Body Language
James Hall

For Evelyn,maker of vivid memories

O! It comes over my memory as doth the raven over the infected house, boding to all…

SHAKESPEARE, Othello

To look back is to relax one’s vigil.

– BETTE DAVIS, The Lonely Life

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Her memory of that day never lost clarity. Eighteen years later, it was still there, every odor, every word and image, the exact heft of the pistol, each decibel of the explosion detonating again and again in the soft tissues of memory.

The loop of tape replayed unexpectedly, while she was driving the car, drifting off to sleep, in the middle of conversation: seeing again the boy sprawled on his bedroom floor, his face blown away, hearing the deafening echo.

Like transparencies overlaid, that time and this one continually mingled. The terrified girl she’d been and the resolute woman she had become, inhabiting, forever, the same body.

Alexandra Collins aimed the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver at the rear window of her parents’ bedroom. Eleven years old, a tall, thin child with straight black hair and bangs that brushed her eyebrows. The revolver belonged to her father. It had a four-inch barrel and was too heavy for her to hold in a shooting position for very long. After only a few seconds, her arm began to droop. Not long enough to take careful aim.

The fifth of September. Her father was mowing grass down by the canal where their small wooden fishing boat was moored against the seawall. As she lowered the pistol and held it loosely at her side, Alex watched her father work in the Miami sun, shirtless and sweating heavily. He was an inch over six feet tall, with muscular shoulders and a tight waist. His hair was black and wavy and he wore it longer than most men. When he grew out his mustache, people said he looked like Clark Gable. Alexandra could tell that other women found him attractive from the way they smiled with their eyes and followed his movements even when Alexandra’s mother was watching.

At that moment, her mother, Grace Collins, was at the grocery store and wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. Alexandra was alone in the house. She could hear a drone that sounded like a bumblebee trapped in a glass bottle. It was louder than the lawn mower.

Turning from the rear window, she lifted the pistol again and this time aimed across her father’s bureau out the side window of her parents’ bedroom. The gauzy curtains were open a few inches and she could see the side of the Flints’ house and, off in the far corner of their yard, a plywood playhouse painted white with red trim. It had a single window and a flower box with some plastic roses poking out. Mr Flint had built the house and positioned it beneath a jacaranda tree. It was the neighborhood hang-out, where the Flint girls, Molly and Millie, and their kid brother, J.D., and Alexandra played with Barbies until last week, when Alexandra decided she was too old for dolls. That was right after Darnel Flint raped her.

On television she’d seen men holding pistols with both hands. She tried to remember how it was done. She found a comfortable grip on the .38, then tried to locate the best place for her left hand. After some experimenting, she discovered that by cradling her right wrist, she could hold the pistol steady for maybe half a minute. Long enough to scare him.

The buzzing sound was changing, growing more impatient. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep inside her flesh.

Through her parents’ window she watched the Flints’ station wagon back out their driveway, the kids and parents going off to do their weekly grocery shopping. Only Darnel allowed to stay home.

Darnel Flint was seventeen, a senior in high school. He had long fingers and broken nails and he lisped certain words. He didn’t play sports and he didn’t have a car or a part-time job, and his clothes were always wrinkled. His skin was pale and his mustache was so blond, it was nearly invisible. Darnel’s father was a burly, flat-faced man who drove a Coca-Cola truck for a living. He was extremely religious and he filled his house with wood plaques and metalwork and mirrors with Old Testament quotations that he had hand-painted on them. While he was at work, Mrs Flint drank whiskey from iced-tea glasses and sat in her Florida room in her pink housecoat, talking on the telephone.

The month before the rape had been the happiest time in Alexandra’s life. She and her parents had vacationed in North Florida at a beachfront village named Seagrove, where there were dunes and sea oats and miles of white sand. For the whole month of August, her father rented a wood house with a tin roof and a wraparound porch just across from the beach. The house was painted pale yellow and had white trim. The days were long and hot and she and her dad spent several hours each day building a sand castle beside the still waters of the Gulf.

While her mother looked on, the two of them constructed it on a part of the beach where hardly anyone walked, far enough from the gentle slap of the surf so that her father claimed the castle would survive at least a thousand years. They worked on it all month – minarets and moats and towers, and a complex system of escape tunnels beneath the castle walls. She collected twisted pieces of driftwood to use as barricades and placed them strategically just beyond the moats. Her father christened Alexandra ‘Princess of the Sugary Sands’ and declared the sand castle her official palace.

In the cool of the late afternoons, her parents took long walks down the beach, holding hands, leaving her to add new features to the sand castle. The morning they were to depart Seagrove, her father assured her that her creation would always be there, forever in the same place, exactly as they’d left it. And someday they would return and resume their building project.

Then just a week ago, on the first Saturday after the start of the new school year, Darnel came into the playhouse holding a bowl of ice cream and he told his sisters and kid brother to scram. J.D., a cute kid of five with dark hair, demanded to stay, but Darnel punched him in the chest and he ran off, wailing. As Molly and Millie marched away, they gave Alexandra superior smiles, as if they both knew exactly what was in store for her and didn’t much care.

