A Fistful of Rain (11 page)

Me with my hand between my thighs. Me with one hand between my thighs and the other over my head, and what’s next, a shot with me taking it from behind?

I put my head against the window, closed my eyes. The glass was cold and a relief against my skin.

So now I’m a whore, I thought. Now the world thinks I’m a drunk
and
a whore.

Graham and Click and Van would see these pictures, they’d see them, the people at the label would see them, the reporters and the photographers and Pete from Christchurch and the groupie from Montreal. Joan’s students would see these pictures, would trade them back and forth in e-mails, maybe print them out, maybe bring them to school. Would they tell her? Would they laugh? Would she see them, too?

“Miriam—”

I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice, I didn’t trust that I could tell him to be quiet, to go to hell. I was thinking of Steven and how at least he couldn’t see his daughter like this, wouldn’t know that the world had seen it, too. God in heaven, even
I
thought it looked like I was doing myself, that damn pose, that left between my legs, my right above my head, I might as well have been arching into it—

“Miriam—”

I snapped back, launched myself at the desk, grabbing past Chapel for the mouse. I clicked in vain, frustrated, tried to find a way to do what I wanted, but I couldn’t make the computer go, and Chapel had to reach for my arm, saying my name again.

“Mim. Calm down.”

I shoved the mouse, stepped back, pointing at the screen, at the third picture.

“I’ll close them—”

“No!” I snarled. “No, no, my
arm,
dammit, my arm, in the picture.”

Chapel looked at me, utterly lost.

I jabbed my index finger at the picture, at my right arm, extending out of the frame. “There!”

He looked from it back to me, then again, bewildered. “I don’t—”

“Bigger! Make it bigger!”

Chapel hesitated, but only for a second, then took the mouse and began clicking. He surrounded my arm, clicked again, and it filled the screen. Glorious full color, my arm.

With blood just barely visible, seeping out from beneath it.

Chapel turned, confused and concerned and hoping for an explanation, and I just couldn’t talk. The only thing I could give him was my right hand, palm up, the bandage Joan had put on me still wrapped around it.

He looked from my palm to my face, still not getting it, and he said, “I don’t understand—”

“Home,” I managed.

CHAPTER 14

There were three of them, from a firm called Burchett Security: a woman in her early thirties who looked strong and intense and never spoke and frankly scared me; a man in his late twenties who reminded me of the sailors who’d attended the Tailhook shows we’d played in San Diego; and Richard Burchett himself, who was perhaps in his mid-fifties, light brown hair a little shaggy, beard and mustache trimmed, in Levi’s and cowboy boots and a St. Louis Cardinals fan shirt.

Chapel told me that they were professional, thorough, and discreet. He told me they knew what they were doing. He told me to trust them.

Burchett and his crew used gadgets that they held in their hands and gadgets that hung from their belts and gadgets that they slung over their shoulders. They wore headphones and waved magic metallic wands. They dismantled outlets and fixtures and searched moldings and pictures and unplugged appliances and utilities. They moved furniture and lifted rugs, and every time they found something, they used a little pin with a hot pink plastic flag on its end to mark the location.

They’d used twelve of those pink plastic flags before they were through.

Chapel sat with me on the back porch while Burchett and his crew did their work, and that was when I told him about my two stalker incidents.

“You were abducted at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call me?” He looked like he was on the verge of a seizure. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I didn’t fucking know you existed,” I reminded him.

“Tell me you at least called the police.”

“They thought I was full of shit. They didn’t go so far as to actually say it, but it was pretty evident that that’s what they thought. They told me it was probably a mugging gone wrong or something like that.”

“A man points a gun at you, puts you in the back of his truck, strips you, and they call that a mugging gone wrong?” Chapel shook his head.

“They wanted me to go to a doctor, have a rape kit done.”

“Did you?”

“I wasn’t raped. The only time he ever touched me was to get me into the truck.” I thought about it for a couple seconds, then said, “Maybe that’s why, you know? He wasn’t about me, he was about the cameras. Maybe that’s what he was doing, why he was in the house last night.”

“Maybe, but then why the whole bit with the truck and the clothes the first time?”

“I don’t know.”

“You called the cops after last night?”

