Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

  The captain sat back and crossed his arms. “Okay, Al,” he finally relented. “It’s a long shot, but I guess the developing fluid is the only fresh lead we’ve got.”

  “When I was growing up,” Claire offered, both nervous and excited that she may have set them on a new course, “our neighbor down the street was a professional photographer. He was always going to weddings, confirmations, and social events. He belonged to some trade organization—I think it was called the Rochester Photographic Society. Maybe we should start there.”

  “I have a better idea,” Hart said.

  A short time later, the trio pulled up to Great Lakes Film Labs, a gray concrete building located in an aging industrial park in the nearby suburb of Henrietta, fifteen minutes south of downtown Rochester. Hart’s “better idea” had been to confer with an old-timer in the police department’s photo lab who’d assured him in the presence of Nick and Claire that there wasn’t a photographer in the area who hadn’t gone to the people at Great Lakes for help at one time or another.

  They entered the front office, noticing the framed before-and-after prints adorning the walls. Images of brides from the 1920s, once murky and faded, now showed them holding flowing bouquets of tinted pink roses, their cheeks the same blushing color. The brides in the restored photos stared out into the showroom, as if they were looking ahead to a bright, happy future. But no customers were there to see them. The young assistant behind the counter, her arms tattooed with winning poker hands, made Nick and Hart for cops immediately.

  “You guys from Rochester PD?” she asked before either detective could open his mouth.

  “I’m Detective Hart,” he said, displaying his badge. Then, gesturing to Nick and Claire, “They’re just along for the ride. We’re looking for Douglas Lewis.”

  “He’s expecting you,” the girl said, reaching for her purse, “but he’s stuck in the back with a customer.” She pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. “He’ll be out in a second. Do you mind if I—”

  “Don’t let us stop you,” Claire said.

  “Thanks,” she replied with a smile of relief, obviously tweaking for her nicotine fix as she burst through the front door into the sunlight, lighting up at the same time.

  Copies of the company’s sales brochure lay on a table near an aging but intact leather sofa. Claire leafed through one and read aloud, “ ‘We develop and restore disk film, old film, damaged and wet film.’ ” She looked up, thinking there was a deep sadness to the place, as if it were trying to hold on to a past that was forever gone. “Everything’s digital now. I barely remember using film in a camera.” Claire walked over to study the restored images on the wall. They look like phantoms, she thought.

  She was staring at the photographs of people whose lives ended years ago when a door opened. “Film is dead,” said a male voice.

  Nick and Hart turned to face a sandy-haired, pleasant-looking man in his thirties walking toward them. “I’m Doug Lewis. Which one of you is Detective Hart?”

  “I am,” Hart replied, offering his hand, which Lewis shook. “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice.” He gestured to Nick. “This is Detective Lawler from the New York Police Department, and the young lady over there admiring your work is Dr. Waters.”

  Lewis looked Nick in the eye as he shook his hand. “What brings the NYPD all the way up here?” he asked in a friendly tone.

  “It’s actually a local case,” Nick answered. “I’m a friend of Dr. Waters and I’m helping her out.”

  It was Nick’s words—and the sudden strong smell of developing fluid—that brought Claire back to the present. She turned from the photographs on the wall and walked over to Lewis. “I’ve got to tell you, what you do here is fascinating—”

  She stopped as she locked eyes with Lewis. She stiffened, unable to turn away because what she saw horrified her.

  Oh my God. It’s him.

  Lewis’s smile faded as he read Claire’s face.

  “Are you okay, Doctor?” he asked.

  But Claire was so shocked she couldn’t answer.

  It’s him.

  “Where is she?” Claire whispered.

  Lewis shot a nervous glance to Nick and Hart, who were as in the dark as he was. He turned back to Claire. “What did you say?” he asked, taking a step back.

  “Where is she?” Claire said with a threatening edge in her rising voice that scared the hell out of Lewis.

