he hung up.
"What about a trip to Holly Lindstrom's?" Mary asked. "She should be home from school by now."
"You read my mind. And what about your sister? It sounds like she and Holly got along pretty well. Maybe we should pick her up on the way."
"I'll give her a call."
"You can leave your car here," Elliot said as they left the building. "We'll get it later."
Mary got in touch with Gillian, catching her at home. Since her apartment was only a few miles away, they swung by and picked her up.
Gillian was waiting at the door. As soon as Elliot pulled into the driveway, she locked her house and hurried to the car, quickly sliding into the backseat. "I called Holly," she said breathlessly, slamming the door as Elliot backed up. "She's home. I told her we'd be there in a half an hour. Where's the photo?"
Mary passed it over the seat, and Gillian settled back to examine it. After a few moments, she said, "There's no way of knowing if it's her, is there?"
"That's why we're hoping Holly can shed some light on the mystery," Mary said. "I know she said he took photos of her."
"We can get a specialist to blow up the print," Elliot said. "If you look closely at the top and bottom edge, you can see a sliver of fabric. Maybe we can find a match."
"I sent the negative to the lab. They're going to do everything they can to it."
"You said Hitchcock's name was on the sign-in book?" Gillian asked.
"Late October," Elliot told her, stopping at the metered light on the access ramp to 35W. "Rush hour," he moaned.
They had to wait through four cars; then he was accessing the freeway, heading to the south Minneapolis neighborhood where Holly lived.
"Do you mind if I speak to her by myself?" Gillian asked. "Poor kid. She was pretty upset when I called her. She's trying to put this behind her, and now I'm going to show her a nude picture that might be of her."
"We were thinking it would be better if you talked to her alone," Mary said. "It will be embarrassing enough for her without having an audience. Put it in here." Mary handed her a large manila envelope. Gillian slid the print inside.
Traffic was stop and go. Because of rush hour, it took them longer to reach Holly's than Gillian had thought. They were ten minutes late by the time she knocked on the door.
Holly answered. She and Gillian embraced; then Gillian took a step back, her hands on Holly's arms. "Are your parents home from work?"
Holly shook her head. "Not yet."
"Would you like to wait until they get back?"
"No! I was all worried they'd get home before you got here. I don't want them to see it. Not now, anyway. And what if it's not even me? Then they wouldn't have to see it at all."
"Okay. Are you ready? Here—let's go sit down on the couch."
They moved over to the couch, sitting side by side. Gillian handed Holly the envelope.
Holly opened the package and slipped the photo out, leaving one end still inside the envelope in case she had to quickly hide it.
She stared at it for a long time.
"Well?" Gillian asked.
"I don't know."
"Is there a chance that it could be you?"
"Well... yeah. Yeah, it could be. But I don't know. I mean, it's somebody's crotch. It could be anybody's crotch."
"Look at it carefully and ask yourself if there's anything about it that tells you it can't be you."
She continued to stare at it, then finally shoved it back inside the envelope. "No."
"Okay," Gillian said. "That's all we wanted to know."
Holly handed the photo over. "I suppose that's going to be passed around all over the place," she said uneasily.
"It's evidence. Some experts are going to enlarge it so they can compare the fabric in the photo to the clothes you were wearing the night you were found."
"Enlarge it? Oh my God. Do they have to?" Holly began to nervously jiggle her knee.
"They aren't going to be looking at you—or whoever it is. And it might not be you at all. They're going to be looking at the fabric. That's all they'll care about."
"Most of them, sure. But there's always going to be somebody in the bunch who'll make a joke out of it."
Unfortunately, that was true.
Her knee moved faster. "They'll blow it up to the size of a billboard and slap it on a wall. Or it will end up on one of those games where you guess what the enlarged object is. Is this a Brillo pad magnified a hundred times? Is it an extreme close up of a moon rock? No, it's Holly Lindstrom's crotch!"
Gillian laughed, and a moment later Holly joined her, a little manic at first, but then she began to calm down. "Hey—how would you like to come to my place this weekend?" Gillian asked.
"You mean, stay over?"
"Yeah. We can rent some comedies or whatever. We can hang out and talk."
"Yeah, cool!"
They quickly made their plans, and then Gillian was joining Elliot and Mary in the car.
"Well?" Elliot asked as he backed out of the driveway.
"She doesn't know," Gillian said. "But there's nothing about the photo that ruled her out either. And believe me, she was looking because she didn't want it to have anything to do with her."
"That's all we could have expected," Mary said. "Either a no, or a it's possible. I had an idea while we were sitting here. Take me back to my car and the photo lab. I want to talk to the kid at the check-in desk. I started thinking about a woman I used to know who hated to pay for trash pickup, so she would bag up her garbage and drive behind grocery and discount stores and toss it in their Dumpsters."