To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “No, no, no, no.”

  Infante had slid down in his chair, his posture so bad that his chin was almost on the table. Lenhardt realized that his own shoulders were hunched and rounded, and it was only 10:00 A.M. Mrs. Delacorte—Michael—was exhausting, a reminder of the old adage that no matter how beautiful a woman was, someone, somewhere, was tired of her.

  “So you can’t help us link Perri to your gun?”

  “Oh, no. That I can definitely do.” She pulled a slender silver rectangle from her purse. “About ten days ago, I found this.”

  “It’s a camera,” Infante said. Lenhardt had thought it was a cigarette case.

  “I know that. But look at the photos.”

  Infante, the more technologically inclined of the two of them, took the camera and began scrolling through the display. “Baby in high chair. Baby at zoo. Baby at zoo.”

  “Oh, I forgot there were some photographs of Malcolm there.”

  Lenhardt looked over Infante’s shoulder. The boy was huge, plump and pink-cheeked and smiling. If Lenhardt didn’t know otherwise, he would have assumed he was freakishly healthy, not a child whose very DNA was wired against him.

  “Baby, baby—whoa!”

  It was a photograph of a thin, dark-haired girl, wearing an emerald green bra and panties while holding a gun, by all appearances the same .22 recovered at the scene.

  “Perri,” Mrs. Delacorte said. “In my underwear.”

  “Who took these photos?”

  “Now, that,” she said, “is the ten-million-dollar question.”

  Lenhardt almost literally braced himself on the table between them. He hadn’t liked Delacorte, but he hadn’t picked up a pervert vibe from the guy. Okay, the girl was eighteen, technically legal, not pedophile stuff, but it still disgusted him. Maybe Jessica would be better off getting a mall job when she was old enough to work. Even if the father of the house wasn’t some sicko, Lenhardt wasn’t sure he wanted Jessica free to roam another household. Look what this one girl had found—lingerie, a digital camera, a gun. And that’s just what they knew so far. There could have been more. Unlocked liquor cabinets, drugs, legal or not. How could he control for that? Lenhardt’s wife didn’t know it, but before he allowed Jessica to go on sleepovers, he ran the parents through all the state and national criminal checks.

  “So enlighten us,” Lenhardt said. “Because we don’t have ten million dollars, and we don’t have all the time in the world.”

  “Maybe my husband didn’t always work late. Maybe he sneaked home early on some Thursday afternoons.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I mean, I can’t prove anything, which is utterly, utterly unfortunate,” Mrs. Delacorte continued. “You see, with a digital camera, there’s just no way to establish what my lawyer calls ‘provenance.’ Date and time—yes. This photo was taken on May third. But can I prove who clicked the shutter? No.”

  “What?” Infante said, although he knew full well what the woman meant. He was just having trouble catching up, now that she was finally on topic.

  “There’s no way to prove who took the photos. It’s my camera, after all. Besides, digital photos can be altered. They were of no use to my lawyer.”

  “But your husband—”

  “Oh, he would just deny everything. I haven’t even bothered to show this to him. The only person who can tell us what happened is Perri, and she’s probably going to die, which is too bad.”

  “Too bad that she might die or too bad that she can’t talk?”

  “Why, both, of course.”

  Had the husband’s surprise about the gun and his ignorance about the baby-sitter been genuine? Lenhardt thought so at the time. In fact, the guy had seemed unnerved to learn that his wife had a weapon, and now that Lenhardt had met her, he could see his point. Discovering in hindsight that you had dared to close your eyes when this lunatic had a gun at hand was no small thing.

  “Does it have a timer?” Infante asked of the camera, turning it around and examining it. “Can it be set so someone can take a photo of herself?”

  “I’m not big on reading instructions,” Mrs. Delacorte said airily. That must be one of the perquisites of beauty, Lenhardt thought, not reading instructions because someone else would do such things for you—read your instructions, carry your packages, waive your speeding tickets, assemble your furniture. Then again, Mrs. Delacorte probably didn’t have the kind of furniture that needed to be assembled. At least, not during her marriage to Mr. Delacorte.

