Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [461]
She slipped the book into her jacket pocket. If Garrison had stolen it, he couldn’t mind her borrowing it. She was ready to leave when she noticed a small room off the kitchen. It wouldn’t have attracted her attention except that a faint red light glowed from inside. Of course, Garrison would have his own darkroom.
No. She was wrong, she realized as she opened the door. It wasn’t just a darkroom. It was a gold mine.
Prints were strung on a clothesline that stretched the length of the small room. Chemicals had been left in the plastic trays, lining the inside of an oversize sink. Bottles and canisters and developing tanks filled the shelves. And there were prints everywhere, overlapping one another and covering every bit of space on the walls and counter.
There were more prints of tribes doing their ceremonial dances. Prints of Africans with hideous scars. Prints of strange mutant frogs with legs coming out of their heads.
And then she saw them—prints of dead women.
There must have been about a dozen prints. Women naked and braced against trees, eyes wide open with duct tape across their mouths and their wrists handcuffed. Maggie recognized Ginny Brier, the transient they had found under the viaduct, the floater pulled from the lake outside of Raleigh and Maria Leonetti. But there were others. At least a half dozen others. All in the same pose. All with their eyes wide open, looking directly at the camera.
Jesus! How long had this been going on? And how long had Garrison been following Everett and his boys?
Her hand reached for the light switch without looking to find it. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the dead women’s eyes. Surely there was a light other than the red safelight. She found the set of switches and flipped one, causing the entire room to go black. But before she could flip the other one on, she stood paralyzed, staring in disbelief. The clothesline that stretched across the room glowed in the dark.
She leaned against the counter. Her knees went weak. Her stomach plunged. The clothesline glowed in the dark. Of course, what a perfect invention for a darkroom. What a perfect weapon for a killer.
How could she have been so stupid! Garrison didn’t just photograph the dead women. It wasn’t dead eyes that interested him. The eyes are the windows to the soul. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Was Garrison trying to photograph the fleeting soul?
She flipped on the red light again and took a closer look at the photos, the track marks on the victims’ necks. Over and over again, he must have brought them back to consciousness, posing them, waiting, patiently waiting for that one moment while he watched with his camera ready on a tripod nearby, waiting. Waiting over and over again to catch a glimpse, to photograph that moment when the soul left.
Garrison. It was Garrison and his obsession with that last moment of death.
Maggie heard the creak of floorboards in the living room. She grabbed for her gun. No cockroach was that fucking big. Was it the landlady? Maybe the real health inspector had arrived. It couldn’t be Garrison. He was in Cleveland.
She inched her way to the darkroom’s door, edging along the counter. Another creak, this time louder, closer, just on the other side of the door. She took aim, holding the gun with both hands and ignoring the slight tremor in her knees. Then in one quick motion she kicked open the darkroom door and rushed out, pointing her gun and yelling “Freeze!”
It was Garrison.
He stood in the middle of his apartment over the frightened landlady, holding a length of clothesline around her neck, yanking on it like a leash. The old lady was on her small bony knees, gasping for air, her glasses gone, her eyes glazed over as her skeletal arms flayed and struggled against him. He seemed unfazed by it all as he looked up at Maggie. It was as if he didn’t even notice Maggie’s gun pointed at his chest. Instead, he held out his free hand and demanded,