‘The dog goes, too,’ Darnel said as he dumped Pugsy, Alexandra’s boxer, outside the door.

While Pugsy scratched at the plywood door, Darnel held out the dish of Neapolitan ice cream to Alexandra. The dish was green. Reluctantly, she took it and ate a few bites; then Darnel unzipped himself.

‘This is for you. I’ve been saving it.’

Alexandra stared at his erect penis, then dropped the dish and sprang for the door, but Darnel was quick and got a hand over her mouth. While he clamped her mouth shut with one hand, he dragged down the elastic band of her white shorts and shoved his rough hand between her legs.

As he wedged himself inside her, Alexandra opened her mouth against Darnel’s hand and bit deep into one of his fingers, wrenching her head to the side, trying to strip flesh from the bone. She tasted the tang of his blood, and Darnel cried out, but he did not stop.

The rest of it was fast and clumsy and it hurt at first; then she was numb. The ice cream dish was broken on the plywood floor and a puddle of ice cream melted next to her head the whole time. As Darnel rose up on straightened arms and began to groan, she turned her head to the side and her gaze fell on the playhouse mirror, where she and the Flint sisters had made their first experiments with makeup. Mr Flint had inscribed a passage from the Twenty-third Psalm across the top of the mirror. With her eyes blurred. Alexandra stared at the mirror, and for a second she thought she saw the outline of someone’s face. But when she blinked her eyes, the apparition had vanished.

As Darnel worked to his climax, she turned her head away and let the Scripture run through her mind, a quieting refrain. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’

Finally, Darnel rolled away and lay panting for several moments. Then he told her that from this moment onward he and Alexandra were engaged, which meant he had the right to kill her if she violated their sacred oath of silence.

She said nothing to her parents. Her father was a police officer and she was afraid he would explode and kill someone. Her mother taught high school and had a very stern manner. Several times, she had told Alexandra that girls who misbehaved with boys had only themselves to blame. Girls were in charge. They simply had to be strong and prudent and exercise good judgment about what gestures of affection they gave to their male friends. Flirting could lead to trouble, she said. Be vigilant.

For the next few nights after the rape, Darnel tapped on her bedroom window and stood with a bowl of ice cream in his hand. Ashamed she’d provoked him to such an emotional pitch, Alexandra trembled and fought back tears. She peeked around the edge of the curtains but wouldn’t show herself.

Even after he gave up and stalked away, she couldn’t sleep. Each time her eyes began to drift closed, she felt again Darnel Flint’s suffocating weight against her chest, and she jerked awake.

Then last night, Darnel Flint had been at the window again and his hair was slicked back and he wore a new shirt and was holding a rose. Through the glass she told him to leave her alone. She never wanted to see him again. He was disgusting and mean and he had hurt her.

‘I love you and you love me. This is the way love works.’

‘I don’t love you. I hate you.’

‘Be careful what you say,’ he hissed at her. ‘If you reject me, I might go crazy and kill your entire family.’

She shut her curtains against him.

The next morning when her father went out for the paper, he found Pugsy lying on the sidewalk. His neck was broken and his hips were crushed as if he’d been run over by a car and had dragged himself into their yard to die. Alexandra sobbed but was too frightened to tell her parents what she suspected.

After they buried the dog down by the canal, Alexandra lay all morning in her room and thought of the summer on the beach, trying to revive the feelings she’d had just a few weeks earlier. How every morning she woke to the pleasant mumble of the surf, then right after breakfast ran across the empty roadway to check her sand castle. Dolphins rolled past in groups of three and four; the Gulf changed colors all day, from blue to emerald green, and then to silvery red. Each night, the sunsets turned the sky into immense paintings that the three of them would try to interpret. At lunch, they had lemonade and sandwiches on the screened porch with the radio playing country music, the paddle fans circling. Lazy lizards climbed the screens, puffing out the orange disks at their throats. The air was rich with honeysuckle and coconut suntan oil. Her mother and father were quietly in love. Alexandra was tanned and healthy, Princess of the Sugary Sands.

But recalling it didn’t help. She was no longer that girl. Last week, after Darnel raped her, Alexandra had risen out of her body, and now she hovered above herself like a shadowy haze. She looked down at the little girl with the pistol that was too heavy. Floating near the ceiling, she watched the girl open the cylinder of the .38 and look at the bullets, spin the cylinder as she’d seen her father do, then click it closed.

Alexandra wasn’t afraid of guns. She’d been around them since she was little. Her father had shown her how to clean them, how to put the safety on and take it off. He had pistols and rifles and shotguns around the house and he said it was important that she knew how to handle them responsibly.

Alexandra listened to her father pushing the lawn mower through the brittle September weeds. She felt dizzy and far away. She had been forced out of her body by Darnel Flint and she doubted she would ever be able to return. She would have to live in exile for the rest of her days, forever homesick, forever banished from her own flesh.

The Flints’ front door was unlocked, as it always was. When Alexandra pushed it open and stepped into the house, she heard one of Darnel’s heavy-metal albums playing from his bedroom stereo.