  “Lady, I agreed to see Detective Hart because he said he had some questions. I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “What did you do to her?” Claire screamed, rushing toward Lewis and pounding on his face and chest with her fists before Nick and Hart could react. “Tell me, you sick bastard! Tell me where Amy is!”

  “Get away from me!” Lewis yelled, terrified by her outburst.

  But she kept repeating herself as Nick and Hart pulled her off Lewis.

  “Claire, what the hell are you doing?” Nick yelled, clutching her hands in his so she’d stop beating Lewis.

  “Can’t you see?” Claire screamed at Nick. “It’s him!”

  “It can’t be him,” Hart said as calmly as he could. “He’s too young.”

  Hart turned to Lewis. “You were how old in 1989, ten?”

  “Eight,” Lewis said, the color just returning to his face. “What’s going on here?”

  “Dr. Waters thinks you’re the man who kidnapped her friend,” Hart said as Claire caught her breath.

  She realized she had made a terrible mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the words pouring out. “The man smelled like developing fluid. He took my friend Amy, put her in his white BMW, and I never saw her again. You look so much like him.”

  The mention of the car made Lewis’s face drop.

  “Are you okay, sir?” Nick asked him, seeing the fear in Lewis’s eyes—the same fear he saw every time he looked at his own face in a mirror.

  Lewis caught Nick’s sympathetic glance. “This man . . .” Lewis hesitated, then forced himself to ask, “What else can you tell me about him?”

  Hart shot a look to Nick as he answered. “Not much. All we have is a composite sketch and the fact that he drove a white BMW.”

  “And his name,” Claire offered, “or at least the name he gave us. Winslow.”

  “Winslow?” Lewis spat out the name as if it were a curse. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll never forget it,” Claire said.

  Douglas Lewis looked at them with a profound sadness, as if a crushing weight had just landed on his shoulders. They watched as he turned around and walked to a nearby file cabinet. He removed a key from his pocket, unlocked the top drawer, and opened it.

  “If your memory is correct,” he said as he shuffled through papers in the file drawer, “then I’m the one who should be apologizing to you.”

  He found what he was looking for, a single piece of paper, and left the drawer open as he walked the few feet back to them.

  “Is this the man who kidnapped your friend?” Lewis asked, his voice cracking.

  He handed the paper to Claire, who realized by its touch that it was a photograph. Without even looking, she knew what she was about to see.

  She brought the picture up. Tears welled in her eyes.

  Claire was looking at the man who’d so long ago plunged her entire world into darkness. She glanced over at Nick. All she could manage was to nod yes.

  She turned her head back to Lewis, not wanting to ask him the question, already knowing the answer.

  “His name is Peter Lewis,” he said. “He’s my father.”

  The room in Rochester Police Headquarters was decorated in soft, friendly earth tones, the furniture a step up in appearance and comfort from the usual government-issued crap found in municipal offices everywhere. It was here that Doug Lewis sat with Claire, Nick, and Al. He agreed to tell them what he knew, even consenting to having his statement videotaped on the condition that it never be made public unless needed as
evidence in court.

  They had piled into Hart’s unmarked Ford Crown Victoria for what turned out to be a mostly silent ride downtown. Lewis sat up front beside Hart, directly in front of Claire, who tried not to bore holes into the back of Lewis’s head with her eyes. Instead, she forced herself to stare out the window, a jumble of emotions running through her. She wanted to hear everything Lewis had to say and at the same time was petrified to hear a word of it.

  But now, at the table, it became clear from the look on Lewis’s ashen face that this was going to be as hard for him as it would be for her. He had just learned that his father kidnapped a young girl, who would now be the same age as he was. As Claire was. If Amy were still alive.

  We’re in this together, Claire thought.

  “Are you ready?” Hart asked Lewis, placing the microphone before him.

  “As much as I’ll ever be,” Lewis replied, glancing nervously at Claire.

