The Narrows - Michael Connelly [20]
He left and I heard him bound up the stairs. I took the first photo out of the printer and put it on the desk. It was the shot of Jordan Shandy hiding his face with sunglasses and the Spanish mackerel. I stared at it until Lockridge came back into the room. He didn’t try to sneak up on me this time.
“We made the burglary report February twenty-second.”
I nodded. Five weeks before McCaleb’s death. I wrote all the dates we had been talking about down in my notebook. I wasn’t sure if there was significance to any of it.
“Okay,” I said. “You want to do one more thing for me now, Buddy?”
“Sure. What?”
“Go on up and take those rods down off the ceiling and go out and wash them down. I don’t think anybody did it after that last trip. They’re making this place smell sour and I think I’m going to be hanging out here for a couple days. It would help me a lot.”
“You want me to go up and wash off the rods.”
He said it like a statement, a treatise of insult and disappointment. I looked from the photo to his face.
“Yes, that’s right. It would help me a lot. I’ll finish up with the photos and then we can go visit Otto Woodall.”
“Whatever.”
He left the room dejected and I heard him trudge up the steps, equally as loud as he had been silent before. I took the second photo out of the printer and placed it down next to the first. I took a black marker out of a coffee mug on the desk and wrote in the white border beneath the photo the name Jordan Shandy.
Back on the stool I turned my attention once again to the computer and the photo of Graciela and her daughter. I clicked on the forward arrow and the next photo came up. Again it was a photo from inside a mall. This one was taken from a further distance and there was a grainy quality to it. Also in this picture was a boy trailing behind Graciela. The son, I concluded. The adopted son.
Everyone in the family was in the photo but Terry. Was he the photographer? If so, why at such a distance? I clicked the arrow again and then continued through the photos. Almost all of them were from inside the mall and all were taken from a distance. In not one photo was any family member looking at or acknowledging the camera. After twenty-eight similar shots the venue changed and the family was now on the ferry to Catalina. They were heading home and the photographer was there along with them.
There were only four photos in this sequence. In each of these Graciela sat in the middle rear of the ferry’s main cabin, the boy and girl on either side of her. The photographer had been positioned near the front of the cabin, shooting across several rows of seats. If Graciela had noticed, she probably would not have realized that she was the center of the camera’s focus and would have dismissed the photographer as just another tourist going to Catalina.
The last two photos of the thirty-six seemed out of place with the others, as if they were part of a completely different project. The first was of a green highway sign. I enlarged it and saw that it had been shot through the windshield of a car. I could see the frame of the windshield, part of the dashboard and some sort of sticker in the corner of the glass. Part of the photographer’s hand, resting on the steering wheel at eleven o’clock, was also in the picture.
The highway sign stood against a barren desert landscape. It said
ZZYZX ROAD
1 MILE
I knew the road. Or, more accurately, I knew the sign. Anybody from L.A. who made the road trip to and from Las Vegas as often as I had in the last year would have known it. At just about the halfway point on the 15 freeway was the Zzyzx Road exit, recognizable by its unique name if nothing else. It was in the Mojave and it appeared to be a road to nowhere. No gas station, no rest stop. At the end of the alphabet at the end of the world.
The last photo was equally puzzling. I enlarged it and saw that it was a strange still life. At center in the frame was an old boat—the rivets of its wooden planks sprung and its yellowed paint peeling back under the blistering sun. It sat on the rocky