I shook my head.

“You should have called the cops as soon as you were out of the house.”

“They didn’t seem to take me real seriously the first time.”

“You should have called them, anyway.”

“So we’ll call them now.”

“You could, but with the discovery of the cameras, we’ll have the same situation we were talking about at the office. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the media.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then we don’t call the cops at this juncture. We’ll see what Rick finds, take it from there.”

I didn’t say anything, and he went back inside, to follow Burchett and his people around, leaving me alone. After a few minutes I went down to the music room and grabbed the Taylor, then returned to the porch. It seemed best to stay out of everyone’s way.

I played for a bit, but nothing sounded right, and after a while I gave up. Once I started thinking about the pictures again, about all the people who had seen them, and all the people who would see them, and it was enough to start me feeling good and sorry for myself, and it almost brought tears.

But it brought a memory, too, of being maybe seven or eight years old on a late summer afternoon, the coolness of our tract home in Gresham. Tommy, still in his work clothes, caked in a mix of dried sweat and cement dust. He’d bought a six of Coors and a pack of Marlboros, and dropped himself on the couch to smoke and drink and listen to music on the hi-fi, and I was sitting with him, my head against his chest as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

And Tommy had gotten all weepy at the end of the song, and I’d asked him why someone would make a song like that, about something so horrible and sad.

“Because sometimes making a song about something sad is the only way to understand it,” he’d told me.

It made me wonder if Tommy ever had a song he wanted to write.

Chapel and Burchett came outside together a little before three that afternoon to give me the joy.

“We’re done with the sweep, miss,” Burchett told me. “If you want to see what we’ve found?”

“Not if I’m going to be photographed doing it.”

He grinned big. “Made sure that won’t happen, miss.”

“You should see,” Chapel told me. “It’ll help you decide what you want to do next.”

I had several ideas of what I wanted to do next, but I kept them to myself, since mostly they consisted of violence and alcohol, not necessarily in that order. I got off the steps and dusted my butt off, then nodded for them to lead the way.

We went through the kitchen, where Burchett’s colleagues were packing their gadgets into shiny metal containers not unlike my flight case. The scary woman watched me as I followed Chapel and Burchett, and I wondered what her problem was, then wondered if it was that she’d seen the pictures, and so didn’t ask.

Burchett led the way to the music room in the basement, and we started there, working the same path they’d presumably taken in their search. He pointed out each pink flag, even though they were easy enough to spot. It was an alarming education.

One flag in the music room. One flag in the downstairs bathroom, in the medicine cabinet over the sink, so that anyone looking—or grooming—in the mirror would be seen. One flag in the downstairs guest room, positioned so it could catch anything or anyone that happened onto the futon. Two flags in the kitchen, presumably in case things got exciting while I was fixing a late-night snack. Two more in the living room. Two in the master bathroom: one of them angled to catch anything happening in the shower or tub; the other one, and Burchett was impressed by this, set in the outlet between the mirrors over the sinks.

The last three flags were all in my bedroom. One directly over my bed. One in the wall just over the headboard. The last one in the outlet by the bureau, to catch me in the mornings when I picked out my day’s lingerie.

“And you know what the irony of this is?” I said to them, standing in my bedroom, looking at all of the little flags. “I fucking hate pink.”

Chapel smiled thinly, but Burchett laughed out loud.

“Fred says that some pervert pulled a gun on you when you got into town Monday morning. Says he got you into his truck and had you give him your clothes, that right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think that same guy was in your house last night?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure.”

“Any sign of a break-in?”

I shook my head.

Burchett scratched his beard, craned his head back to look around my bedroom again. “You started renovating about when?”

“When I left on tour.”

“And they finished when?”

“Last month, the beginning of September. I’m not positive of the date.”

Burchett looked at Chapel. “That’s when this was done, Fred. Our pervert must have gotten himself onto one of the crews working here, maybe working with an electrician. Hell, he could
be
the electrician. Gives him access to the whole house, lets him wire everything just the way he wants. He probably got a copy of the house key from the contractor or someone.”

“Then why the hell did he do all that stuff Monday morning?” I asked.