She shut the front door and stepped into the Flints’ living room. Mr Flint’s Old Testament verses crowded the walls and shelves and mantel. Women’s magazines littered the floor; ashtrays overflowed. There was the smell of stale cigarettes tinged with Mr Flint’s English Leather cologne.

She walked down the hallway to Darnel’s room and pushed open the door.

He was propped against his pillows, still in his pajamas. J.D.’s twin bed was neatly made beside his. It took Darnel a few seconds to look up from his Penthouse magazine. When he saw her, he grinned. His cheeks were puffy and white, and as always they seemed to be printed with circles of rouge.

‘Well, well, well, look who came for a visit. My little fiancée. Couldn’t stay away, could you?’

He set the magazine aside and started to get up. Then he saw the pistol and his grin crumpled.

‘You killed Pugsy,’ she said.

She watched herself from above, a girl in pink shorts and a yellow top, white Keds, holding a .38 Smith & Wesson down by her side. She felt giddy and breathless from being so far outside her body.

‘Jesus Christ! What do you think you’re doing with that gun?’

He was kneeling in the center of the unmade bed.

‘You killed my dog, Darnel. Admit what you did.’ She lifted the gun a few inches but didn’t point it at him.

‘Okay, okay, I killed the damn dog. He was getting old anyway. He was a pest.’

She took a deep breath and blew it out.

‘You shoot me, they’ll send you to the electric chair. You’ll get fried.’

‘You’re going to stop bothering me, Darnel.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. Whatever you say.’

‘You’re going to stop coming to my window and you aren’t ever going to touch me again, either.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said, staring at the gun. ‘I won’t ever bother you again. Okay? Now get out of here.’

‘You’ve got to swear on a Bible.’

She kept the pistol at her side.

He looked wildly around the room.

‘This will do.’ He leaned over to his bedside table and picked up one of his schoolbooks – twelfth-grade civics.

‘And swear you’ll never tell anyone what you did to me, either.’

‘Okay, yeah. I swear. I swear. All of it. Every single word you just said.’ He pressed the civics text against his heart.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Goddamn it, I swore, didn’t I? You and me, it’s finished. I got another girlfriend anyway. I’m not interested in you anymore, you little shrimp.’

‘You’ll never stand outside my window again. Say it.’

‘Okay, okay, never in a million years will I stand outside your window.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now when your parents get home, you’re going to tell them what you did to Pugsy.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that. My dad’ll kill me.’

She raised the pistol, supported it with her left hand, cocked the hammer with her thumb, and aimed at the wall a couple of feet beside him.

She heard her father’s lawn mower sputter and die out. She heard him trying to start it. Pulling the cord, pulling it again.

She was very calm, floating high, watching herself, that little girl.

‘All right, all right, goddamn it.’ He put his hands up beside his shoulders. ‘I’ll tell my dad about your stupid dog. Okay? Now get the hell out of my room.’

Alexandra took a deep breath and let it go. She was lowering the pistol when behind her she heard the surge and flutter of water – a toilet flushing.

She swung around and peered down the hall toward the Flints’ single bathroom. As she waited for the bathroom door to open, she heard Darnel fling his civics book aside, then heard the screech of the bedsprings.

She spun back and glimpsed his snarling face, his hands clawing the air as he leapt at her. Jerking away, she slammed against the door, stumbled, and fell to the floor. On her way down, the pistol fired.

Darnel was flung backward against the edge of the bed. After hanging there a moment, he spilled to the floor and came to rest in a sitting position, his legs stretched across the rattan rug, his back propped against the side of the mattress. He was motionless except for his right arm, which twitched.

The bullet had struck him in the jaw and had torn away his right cheek. His bedspread was covered with blood and the spatter of his skull. She watched Darnel’s arm quiver for a few moments. It was as if he was trying to shake loose something stuck to his fingers. Gradually, the arm went dead. And at the same time, the buzzing beneath her skin eased.

She got back on her feet. She felt nauseated and empty and even farther away from her body than she’d been before – up above the ceiling, beyond the roof, way up in the air and the high, streaming clouds. But she couldn’t stop staring at Darnel, at the open place where his jaw had been. In her hand, the pistol hung heavy, tilting her sideways. She saw the blood running down his hairless chest, the angle of his neck as it hung to the side. Her eyes burned from staring, but she could not pull away.

Then she was crying, dragging in gulps of air between sobs, but at the same time she floated high up in the air like a peaceful mist, looking down at the girl who sobbed and was frozen in place, a gun in her hand.

In the Flints’ hallway, there were heavy steps. She stopped crying, but Alexandra didn’t move, didn’t turn from the faceless thing before her. Her eyes ached, but she continued to stare at the dead boy.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Her father, Lawton, was behind her, breathing hard. He smelled of cut grass and sweat. ‘Christ Almighty.’

He stood unmoving for a few moments; then his hands were gentle but commanding as he drew Alexandra into the hallway and pried the pistol from her hand and ordered her to stay put, not to move. He sprinted down the hallway and out the back door of the Flints’ house.