  Hart pressed RECORD on the camera. “Please begin with your full name and date of birth.”

  Lewis looked at them, took a deep breath.

  “My name is Douglas Adam Lewis. I was born April second, 1981, at Highland Hospital in Rochester. I am here of my own free will and am anxious to cooperate with the police on this matter.

  “As a child, I lived in Webster, just east of Rochester on Lake Ontario. I am the only child of Marjorie, a secretary, who died of cancer in 1997, and Peter, a chemist who worked for a company called PhotoChem over in Irondequoit, which made developing fluids and emulsifiers for film. He always used to say that he was fascinated with how chemicals could bring an image to life. He passed away from a heart attack in 1999.”

  Claire was crushed. She’d held out hope that she’d be able to confront the man who took Amy away from her. Lewis caught her disappointment but continued on, staring straight into the camera.

  “Dad used to travel a lot. Phoenix, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans. I used to ask him what those places were like. His answer was always the same. ‘Someday we’ll go there,’ he’d say. ‘But if I tell you about it now, it’ll spoil the surprise of seeing it for the first time.’ I never questioned him. After all, he was my dad. He knew everything. He always seemed to be a happy guy, and he and my mom got along great.

  “But when I was eight, everything changed. It was summer and there was a thunderstorm that day. I came home from camp, and my mother was worried out of her mind. When I asked her what was wrong, she said it was nothing. ‘It’s got to be something because you look so sad,’ I remember saying to her. I was just trying to make her feel better, but instead she burst into tears and ran up to her room. I started to cry, too, thinking I had said something terribly wrong. I waited downstairs for my father to come home. I wanted to tell him what happened. My dad always had a way of soothing my mom when she was upset. I just wanted her to feel better.

  “So I turned on the TV and lay down on the couch. Dad always got home around seven. When it was eight o’clock, I called his office. Nobody answered. I went upstairs and knocked on my parents’ bedroom door. Mom wouldn’t open it, and when I tried the knob, I found it was locked.

  “I went back downstairs and got on the couch. Next thing I knew, it was morning and Mom was waking me up for camp, something Dad always did.

  “When I asked her where Dad was, she said he had to leave for work early. But she was still upset, so I knew he never came home.

  “Mom went upstairs and I went into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed Dad’s office. His secretary answered and said he wasn’t coming back to work there.

  “I remember hanging up and wondering what had happened. I thought about it all day at camp. But when I got home, there Dad was, smiling that same old smile. I asked him where he was last night. ‘Out with the guys, celebrating,’ he said. Mom walked into the room just then, and she was smiling too. ‘Your father’s taking some time off,’ she said cheerily. ‘He’s going to be spending a lot more time with us now.’ I thought it was great. After all, he was my dad. Why wouldn’t I want to hang out with him?

  “A week later, I was asleep and had a dream that my parents were fighting. At least I thought it was a dream. Until I got up and realized they were yelling at each other. ‘We can’t afford to live here on just what I make,’ I heard her say. ‘Can’t you ask them for your job back?’ My father said he’d never go back there, not for a million dollars. Not after what they did to him.

  “So he found another job, working part-time for the water company. I still to this day don’t know what he did for them, except that it had something to do with monitoring pollutants. He started going away again, saying other cities wanted him to make sure their water was safe. And he always seemed pretty sad.

  “Then, on my tenth birthday, he came home and was very excited. He said PhotoChem had just called, and they needed someone to run a new polymer science division they were starting up, and it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  “He was thrilled. Mom was thrilled. He hadn’t been this happy in years. And then he dropped the bomb. We’d have to move to Canada. Mom didn’t care. But I had a lot of friends here. I didn’t want to leave. But I didn’t want to be Dad’s buzzkill.

  “He left for Canada the next week. He came back almost every weekend. Mom and I waited until the end of the school year and moved with him to a place called Pickering. It was nice there and didn’t snow as much. And Toronto was right nearby. Dad worked there, and it was a great place to go. We were there three years, and it was the best three years of our lives.