  “You said you found this ten days ago. The shooting happened five days ago.”

  “Ten days, five days, whatever.” She didn’t get the point he was making, didn’t get it at all. “I needed to consult my lawyer, of course. He’s the one who told me it would be impossible to prove that Stewart took them, so we shouldn’t show it to Stewart’s lawyer.”

  “I’m just not sure,” Lenhardt said, “why that was your primary concern. You knew about the shooting, right? And that your old baby-sitter was involved? Didn’t you think the police would want to know you had a dated, timed photograph of her with the gun that she apparently used?”

  “Well…there are liability issues. Right?” She sounded like someone guessing on a multiple-choice test, throwing out a term she had heard but not quite understood. “I mean, yes, I found the photo, but I didn’t see any urgency.”

  “The law requires that you report a stolen firearm ASAP. You had a photo of an eighteen-year-old girl posing with your gun, a gun you knew had been missing for several weeks. If you’d come in here last week instead of today—”

  “But I couldn’t know, from a photo, what she planned to do. It was taken in my home—I recognize the maple drawers of my walk-in closet—so I don’t even know for a fact that she took the gun. I thought she was just acting, playing a part. Acting for someone else’s benefit, don’t you think? She probably meant to erase it and forgot, or didn’t realize there was one photo left on the camera.”

  “We don’t sit here and make up stuff that might be true,” Lenhardt said, angry and out of patience. “We try to establish what is factual, what really happened.”

  “What if my husband asked Perri to do it? I saw that on a Law & Order once.” The way this woman’s brain worked, it was like those science fiction movies Jason loved so much, where people moved in defiance of gravity. Up, down, sideways.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A man was having an affair with his stepdaughter, and he convinced her to shoot her own mother. Only maybe…I think there was another twist, and it turned out it was the girl’s idea. Or, no, that was the one about the private school—”

  “Mrs. Delacorte, we’ve never even established that your husband knew the Kahn girl, much less the victim. He couldn’t even pick Perri’s name out of a list or describe her to us.”

  “He knew Dale Hartigan.”

  But Delacorte had readily admitted as much to Lenhardt.

  “I know. I talked to your husband Sunday.”

  Her worried look told him that she hadn’t known that. “You can’t believe a word he says. He’s the most horrible liar.”

  “Be that as it may, to your knowledge, your husband doesn’t know the victim, has a cordial relationship with her father—or did, at least, before this happened—and may never have even spoken to your baby-sitter. Meanwhile this is your digital camera, your gun.”

  “Your underwear,” Infante put in. “I mean—that’s what you said.”

  Mrs. Delacorte nodded, as if she had been complimented. “Yes. And I’m just trying to be helpful. You are free to use this information in any way you deem necessary if it will help you in your investigation of this horrible tragedy. Give it to the state’s attorney, even release it to the press.”

  Release it to the press? To what purpose? To what publication? Lenhardt finally understood why this good citizen had come forward.

  “And, maybe, it would help you, too, to have this photo in circulation? I mean, it’s not admissible in your
divorce, but if it were part of a homicide investigation, someone might leak it to the Beacon-Light. What can’t be proven in court can still be potent in a divorce.”

  She lifted her chin, a grand-lady mannerism that didn’t really suit her. “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But you hope that your husband does, even if you can’t prove it. Me, I’m now more convinced than ever that your husband doesn’t know anything about this. How do we know that you didn’t take this photo, just to cause all this trouble? Took the photo, then gave Perri Kahn the gun, as a parting gift, to do with as she pleased?”

  “That’s just ridiculous. I’m not exactly inclined that way.” Toward women? Toward blackmail? Toward arming adolescents? Lenhardt waited, but Mrs. Delacorte didn’t elaborate. Instead she rose and held out her hand for the camera, but Infante shook his head, closing his fist around it. She left the room with the same rushed flutter with which she had arrived.

  “Tempting,” Lenhardt said.