Alexandra wiped her nose and stared at a rectangle of copper that sat on the hallway bookshelf. Etched into it was a quote from Ecclesiastes: ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.’

She looked at the words from the Bible, read them over and over to herself for whatever comfort they might provide, but she had no idea what they meant. She was cold and vacant and the buzzing had completely ceased.

When her father returned, he was carrying a plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. He held it inside a blue bandanna.

‘You stay here,’ he said.

He went into Darnel’s room, and Alexandra moved to the doorway to see.

She watched him step around the widening circle of blood and stoop over Darnel and dump the powdery dust across his shirt. He stood up and dropped the empty bag near his lifeless hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘A drug,’ he said. ‘An illegal substance.’

‘Why do you have it?’

‘For emergencies,’ he said, ‘occasions like this.’

He stared down at the body, the sweat sheening his face.

‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

‘I don’t need to hear it, sweetheart. I can see.’

‘I just wanted to scare him. That’s all.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all right. We’ll fix this. We will.’

‘He killed Pugsy, Dad. He murdered the dog.’

Her father stepped over to Darnel’s dresser and, using the blue bandanna, opened each of the drawers and dumped them onto the floor.

‘But it wasn’t just about Pugsy,’ she said. ‘It was about me.’

Her father drew a long breath and stared at the dead boy.

‘Did he touch you, Alexandra?’ he asked quietly, his eyes hidden from her. ‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Yes.’

Her father tried to say something, but the words failed in his throat and he swallowed hard.

‘Am I going to the electric chair?’

He shook his head and stepped over to her and squatted down to look squarely into her eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not if I have anything to say about it.’

She hugged him and he patted her back as she wept. Finally, he rose and took her by the arm, then drew her away and guided her out of the room, down the hallway and toward the back door.

At the door, she halted.

‘There’s somebody else in the house.’

Her father turned and knelt down to peer into her eyes. His eyes were bruised and misty. She had never seen him look so naked before.

‘I heard a toilet flush,’ she said. ‘There’s someone else here.’

Her father gazed past her, down the hallway, and swallowed hard. Then he rose, walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and went inside. He came back out a few moments later. Next, he went into the Flints’ bedroom, then the girls’ room. When he came back down the hall, he was shaking his head.

‘There’s no one here.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Alexandra, listen to me. Nothing happened here. It’s all going to go away and we’ll forget it and things will be the way they were before. I promise you that. Exactly the way they were. This didn’t happen, Alex. This simply didn’t occur.’

They walked back to their yard and Alexandra sat in the shade of a mango tree, and through the blur of her tears she watched her father finish mowing the grass. Her body felt heavy and old, as if the part of her that had been floating above had stolen all the buoyancy from her flesh.

She watched him, shirtless in the sun, a scattering of gray hairs showing among the dense forest on his chest. He pushed the mower through the tall grass by the canal. And she thought about men, how they could do such terrible things, then go right back to eating ice cream, mowing the grass. She watched her father and tried to picture herself as a grown woman married to a man like him, someone strong and sheltering.

The flesh of her face felt heavy. She couldn’t imagine laughing again, or even smiling. It was the first time in her life she had noticed the dreadful pull of gravity.

A half hour later when the Flints returned home, the twins ran over to Alexandra and began to chatter while they ate their raspberry Popsicles. Alex tried to act natural, listening and nodding. Molly asked her about her reddened eyes, and Alexandra said her allergies were acting up. A few minutes later, Mrs Flint screamed and screamed again, and the girls went flying into their house.

Then the police arrived, and while Darnel’s body was wheeled away, one of the plainclothes detectives spoke with her father on the sidewalk. Alexandra watched from the living room window.

‘Are you all right, sweet pea?’ Her mother put an arm over her shoulder and tried to turn her away from the activity in the street. But Alexandra told her she wanted to watch. She didn’t say it, but she was afraid this would be the last moment she would see her father outside of a jail cell.

A short while later, the police left. Her father spent the rest of the afternoon clipping the hedges, and Alexandra lay in her bed and watched the curtains swell and fall and listened to the snip of her father’s blade.

That evening, Mrs Flint wailed on her back porch and she broke glass after glass against the cement floor. It was that noise Alexandra would hear forever, the crash and clatter whenever she began to drift off to sleep. The beginning of a lifetime of insomnia.

By Christmas, the Flints had moved away. Alex decided that the flushing toilet had been in her imagination, a product of her panic, or maybe just some peculiarity of the Flints’ plumbing, something she didn’t understand.

Her father never spoke of the event again, and though once or twice in the weeks that followed Alexandra was on the verge of confessing to her mother, she never found a way to begin. Apparently, her mother didn’t know. She continued to refer to Darnel’s death as ‘a drug deal gone bad,’ saying it was a lesson about the effects of heavy-metal music and shiftlessness.

