Skewed

by Anne McAneny

  “Sounds like one of the gangs has gone rogue,” I said. “Thought they had an unwritten code that included scruples like not shooting a drug guy’s mom.”

  “Task force thinks it’s this new guy in town, Rocko Mania.”

  “Professional wrestlers taking over the drug game now?”

  “Why not?”

  “You ever wonder how many other people are lying dead and unnoticed in their homes, their absence only noticeable by an odor?”

  “Not really.”

  “There’s this cat, Percival, that climbs the fire escape and taps my window for food. He’d probably be my only hope if I keeled over tonight. I’d be lying there for a week until he shed five pounds and the neighbors would finally realize that that photo lady had stopped feeding him.”

  “It would take a cat longer than a week to lose five pounds,” Wexler said with no hint of sarcasm. “There are mice around, you know. You could be lying there for a month.”

  “You wouldn’t stop by in a whole month to bring me coffee, Wexler?”

  He glanced at me. “I might.”

  He almost ducked while parking beneath Sophie’s encroaching trees. “Is she as weird as they say?”

  “Weirder, and a tad macabre.”

  “Excellent.”

  Sophie opened the front door before we reached it. Dispensing with common courtesies, she nodded at Wexler, then aimed her eyes at me. “Upstairs. I stayed up all night.”

  I glanced at Wexler, suddenly doubting my decision to bring him along. Should I allow him to witness the moment when Sophie’s interpretation slapped me across the face?

  He met my eyes and his calm confidence gave me strength, but who knew what the hell his trip wire was doing back there? Either way, I decided his presence was a plus.

  “My studio,” Sophie said, leading us in and gesturing to a tight spiral staircase, its wrought-iron balusters an unexpected tribute to the male form in all its naked glory. I hadn’t noticed it on my first visit but as I climbed the stairs, cavorting men with metallic members accompanied my ascent. When I completed one turn and faced Wexler from above, I didn’t know whether to resent or be amused by the grin on his lips as he appreciated my discomfort.

  Sophie’s high-ceiling, exposed-beam studio with ample skylights made me forget about the orgy in the balusters. A lovely space—half of it open, inviting, and pristine, and the other half crammed with sophisticated lab equipment, printers, books, and art supplies—probably a good reflection of Sophie’s mind. The place gave off a warm, inviting vibe. But that ended when Sophie dimmed the lights and hit the switch on a projector. The moment I saw what she’d done, all logic and functioning brain circuitry ceased to exist. She had merged the two photos into one seamless image. Staring back at me was my dying mother, her eyes huge and open, in unreserved shock, lying in a near life-size, 3-D rendering of my childhood living room. It was only an artificial projection on a wall—of an image I’d already seen—but my jaw still went slack as I experienced the uncanny sensation that I’d traveled through time and landed in my own past—on the one night I’d least like to experience.

  Wexler instinctively inched up behind me and placed a supportive hand on my lower back.

  Sophie had scanned, digitized, and enhanced the images to a stunning degree, and while she’d mentioned extrapolation, she’d failed to convey the scale and depth. With significant effort, I tore my eyes from my mother’s and noticed that Sophie’s work had made the hazy bumps on the bottom of the second photo both prominent and definable. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to know how she’d defined them.

  Protruding two inches from the wall, fine strands of twine spread out like a fan. They ran from the center of my childhood living room and extended downward, beyond the borders of the original shots. Each strand—and there were dozens of them—was held fast to the wall with a pin. It reminded me of the string method the forensics guys used to analyze blood spatter, creating awesome mini-macramé projects that revealed the distance and direction blood had traveled to its eventual destination. In this case, however, Sophie wasn’t interested in blood.

  Between the bottom of the projected illusion and its newly imagined baseline several feet below—where the twine was ultimately pinned—remained an empty space crying out to be populated, to be filled in with the missing pieces of whatever was causing the bumps along the base of the combined images.

  “Accounting for the warped dimensions of a photo shot at such a close angle,” Sophie said, “its slight downward trajectory, and the measurements of the room available in the county records, I considered multiple human body ratios—such as, from the bottom of the nose to the outside corner of the eye is equal to the length of the ear, that sort of thing—and I analyzed the available statistics from thirty years ago based on the Bertillon system of anthropometrics. From that, I was able to complete the picture for you. Twice.”

  Despite Sophie’s original protests, she apparently did use that arcane skill known as thinking.

  “First version,” she continued, “as it came to me without preconceived notions, and then, incorporating the information and possibilities you shared on your visit. The results are behind you.”

  Wexler and I turned to the large, sheet-covered canvases behind us and waited, assuming Sophie would do the big reveal. But for all her peculiarities, she wasn’t one for drama.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” she said quietly.

  I stepped toward the painting on the left, the echo of my boot heels against the floor emphasizing the vastness of the studio.

  “That’s the first one,” Sophie said.

  I took a breath and grabbed the sheet by the upper corner, pulling it off in a diagonal fashion, wishing I were alone, while simultaneously wishing I were not here at all. I sucked in a breath at the sight of Sophie’s work, but refrained from gasping aloud, hoping that the twitch of my shoulders hadn’t betrayed my alarm.