  “Her?”

  “No, erasing this photo just to get back at her. But at least we have it for now and the time stamp is a good break for us.”

  “I’m sure she’s downloaded a few versions for her own files, not to mention her lawyer’s. Someone took it, by the way. The composition is too sure for it to be a set-and-run-around.”

  “You sound as if you have some experience in the field.”

  Infante smiled. “Digital technology has changed the world. Why do you think all these girls keep getting caught doing stupid shit on home video? It’s the false sense of security created by an image that can be instantly wiped out. They forget the flip side—that it can just as easily be uploaded to the Internet. Hell, you can send photos like this on a cell phone now.”

  “So does it matter?”

  “Only in a long-term relationship. Because then there are all sorts of trust issues if other people see it.”

  “No, I mean, does the photo matter? Should we care who took it? If there’s a person on the other side of the camera, then there’s someone who knew she had access to a gun. All the research says a school shooter almost always tells someone before bringing a gun to school. If she vamped with the gun in front of someone, maybe she also told her photographer what she was thinking. Maybe she had an accomplice.”

  “The Patel girl,” Infante said, taking the camera from him. “Only if this was some sort of conspiracy between them, how does Perri Kahn end up near death in Shock Trauma while Josie Patel is hobbling around with an injury that could sideline her scholarship?”

  “Some sort of bizarre suicide pact?” But Lenhardt had never heard of two girls, much less three, planning such a thing. A girl and a boy, yes. But two girls with a handgun—very strange.

  Infante held the photo out at arm’s length, then shook his head.

  “What?”

  “She’s got no shape at all. What a waste of underwear.”

  Lenhardt considered the way men would start judging his daughter, the way they probably did already, young as she was. He thought of boys in schoolrooms, ranking girls, noticing which ones were developing and which ones weren’t—and punishing them all. He envisioned men watching his daughter walk down the street in a few years, reducing her to her parts. He thought of the creeps who got excited looking at little kids, guys who would get off at the sight of Malcolm Delacorte, the monster baby, taking a bath. The night had a thousand eyes, as the old song had it. Somewhere—at church, on an athletic field, in a shopping mall—his daughter had already been assessed by someone. Assessed and found wanting.

  Or, worse yet, found desirable.

  “You’re such an asshole, Infante.”

  27

  In the thirty-five years since Thornton Hartigan had first fixed his gaze on the farms and undeveloped acres that would become Glendale, civilization had marched toward the area just as he had prophesied. Roads were wider and smoother. Several large grocery chains now vied for customers, and there were two Starbucks. The nearest mall, after a flirtation with bankruptcy, was retooling itself as an upscale shopping destination. Just adjacent there was a multiplex with stadium seating and enough screens to allow the occasional art film to lose money.

  But decent restaurants continued to elude this part of the valley. The usual suspects—the fried-cheese franchises, as Dale thought of them—were represented. But the only high-end places were old-fashioned relics, throwbacks to a day when people took Sunday drives in order to stuff themselves on crab imperial. When Dale had lived here, the lack of good restaurants had not bothered him so much, but after four years in the city, when Baltimore was suddenly enjoying a mild culinary renaissance, he was spoiled. Dale regretted every meal he was forced to consume in Glendale. And given that he had come out every week, sometimes twice a week, for dinner with Kat, he had logged more than his share of time at Applebee’s and Chili’s and Bertucci’s. He knew it was decadent, caring so much about food. An educated palate actually increased one’s ratio of disappointments, for as one grew more sophisticated, fewer meals met one’s expectations. Still, Dale could not bear eating crap.

  Which was how he rationalized making Peter Lasko come to meet him in the city for breakfast at the Blue Moon Café in Fells Point, one of Dale’s favorites. The fare was wonderful, old-fashioned comfort food with a twist. But Dale also wanted a meeting on his own turf, a place where the waitresses knew and fussed over him. Three years ago, when he had tracked Peter down at the Glendale pool and taken him out for a sandwich at the local Dairy Queen, he had felt old and pasty, out of place among all those tanned young people. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  Yet it was apparent from the moment Peter Lasko sat down that waitresses did not need to know him to pay special attention. Apparently he was that good-looking, although Dale would never be able to see it.