  “And then one night, it all changed forever. I still remember the bang on the door. Police in bulletproof vests with automatic weapons screamed at Dad to show his hands or they’d blow his brains out. I was thirteen then and I was terrified. I ran out of the house just in time to see Dad in handcuffs being put into a police car. He kept yelling that everything would be all right. As the car pulled away, he had his hand over his heart, looking at me. I could see him mouth the words ‘I love you.’

  “I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d ever see him.

  “An officer said Mom and I had to go to the police station, too, but we’d be taken in separate cars and not allowed to see each other. When we got there, a very nice female detective came into the room and talked to me. She wouldn’t tell me why Dad was in so much trouble. But she asked me all kinds of questions about where he’d been, the places he traveled to. I told them whatever I could remember. I had no idea what was going on. But of all the things my father told me over the years, the one I always remembered was that your word was your bond so you should always tell the truth. So that’s what I did.

  “And then I asked her to do the same thing, to tell me the truth. She told me my father was in a lot of trouble, that he’d been arrested for kidnapping and murdering a nine-year-old girl from the town next to ours. She didn’t tell me that he’d also raped her. I only found out later when I read it in the newspaper. I told the detective, ‘My father would never hurt anyone. You’ve made an awful mistake.’ I’ll never forget this. The detective looked at me sadly and said that if Dad were innocent, he’d have the chance to prove it in court. That’s when the door opened and a man I’d never seen before, a lawyer whose name I don’t remember, came in and told the detective that I had nothing more to say. And he took me out of there.

  “The lawyer was going to drive my mother and me home. But we never made it. When we turned onto our street, there were TV cameras and reporters in front of our house. Someone had spray-painted the word killer under the living room picture window. Mom told me to put my head down and ordered the lawyer to keep on driving. We got away from there and never went back.

  “We stayed in a cheap motel that night so nobody would know where we were. The next day, the lawyer came back and got Mom. All she wanted to do was see my father. They left me in the room, by myself, all day. When my mother got back, she had her car and a couple of suitcases full of our clothes. I found out later that the lawy
er and his staff had gone back to our house and packed the stuff up for us.

  “I asked her if she’d seen Dad. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I saw him. He’s going to prison for the rest of his life—’ ”

  Lewis caught himself, his eyes wet. Claire felt terrible for him.

  “It’s okay to cry,” she said, handing him a tissue.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” he asked her as he wiped his eyes.

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “I’ve seen my share of those,” said Lewis, a sad smile crossing his lips, trying to make light of it.

  “Where did you and your mother go?” Hart asked.

  “We drove through Quebec, then into Maine. We found an apartment in Bangor, and Mom got a job working for a CPA.”

  “And why did your dad call himself Winslow?” Claire asked.

  “He lived on Winslow Street as a kid, up in Watertown,” Lewis answered. “I only knew about the one girl in Canada he hurt. I never knew there was another one—or maybe others.”

  “When did you come back here to Rochester?” Nick asked.

  “After college,” Lewis replied, now composed. “Bangor never felt like home. I got an entry-level job at the film lab and worked my way up. Like father, like son. Dad loved taking pictures and taught me how when I was a kid.” Lewis closed his eyes, the past washing over him. When he opened them, he looked at Claire. “We both love photography. That was our connection. I hope it’s the only one,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh.

  Claire heard the fear in Lewis’s voice that she’d heard from her other patients whose parents had committed heinous crimes—the fear that they, too, might carry genes that would make them do terrible things.

  “You never married,” Claire observed, noting the absence of a ring on Lewis’s finger.

  Lewis smiled sadly. “I’m only thirty,” he said, looking down. “There’s plenty of time.”

  Claire’s eyes caught his. “When was the last time you went out on a date?”

  Nick and Hart exchanged glances. “Excuse me,” Nick protested, “but maybe you ought to give the guy a break—”