1

Alexandra began shooting at fifty yards. She worked slowly toward the four-story building, taking several wide-angle shots of the whole structure. A stucco apartment building with red tile roof and dark green stairways and landings, here and there a coral rock facade. In that part of Coconut Grove, two bedrooms started at eight hundred a month. Sporty compacts filled the parking lot, owned by the young lawyers and stockbrokers who populated these buildings, twenty-something singles with more expendable income than Alexandra had take-home pay.

She got a wide-angle shot of the cars. You never knew when a perp might leave his vehicle behind. Car trouble, panic, even arrogance. A year earlier, after studying hundreds of photos of two different murder scenes, Alexandra had spotted the same car parked at both, a fact that broke the case.

It took her four shots to get all the cars near the apartment. The Minolta 700 SI she was using was motor-driven, had an autofocus, auto everything. Nearly impossible to make a mistake.

Alexandra Rafferty was an ID tech with the Miami PD, photographic specialist. Not being a sworn police officer meant, among other things, that she wasn’t authorized to carry a gun. Which was fine by her. She’d had more than enough of guns. Her only weapon was the telescoping baton she carried on her belt. Her counterparts with Metro-Dade, the county ID techs, were sworn officers, and they were paid even more than the detectives. They carried the latest Glocks, ran the crime scene, bossed the homicide guys around. But not the City of Miami PD. Exactly the same job, only Alexandra and her colleagues were considered technicians, bottom of the totem.

Night after night, she ghosted through rooms, took her shots, and when she was finished, she moved on to the next scene. Hardly noticed. Which was fine. She had no aspiration to run things. That wasn’t her. She had her attitude, her opinion. Had no problem speaking up if one of the homicide guys missed something or asked for her view. But she didn’t aspire to run the show or get involved with the daily dick measuring that went on all around her. She took her rolls of film, sent them to processing, got them back, arranged them, put together her files, and then moved on, and moved on again.

Her B.A. was from the local state university, criminal justice, psychology minor, 3.8 average, her only Bs a couple of painting courses she’d attempted. Some of her college friends were horrified at her career choice. But she wouldn’t be anywhere else. In a cheap blue shirt and matching trousers, a uniform shabbier than the ones the inmates got, working impossible hours at insultingly low pay. But none of that mattered. She liked her job. It made a difference in the world, a modest one perhaps, but essential. And the job kept her alert, focused, living close to the bone. And she liked using the camera, being a photographer who never had to tell her subjects to hold still, never got a complaint about unflattering angles.

Alexandra was twenty-nine and had been doing this work for eight years. It still felt new. Every night, every scene, something different, something human and extreme. From eleven till seven, alert for eight hours. Wired. Just after dawn, she’d take her run on the beach, then go home, still pumped from the night before, and make breakfast for Stan and her father. She’d ride that high most of the morning. Just steal a few hours of sleep in the afternoon while Stan was at work and her dad was doing basket weaving at Harbor House, four or five hours at the most; then by eleven the next night, she was ready to go again.

It was a little before midnight, Wednesday, October the seventh. No traffic on Tigertail Avenue. No human noises. Only the jittery fizz of the sulfurous streetlights. She lowered her camera, stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape, walked forward five paces, raised the Minolta again, and took half a dozen medium-distance flash shots of bloodstains on the asphalt parking lot. Several drops gleamed near the rear bumper of a Corvette with dark windows and a BAD BOY logo. She got a shot of the Vette, its license plate. A wide-angle shot of the other four cars parked beside it. Then she knelt down for a few close-ups of the blood. It was dry now but still gleamed in the yellow streetlights.

She got back to her feet and scanned the pavement with her Maglite. She worked between the cars, found more blood near the sidewalk, a bloody footprint. She took one establishing shot of the footprint from five feet out, then placed her ruler down next to the print for accurate perspective and took one shot, then another just to be sure she had something.

Eyes neutral. No personality, no throb of self. The flat, disinterested perspective of an android whose assignment was simply to see and document. No Alexandra, no daughter, no wife, no bundle of dreams and wishes and memories. Nothing but the viewfinder, the square frame, the footprints. Step by step, moving closer to the heart of the crime.

On the sidewalk in front of the apartment, she popped out the used film, marked it, and threaded a new roll into the Minolta. Kodak Plus 200. From the window of the bottom apartment, a cat watched her. It was a gold tabby with a bell on its collar. As she came near, the cat stood up on the inside windowsill and stretched itself, then slid away into the dark apartment as if it had witnessed its quota of misery for one night.

Alexandra took another flash shot at the bottom of the stairway. More speckles of blood and more footprints. She found the bloody outline of a hand on the wood rail and got a medium shot and a five-inch close-up of it. Clear enough to blow up later and use the fluorescent-light enhancement to get a usable print. She took one more shot as she was going up the stairs. The bottom of the bleeder’s shoes had deep waffle patterns. The same size ten Nikes he’d worn on the four previous occasions.