  According to Sophie’s rendering, Bridget Perkins’s eyes that night had been gazing at a broad-shouldered, tall man lying in a crumpled mess on the floor in a perfectly pressed white shirt. No blood stained him, although the accumulating pool seeping from my mother’s head had branched out into what looked like accusing fingers pointing in his direction. His glossy, brown hair lay perfectly styled in a longer cut than would be deemed professional today. The merest flecks of gray framed the temples and sideburns. Unbelievably, Sophie had sketched a man lying on his side, as if the photo had been taken from above and behind his right ear. You could see the brow, the top of the cheekbone, and the jaw.

  She got all this from a few smudges along the base of an old photo?

  I forced my eyes away and glared at Sophie, knowing she would see anger, if not rage, in my expression. She remained utterly, irritatingly neutral.

  I turned back. Allowing one inhalation and exhalation, I braced myself for the second portrait, already suspecting what I’d see. As I lifted the sheet, Sophie became quite animated in her description, almost defensive.

  “I used my knowledge of forensic facial reconstruction,” she said, “the principles of facial symmetry and lack thereof, incorporating what I could from the body dimensions, and created one possible face.”

  I removed the sheet completely. A striking, albeit distorted version of Grady McLemore’s face filled my visual space. I swallowed hard, my jaw and neck so tight, I almost hoped they’d cut off circulation to my brain.

  This time, Wexler placed a firm hand on my shoulder. “You okay, Janie?”

  “No,” I said, spinning to Sophie with venom in my eyes. “What did you do, look up the case? Search for old images of Grady McLemore?”

  “No,” she said, as if I’d asked if she wanted honey with her tea.

  “What are you trying to say with this? That the second photo shows Grady McLemore lying on the floor, unconscious, when the picture was taken?”
r />   “I’m not saying anything. The photo is.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  I pointed accusingly at Grady’s image. “Because he’s the only one who saw her like this. He made her like this! Unless my grandfather took time to snap a keepsake photo before trying to save his daughter’s life.”

  The more I ranted, the calmer Sophie grew, until she somehow ended up seated on a chair carved from a burnished log with spindly branches for arms.

  “You take crime scene photos, Janie,” she said. “You notice when things are askew.”

  I felt Wexler gazing at me as surely as I felt myself melting into a puddle of denial and victimhood.

  “You’re trained to look at crime scenes with a cold, hard eye,” she continued, “to see things clinically and to photograph what matters and what’s out of place. Your eyes become the jury’s eyes. Your story becomes the prosecutor’s story and the defense’s albatross, or maybe their blessing.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re not looking at this as a crime scene. How could you? You see nothing beyond your dying mother on the floor, beyond your life inside her, and the story that led to this point. You can’t see anything in those photos except your future without her. That’s why you’re denying what’s right in front of you.”

  “I wouldn’t miss an entire body lying on a floor. Those were somebody’s fingers, or a smudge on the lens. How in the world do you get a whole person out of a smudge?”

  “And how could you hope to focus on the outer details of an image when the eyes of your mother call to you like a maternal siren? There’s such clarity in them.”

  Clarity? Was it supposed to comfort me that my mother was fully aware of her impending death? I blinked away hot tears while the smudge savant continued. “You brought these photos to me because you knew something was off. All I did was rip away the blanket you were too scared to look under.” She leaned forward but remained seated, nonthreatening. “In a way, we just handed the defense its magical moment in the sun. If Grady McLemore is lying on the floor, and someone else was in the room taking this picture within moments of the fired bullet, then there was a third person in the room, a person who for some reason wanted a picture.”

  “A trophy,” I said, my voice cracking despite its whispering tone.

  The next few minutes whooshed by. Despite the conversation’s potential importance, I couldn’t recall a single word exchanged between the three of us. When it was time to leave, Wexler led me out the door, but I stepped back to have a final word with Sophie.

  “You’re wrong about one thing,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I don’t look at crime scenes with a cold, hard eye. I look at them my way.”

  “And what way is that?”

  “However I want them to be.”

  She cocked her head as she contemplated my words, the snake on her neck wriggling for an instant. When she narrowed her eyes and nodded, I felt she understood.

  As I stepped into Wexler’s car, pixels swirled in my mind, the enlarged ones that had created Sophie’s magical movie set on a wall, and the ones she had inferred to breathe life into the image of Grady McLemore.

  “A trophy,” I uttered again without thinking. Wexler knew to stay quiet. If the Haiku Killer had been at my home that night, and had considered the mess of a situation another notch in his belt, then maybe he did take a photo to commemorate it. Was that his weak spot? Serial killers usually chose something physical—an article of clothing, a cutting of hair, or even a body part—to hold, smell, stroke, or manipulate, something to invoke the visceral sensations of their deeds. If the photo was his trophy, would he be so demented as to mail it to the daughter of the victim? Were all of his victims’ relatives receiving mementos of their own? And God forbid, was he still active, minus the haikus?

