five-year-old kid with slobber on his chin.’
He was about to say something more when Lawton pushed back his chair.
‘Hands in the air, Frank Sinatra. Get ’em up and there won’t be any trouble.’
He had his pistol out again. Rising slowly to his feet, using his left hand to steady his aim.
‘Dad, now stop it. Come on, listen to me.’
‘Up in the air, where I can see them. And you, young lady, over by the fridge. Hands up, as well.’
‘Fuck this,’ Stan said, and started toward the dining room.
‘Freeze, you bastard.’
Stan kept going and Alexandra’s father lifted the pistol and fired a warning shot into the ceiling. A slab of plaster fell to the floor and milky dust clouded the room. He fired again, gouging a hole in the wall above the doorway.
Stan was on his knees in the dining room, hands above his head.
‘Jesus Christ! Alex, goddamn it. Do something.’
‘When I say freeze, I mean freeze, punk.’
Alexandra stepped in front of her father. The pistol pointed at her heart.
She took a breath, edged close to him, tried to intercept his eyes. Very quietly, she hummed the first few notes of the wedding march, hearing the shiver in her voice, but going ahead with it. Eyes on her father’s eyes, watching them slowly unlock, drift away from the felon he saw beyond her shoulder. His mouth opening as Alexandra stepped closer, singing the notes again, a little louder.
The pistol sagged, came slowly down. Her father took a long breath and looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the laughing gull trapped in the big sanctuary. She slipped the pistol out of his hand and hooked her arm through his and propelled him forward toward the dining room.
Stan was on his feet, fists at his side. His mouth was twisted and his face purple. There were muscles quivering in his cheeks, as if he were chewing on roofing nails.
‘Goddamn it, Alex, the bastard could’ve killed me.’
‘You’re okay, Stan. Everything’s fine.’
‘Where’d he get those goddamn bullets?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Jesus H. Christ. One of the neighbors hears gunshots over here, calls the police … I could lose my fucking job.’
‘All right, all right.’
She went back to the wedding march, her arm looped through her father’s, leading him down that long aisle of memory.
‘I don’t need this shit,’ Stan said. ‘Not today. Not any day. He’s out of here. I’m not arguing about it anymore. When I come home today, that’s it. He better be packed. You’re going to have to decide, Alex, who you want to live with, your husband or that half-wit.’
After Stan left, Alex got Lawton into a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved plaid shirt, then settled him in front of a morning news show.
In the bedroom while she straightened the quilt and fluffed the pillows, she listened to the television in the next room, a reporter detailing the background of the latest victim of the Bloody Rapist. A paralegal with a prestigious downtown firm. Recently divorced, the woman had moved to Miami only the month before. Her family back in Baltimore had warned her that Miami was too dangerous, but she’d come anyway. ‘She believed the travel posters,’ her brother snarled.
When the TV cut to a commercial, Alex went to her closet, took her fanny pack down, and strapped it on. Stepping into a slash of sunlight, she withdrew the photographs and held them up to the light, four twisted hieroglyphs. Gasper, Hear No Evil, the Swatter, Floater. Studying them carefully one by one, as if in that harsh morning sun she might glimpse the crucial detail she had overlooked before.
It was a violation of department rules, bringing home evidentiary material. But she couldn’t help herself. Dan Romano was right, of course: This case was troubling her, disturbing her already-restless sleep. Time after time, she would jerk awake, the answer in her mind, but as she fetched for it, the image faded, staying just beyond her reach, some insistent warning signal that continued to elude her.
Over the last few weeks, she had slipped the photographs one by one into her pouch and now carried them with her everywhere, sneaking them out when she was alone, staring at them, focusing, trying to identify that intangible detail that was prickling silently on the edge of her awareness. The answer was in the photographs – she was certain of it – somewhere in the austere, brightly lit images. Some key, some revelation. At times, she had begun to feel like there was even something larger at stake than solving this particular case, that if only she could see the detail she’d been missing, she would have, as well, the solution to her own unending grief.
These women were not swingers or risk takers. They’d wanted no more or less than anyone else, but in their understandable hunger for love, each of them had opened their doors and admitted the same man into their homes, a man whose savagery must have come clear to them only in the last seconds of their lives.
It was herself Alexandra saw in those photographs. Her naked form repositioned with such hideous care. Eighteen years had passed since she had risen out of her body and hovered high overhead, a loose cloud of energized gas, escaping from the physical self. And even though over those long years she had gradually reoccupied her body, it was never the same again. The fit was wrong. Some inexpressible unease plagued her still. Even the years of martial-arts training – the stretching, the conditioning the deep awareness of her own body’s strengths and limitations – had not enabled her to achieve the wholeness that had once been so natural. She had been driven out of her own body and had never fully returned, and that part of her that still drifted free seemed at times to take up temporary residence in the very victims she photographed.
Staring at their images, Alex could become those women on the unyielding floors of their apartments. As cold and lifeless, as vacant and remote. Those women who had departed now, leaving behind only their latent images, silver-halide crystals in a chemical emulsion adhering to a flat white page.
‘Want to look at the book?’ Lawton stood stiffly in the doorway.
Alex fumbled the photos back into her fanny pouch, zipped it shut.
Lawton was holding the coffee-table book in his right hand.
‘We’ve got to get you to Harbor House, Dad.’
‘Hell, if I’m late, what’re they going to do, send me to the principal?’
She followed him into the living room and sat beside him on the dark blue velvet couch near the east window, the best natural light in the house.
He opened the heavy book and let it rest half on his lap, half on hers.
Big glossy shots of Seaside, Florida, that carefully arranged clutter of pastel wood houses with tin roofs that had been built along the dunes