  “Nice,” the boy said, glancing around the narrow rowhouse. Man, Dale corrected himself. He was a man now. Technically. Old enough to drink and vote, and more than old enough to go to war, although the Peter Laskos of the world didn’t have to worry about that.

  “You can’t get in here on the weekends,” Dale said. “But I think it would lose a lot of its charm if it expanded to a larger space. It has only one flaw.” He lowered his voice. “The coffee’s the usual overscorched brew. That’s why I bring my own, from the Daily Grind.” He tapped his thermal cup. “Technically not allowed. But I’m a favored customer.”

  “Outlaw coffee, huh?” Kat had made a similar joke about her father’s fussiness when he brought her here. Shit—Dale again felt the waves of grief, not unlike nausea, except these seemed to get stuck in his throat and stay there. He did not want to break down. Not here, not in front of this boy.

  “I hear,” he said, moving to a subject that he knew the boy would like, “that you’ve scored quite a success for yourself, right out of the gate. A major motion picture.”

  “Well, it’s a Miramax film. They don’t carry the artistic cred they once did, but it’s still a big deal. Of course, I’m not the star, far from it. But it’s twelve days’ work, and I play the star’s brother.”

  He threw out a name that meant nothing to Dale, who nevertheless widened his eyes as if impressed. Dale couldn’t remember the last time he had been to a movie theater, or even watched a film straight through on cable. Who had two hours to sit in one place doing only one thing? That was one of the unexpected sides of Susannah, her devotion to certain programs, and, stranger still, her belief that they connected her to others. Television was church for her generation. She and Kat had bonded over that HBO show Sex and the City, which Dale found appalling. It was porno without the money shots, although the girls incongruously kept their bras on while fucking.

  “Will you film around here or in Pennsylvania?”

  “Toronto. More bang for the Canadian buck. Besides, even though it’s called Susquehanna Falls, it’s supposed to be set in some vaguely generic city, like in Miller’s Crossing. We don’t want the audience to know exac
tly where they are, or even what year it’s set in. The sense of dislocation is key to the experience.”

  Dale imagined a director or writer or someone else connected to the movie saying these exact words to the boy, who had absorbed them earnestly and now repeated them on faith. Yes, he was just the kid for the job Dale had in mind.

  “So you’ve got the world by the balls and you decided to kill some time in little old Glendale?”

  “I had four weeks off. It’s not really enough time to do anything. Besides—” There was that raffish grin again. “The money hasn’t started rolling in yet. My rent in New York is manageable, but it’s an expensive city, just sucks the ducats out of your pocket, so I went ahead and sublet my place. And my mom’s the best cook I know.”

  Ducats. Even Dale was pretty sure this was outmoded slang. Kid would probably be talking about “benjamins” in a minute, or drawling a-ight, as if he were some street-corner drug dealer. Dale knew he was being cruel, but such outward pettiness helped keep other, darker feelings at bay. It was easier to feel contempt than think about Kat. Easy yet unnatural, too.

  “Do I know your parents? What does your father do?”

  “He’s at Procter & Gamble, manages people or something. I’ve always been a little hazy on the details.”

  The conversation stalled out, but their food arrived before the awkwardness became too obvious, allowing them to busy themselves with forks and salt shakers. Dale was having one of the Blue Moon’s specialties, the huevos rancheros, and he had assumed that a twenty-two-year-old boy would order something even heavier—the chocolate chip pancakes or Belgian waffles. But Peter was eating an egg-white omelet, no toast, minus the hash browns.

  “They hired me for my lean and hungry look,” he said when he caught Dale eyeing his plate. “I’m not doing low-carb, exactly, but when I’m away from my mom’s table, I try to keep it light. I can say no to a waitress, but I can’t say no to my mom.”