The killer had walked down the stairway, dripping blood in front of him, then stepping into the spatters he’d made. His fifth assault in as many months, identical MO as the others. Lots of theories were circulating about why a guy who’d just raped and murdered took such care to leave his bloody prints behind. A taunt, perhaps. A wish to be caught. Or some ritualistic fantasy he was dramatizing. The Miami Herald and one of the TV stations had dubbed him ‘the Bloody Rapist’ and theorized that he was trying to show the incompetence of law enforcement. A former cop perhaps thumbing his nose at his old colleagues. Here’re my fingerprints all over the place, my DNA, my shoe prints, and you idiots still can’t catch me.

But Alex didn’t buy the profile. As usual, the media jocks assumed everyone else wanted what they themselves hungered so deeply for: publicity, high ratings. But this guy didn’t strike her that way at all. No headline hound. His whole scenario was too intense, too private for that. To Alex, that blood seemed fiercely primal, like the spoor of some fatally wounded animal, a beast too blinded by its hurt to care about the trail it was leaving.

Higher up the wooden railing was another bloody handprint. Alexandra got an establishing shot from five feet away, then two close-in shots. Good clear prints. She moved slowly, warily, eyes roaming in precise concentric circles, five feet out, ten feet, farther. As she’d been trained to look. Second nature now.

Down the hallway, Dan Romano was smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the night sky. Heavy guy with white hair swept back. Thirty years on the force. Homicide lieutenant who was running the Bloody Rapist investigation. Dan was due to retire any day now. Getting philosophical these last few months on the job, bugging everyone with big unanswerable questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does the ivy twine?

‘Place is pretty quiet,’ she said. ‘You run everybody off, Dan? Your charisma on the fritz again?’

Dan flicked his cigarette out into the night, turned to look at her.

‘ME’s getting his pants on; everybody else is rolling. Be here momentarily.’

‘What do we have?’

Dan gave her a wan smile.

‘Your guy’s been naughty again.’

Alexandra shook her head.

‘You can drop that crap. It’s not funny anymore.’

‘Hey, I’m not the only one to notice. Folks are starting to talk.’

‘He’s not mine any more than he’s yours or anybody else’s, so cut the shit.’

Alexandra checked the settings on the Minolta.

‘Like right now, Alex. How tightened up you are. Stiff-jointed. That thing happening with your eye.’

She stared at him.

‘Yeah? And what thing is that?’

‘That twitch, right there in the corner of your left eye. I’m not the only one to notice it. You got a reaction going on, Alex. This guy’s hit a nerve.’

‘I was winking at you, Dan. Flirting. You couldn’t tell?’

He gazed at her for a few seconds and his voice softened.

‘I don’t think so, Alex. I think this is getting to you. I think you need to talk about this to somebody with some training.’

She shook her head, lowered her camera.

‘Come on, Dan. All the shit we wade through every day, I guess I’m entitled to a goddamn eye twitch now and then, don’t you think?’

He kept staring at her for a moment or two; then he sighed and his eyes drifted off to the horizon. He lit another cigarette, took a hungry pull.

She said, ‘I’m finished shooting out here. You want to show me around inside? Or just do it on my own?’

Dan blew out a cloud of smoke and didn’t move. His eyes were scanning the dark heavens.

‘Tell me something, Alex. I been meaning to ask you.’ His voice with that dreamy edge.

‘Oh, brother, here it comes.’

He drew in another hit and let the smoke drift out with his words.

‘Why do you do this shit? You’re a smart, good-looking woman. You got skills, a college diploma; you could do anything. What the hell motivates you?’

He brought his eyes back from the dark and peered at her.

‘It was either this or a nunnery.’ She gave him a light smile, but he didn’t notice.

‘I’d hate to see you wind up like me. Because you know what I’m starting to think, Alex? I’m starting to think I fucking wasted my life. That’s where I am these days. Standing here, on the goddamn threshold of my golden years, I been running these same laps three decades now, and I ask myself what it’s all added up to. And the answer keeps coming up the same. Not a hill of shit.’

‘What do you want, Dan? Want me to try to cheer you up?’

He looked down at the sprinkle of blood near his feet.

‘It won’t work. I’m inconsolable.’ He cocked his head and smiled. ‘I pronounce that right? Inconsolable?’

‘Sounded right to me.’

‘I’m working on my vocabulary. One of my new hobbies, getting ready for retirement. Hell, I never needed a fucking vocabulary on this job.’

‘Well,’ Alex said. ‘Inconsolable seems like a pretty good place to start.’

Dan tilted his head back, stared up at the sky, getting that look again.

Alexandra stepped into the apartment.

The sectional couch was shaped into a U and took up most of the room. It was a green-and-white tropical print. On the glass coffee table was the same bottle of Lucere, a Napa Valley chardonnay that had been at all the other scenes. A high-end grocery store wine, but not rare enough to be helpful.

Sprawled on the beige rug in the center of the U was a pretty woman in her late twenties with short black hair. She was naked and her slender body had been rearranged. The killer had laid her out flat on her back with her arms hugging her belly as if she’d been kicked in the gut and was fighting for air.

‘Same as number one,’ Dan said from the door. ‘Like maybe he’s run out of poses and he’s starting the cycle again.’

‘Maybe.’