  No one ever knew whether he kept trophies, but I knew as well as anybody how carelessly crime scenes could be treated, how even the lowly photographer could enter a scene, rewrite it, and never tell a soul. The police could have missed a skin scraping or a clipped fingernail—or the one thing that could surely be taken without leaving evidence: a photo. Its only evidence was itself.

  And now I owned it.

  CHAPTER 13

  Janie and Jack Perkins, Age 10

  “That’s where Mom was shot, you know,” Jack said, pointing to a spot on the green-and-maroon Persian rug. “Grandpa was talkin’ to Aunt Louise about it.”

  Janie stared at the spot on the rug. Sure didn’t look like a place for a mom to get shot. It looked like a place to lie down with a cozy pillow and snuggle up with a book. In fact, Janie had done just that on more than one occasion when Grandpa had a fire going.

  She interrupted Jack as he landed a plane on the rug’s green stripe. “So where’s the blood then?”

  “The what?”

  “Mom’s blood. In Grandpa’s movies, there’s lots of blood when people die.”

  “Ha! You’re not supposed to watch those movies. I’m gonna tell.”

  “Then I’ll tell about you sneakin’ extra cookies for school.”

  Jack scowled. Even though he was better than Janie at most things, she always seemed smarter when it came to getting away with stuff.

  “The blood’s under the rug, stupid.”

  Janie backed away, as if believing there was nothing between her bare feet and her mother’s corpse but a few shreds of wool.

  Jack landed another plane and crashed it into one that had inexplicably parked in the middle of the runway.

  “Planes park in hangars, Jack. You’re such an idiot.”

  “Shut up.”

  Janie looked back and forth between Jack’s planes and the spot on the rug where her mother’s blood was stuck to the underside. “Have you seen it?” she asked quietly.

  Jack turned around slowly, realizing his advantage. “Course I have. Who hasn’t?”

  “Me,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was there and all, but—”

  “No, you didn’t. I just told you. You’re totally scared of it.”

  “Scared? I’m not scared of stupid old blood. I scrape my knee all the time. And I squash a hundred more spiders than you.”

  “Spiders don’t bleed,” he said, and Janie couldn’t recollect her spider victims clearly enough to refute his claim.

  She crossed her arms and scowled, desperate for a retort but coming up short.

  “Go ahead,” Jack said. “If you’re not scared, why don’t you look at it?” The grin on his face screamed victory—his sister would be moving furniture and rolling back that rug in a matter of seconds.

  Janie froze in place a moment more, steeling herself for a task she’d never considered before. At her hesitation, Jack shrieked with excitement. He rolled back until he was balanced on his buttocks, his hands grasping the underside of his thighs while his feet kicked wildly in the air.

  “Go ahead! Look at it! Look at it!” he shouted. “Unless you’re too chicken.” He rolled forward again and pointed at his sister. “Chicken, chicken, chicken! Can’t even look at a little blood.”

  “Can, too. Just don’t know if I can move that chair by myself.”

  Jack couldn’t have risen any faster. He rushed over to the velvety chair whose thick legs left indentations in the carpet. He scraped it mercilessly across the floor and shoved it against the wall. “There. Go ahead.”

  He crossed his arms, grinned, and raised his eyebrows so high that he looked like a badly carved jack-o’-lantern.

  Janie sucked in a gulp of courage and stared down the rug like an enemy. Its patterns took on a movement all their own, the lines crisscrossing and dancing until she was sure that something alive—or dead—was rising up from the thick wool stitches. A deep red stripe ran into specks of the g
reen S-swirls until it all formed a nauseating mishmash of pigment. She wanted to look away, but the gyrating, pulsating thing on the carpet wouldn’t release its hold on her. In her mind, it assumed a three-dimensional shape, twirling up like a genie and forming a garish apparition that rose almost to the ceiling. She followed its eyes. They were nothing like human eyes, more like vacuous holes of shadowy evil. They drew her own eyes far away from that hideous spot below. Perhaps the specter would keep going and take her mother’s blood with it. Perhaps it would spare the daughter. And just as she grew certain that she could make the blood disappear, her brother knocked her to the side. She lost her footing and fell on the carpet. Jack’s voice penetrated her haze. “You’re such a baby!”

  A frenzied expression had replaced Jack’s haughty one as he rolled back the carpet, desperate to show his sister the spot. And despite her fear, Janie knew she’d look—and never forget.

  Jack got to within a millimeter of the claimed exhibition. “There! It’s right there! Go ahead! Look!” And he flipped the carpet back in one fell swoop, hoisting the accumulated dust and making Janie choke and sputter as she gazed at a perfectly normal plank of wood flooring.

  No blood. No stain. Her brother had tricked her.

  “Ha!” he screamed. “You were so scared! Are you really that stupid? There used to be a different floor here, you idiot. They weren’t gonna keep bloody old boards around. I don’t even know where she really landed.”

  Janie fled toward the back door, the one that led to the deck. Despite the expansiveness of the room, the walls closed in on her and she needed to escape. But Jack got to the door a split second before her and blocked her exit.

  “Let me out! Let me out!” she screamed, turning back to make sure the thing hadn’t rematerialized. Despite no evidence of its presence, she felt it looming, ready to swoop down to take her to the place where it had stowed her mother’s blood.