There was a deep cut at her throat, like the others. She was slender and her eyes were open – dark and disconnected.

‘Landlord found her. A week late on her rent. He knocked, walked in. I’m guessing she’s been dead more than twenty-four, less than thirty-six.’

‘Seems about right,’ Alex said.

The other four women had been naked, as well. All the bodies were laid out in different positions, each one portraying another violent drama. The homicide guys had given each a name. Number one, like this one, was known as ‘Gasper.’ Number two was found lying on her side bent at the waist with her hands covering her ears as if she were trying to shut out some gruesome noise. ‘Hear No Evil’ the detectives called her. Number three had given the namers the most trouble. Like two, she’d been placed on her left side with her legs forward, but this one’s arms had been extended in front of her, one at chest level, one arm stretching out from beneath her head, a flailing motion as if she were trying to fight off a swarm of bees. They called her ‘The Swatter.’ And then about a month ago, they’d found the fourth victim badly decomposed in her Little Havana apartment. Her nude body was lying face up with arms and legs spread as if she were floating tranquilly on the quiet surface of a lake. So ‘Floater’ it was.

The FBI examined the photos and found no matches with any other signature killings around the country in the last ten years. Their profilers theorized the Bloody Rapist was creating particular scenarios from his past, trying to reconstruct moments of abuse he’d witnessed as a child – probably acts of violence against his mother he was helpless to prevent.

But that was far too neat an explanation for Alexandra, too off-the-rack. Just as likely the killer had repositioned the women according to the twisted commandments of some crazed inner voice. But these days everyone wanted a formula, a nifty explanation for guys like this. As if his actions might make a kind of sense, raping women, slashing their throats, repositioning them, then leaving a trail of blood leading away from the scene. Like sure, of course, he must have seen his father beat his mother, then leave her in these exact positions on the living room floor, and he’d walked away bleeding from the scratch marks she’d given him, so now the grown-up boy, that poor, twisted son of a bitch, is compelled to re-enact endlessly those traumatic episodes, laying the dead women out like sacrificial offerings to his past.

Alex hated it, the way the forensic-psychology hotshots had taken over, explaining it all, giving every crime a cute Freudian cause and effect. She hated it because the explanations were always more than explanations. Behind each of their clever scenarios was the same suggestion – that there was logic to evil, a reasonable justification for every fucking horror under the sun.

The media wasn’t onto the weird arrangements yet, because so far, everyone working the case had been stonewalling, keeping the reporters beyond the crime-scene tape. If the killer was indeed hungry for newsprint, it wasn’t their job to feed him. And, of course, the second the word got out about those eerie poses, there’d be tabloid crews elbowing their way to the front of the pack, making good police work a hundred times harder.

Slowly, she began to work her way around the perimeter of the room, a full 360 degrees. The light was good. Dan had turned everything on, overhead, table lamps, fluorescent kitchen lights. She had to change film again. Marking it, slipping the used film into her waist pouch. Continuing around the edge of the room to get the complete perspective. Then zooming in for the victim. Pretty woman, athletic. That one-inch incision in her throat, a few quarts of her blood spreading into the beige carpet. Alexandra got close-ups of the wound, the stained carpet.

Across from the flowery couch was a leather wing-back chair, a matching ottoman. Something from a lawyer’s study. Two cheap oils on the walls, sad-eyed clowns and a pelican nesting on a piling – tourist shop trash. But behind the couch was a large black-and-white photograph, a misty Everglades glen cluttered with ferns and alligators lurking beneath the still waters. A guy’s work she’d admired for years. Clyde Butcher.

She’d read about him, how he slogged with his huge camera and a hundred pounds of equipment out into the middle of the soupy Glades. Then he set up his tripod, hefted the camera onto it. Two hours to set up for one shot – all so he could make these huge photographs full of intricate detail. Butcher did magical things with black and white. Made herons and ibises into angels. Put an enchanted sheen on the palm fronds and the saw grass that exposed the sinister grace of that river of grass. Its silence and danger, its holiness.

Nothing at all like the stuff she did – just one color shot after another, stark and standard. Keeping herself out of it. Keeping her mood, her values, her interpretation buried away.

She would snap somewhere around three hundred shots of that particular crime scene alone. Probably over a thousand photos before the night was done. And none of them would be art. That was the skill of the job. Keep it dull. Plain and simple and honest and straight. No spin, no subjectivity. Nothing for defense lawyers to argue about. That was what she did five nights a week. She kept herself out of it. Walked through these rooms with the scrupulous dispassion of a Buddhist priest. Not playing with shadows and perspectives, not stalking, like Clyde Butcher did, that perfect moment when sunlight and shadow and the ripples on the water’s surface were in perfect alignment.

Her job was the opposite of art. Pornographic reality. If she had a gift, it was a talent for watchful emptiness. Standing back, seeing, then getting it all down on her negative – the disinterested purity of fact.

‘You like that?’ Dan said from the doorway. ‘That photograph?’

‘I like it. Sure.’

‘So take it with you. I’ll help you get it down.’

She looked over at him.

‘Who’s going to know, Alex?’

‘What’re you, cracking up? I’m not taking that thing.’

‘Why not?’

Alexandra took another look at the photograph and heaved out a breath.

‘Well, for one thing, it wouldn’t fit in my place,’ she said. ‘It’s too beautiful. I’d have to take down all the other crap I got on my walls. Or else move to a better house.’

Standing in the doorway, he shook his head, stripped a stick of gum.

‘You know, Rafferty, I’m developing a new theory about this blood thing he does.’

‘I don’t like the jokes, okay? Not about this guy. Spare me.’

‘It’s not a joke,’ he said. ‘What I think is, cutting himself like he does is how the guy gets off. Like a sperm substitute.’

‘He doesn’t have any trouble ejaculating,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of seminal fluid.’

‘Maybe this is like some kind of bigger, better orgasm. He blows his load, kills the woman, then slashes himself. And there’s blood flowing and sperm leaking out, and the goddamn freak is flying off into orbit. All the bells ringing, whistles shrieking, lights going full blast, the guy’s soaring out there into interplanetary nothingness.’

She stared at him.

‘Dan, maybe it is time for you to retire.’

‘Pathology boys are saying it’s glass he cuts them with, not a blade.’

‘Glass?’

‘Yeah, figure that out. Some kind of special glass.’

‘Special? How?’

The big man shrugged. ‘I haven’t read the report yet. Just glanced at it on the way over here.’

‘Let me get this straight. The guy holds a chunk of glass in his bare hand, and when he cuts their throats, he winds up slicing himself in the process. Like either he’s totally stupid or for some reason he enjoys the pain.’

Romano shrugged again. ‘Well, I think we can rule out stupid.’

‘Oh boy, the psychobabblers ought to have fun with that.’

She shot the sprinkling of blood on the beige carpet. Got close-ups of the woman’s throat. Just like the four others, a gash with a little wrist flick, like the letter C. But that was for the ME to figure out, the pathology guys, the blood-spatter techs. Alexandra was just a photographer – cold, neutral eyes.

They’d send the blood and sperm specimens, tissue samples, hair and fiber off to the FBI lab, the FDLE, have them run their blue-ribbon tests. And it would all be futile. This asshole wasn’t leaving behind anything he didn’t want them to find. They already knew his fingerprints weren’t on file in the AFIS database or with the FBI. The DNA was worthless unless they already had the guy in custody.

From the autopsies and blood-spatter patterns, they could tell the guy was highly organized, under strict control. The whole event had the feel of a finely tuned script, a lockstep ritual. Same white wine at every scene. Even the same amount of chardonnay left in the bottle each time.

No witnesses ever remembered seeing him arrive. No one saw him depart. Apparently, the guy was a charmer of lonely hearts. All the women he’d chosen were loners, vulnerable women, recently divorced or separated. Awkward and unsure, back on the market after some wrenching failure. Easy prey.

After two sips of wine, a few hors d’oeuvres, he punched them in the face, slammed them to the floor. He was strong and quick, and once he got started, he was ruthless. Somewhere during the act itself, he reached back for his weapon and plunged it into their throats, stayed mounted until he’d ejaculated, then climbed off their cooling bodies. The ME had come up with that opinion, comparing the temperature of sperm with the temp of the body. Nothing high-tech about it.

Then a few minutes postmortem, most likely after he’d dressed and recovered, the killer arranged his victims into the pose he’d selected, and a minute or two later, he began to dribble that trail of blood away from the scene.

Though the sequence was identical every time, the women were all different. No regularity to body types or hair color or socioeconomic background. Either the killer wasn’t that particular or his fantasizing capabilities were so powerful that he could incorporate a lot of different types into his horror show. The only similarity among the women was their ages. They were all in their late twenties.

Based on the very limited evidence he was leaving behind, Alex doubted he’d be caught from police work alone. Probably their best hope was that the killings would someday stop gratifying the guy and his passions would grow so pressurized inside the locked chambers of his heart that the walls would rupture and he’d blow wide open and do something out of character, wild, stupid, clumsy. Or better yet, there was the outside chance he would meet a woman who outmatched him, someone who could block that first punch and answer it with a high-caliber counter-punch – someone with a quick draw and a fast trigger, who’d make him spill his blood in earnest.

Alex only hoped it happened on her shift, so she could take a roll or two of the asshole’s corpse.

The apartment was crowded with cops by the time she was leaving. Media trucks in the parking lot, halogen lights blazing, helicopters fanning the moonlight. Alexandra Rafferty got in her van and moved on to a quiet neighborhood in the Grove, a home invasion with a husband and a wife pistol-whipped but alive. After that, she did a convenience-store robbery on Biscayne Boulevard, the clerk shot twice in the face for sixty-three dollars and two six-packs of Colt 45. As the sun was coming up, she did a domestic-abuse case in Little Havana. A Latin man in his sixties who’d stabbed his teenage boyfriend twenty-five times in the genitals. The old man had to be sedated before he would let go of the mutilated body of his lover.

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