Burchett reached for the Leatherman on his belt, snapping out the Phillips head, then leaned past me and began unscrewing the cover to the outlet by my bureau. Chapel and I waited, watching. It didn’t take him long, and he hummed while he worked. Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire.”

When he removed the cover, he pointed to a portion of the wall, just above the lower outlet. There was a black smudge on the paint, a teardrop shape.

“Scorch mark,” Burchett told us. “The camera shorted. He must have been trying to replace it.”

“And if he’d been listening for news of when she was going to return home, he’d have known she was on her way,” Chapel said.

“But he got me outside,” I said. “He wasn’t inside.”

Burchett began replacing the plate over the outlets, his brow furrowed. “Maybe there were two of them, working together. You get one in the house when you come home, the other is outside waiting. He sees you, panics, thinks he can’t let you go inside. That would explain why he dropped you off here when he was through. All he wanted to do was keep you occupied for an hour or so.”

“There’s the little detail where he had me strip for him.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t touch you, right? And if he has your clothes, you’re less likely to make a break for it, irrational modesty being what it is. He takes your clothes, you’re going to stay put until the danger is so great your modesty comes second. For most people, by the way, the point when their modesty stops being first is normally right after too late.”

“Could the partner be the one you saw last night?” Chapel asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. But if one of them was fixing the camera Tuesday morning, then why’d he come back last night?”

“Well, could’ve had another short, maybe. Might’ve forgotten something, something that he thought would incriminate him.”

“Or maybe he wasn’t here to work on the cameras,” Chapel said.

Burchett frowned at him, then glanced at me. He looked embarrassed, and it took me a second longer to realize why, that he’d been thinking the same thing Chapel had, but hadn’t wanted to say it.

So I said it for them both. “You think last night he came here to rape me.”

“We don’t know that,” Burchett said, replacing the Leatherman in the pouch on his belt. “Got one more thing to show you.”

“I think I’ve seen enough.”

“We’re almost through.” He smiled reassurance at me, then opened my closet and stepped inside, sliding my clothes down along the rod and revealing the access door into the attic space. He shoved it open and crawled through, then called back for me to follow. I ducked and shimmied after him.

It was dusty and dim, the only illumination the sunlight slanting through the small vent at the front of the house, and it smelled of insulation and wood and stale air. Cobwebs hung off the rafters, and I swiped at them uselessly as I got to my feet. There was just enough room to stand, hunched, if you were short like myself or Burchett. Chapel, when he came through, stayed on his knees.

Burchett had moved forward and when I reached his side, he indicated the vent. Through the slats I could glimpse the street out front of the house, the tops of the apple and elm trees in my yard.

It took me another second before I could make out the antenna, short and stubby and rubber and black, attached to the underside of one of the slats. From outside, in the shadow of the house, it would have been invisible. Burchett had crouched and was fumbling beneath the crossbeams, and then he came up with what looked like a thin rectangular box, also black plastic. It had another antenna attached to it, even stubbier than the first, and a row of three lights, all of them off. A power cord ran away from it, disappearing in the insulation at our feet.

“The transmitter,” Burchett explained. “Broadband wireless; you can get one at just about any computer hardware store for a couple hundred bucks. All of the cameras in the house send to this little guy here, you see? Then this fella, he beams the signal to another unit somewhere, maybe only a couple blocks from here, maybe up to a mile away, and it downloads the signal onto tape or maybe even direct to a hard drive.”

“Tape?”

“The cameras, they’re video, Miss Bracca, not still-image. Those pictures of you, they’re not photographs, they’re video captures. This guy is taking videos of you, selecting the image he wants, pulling that, and cleaning it up. You see?”

I did see, and it alarmed me enough that I shot a glance back to Chapel, where he was wedged just inside the access way. From his expression, I knew that he’d seen it, too, was probably a lap ahead of me.

“There’s a fucking
tape
?”

“It’s possible.” Burchett looked at the unit in his hands, then back to me. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Is it off?”

“Yes, ma’am. We did a frequency trap before disconnecting it, so there’s no need for it to ever get switched back on.” He moved the box to his left hand, went into the coin pocket on his Levi’s with his right, coming out with a thin and short metal tube that he held between his thumb and index finger for me to see. “This is one of the cameras. Not much to look at.”

There was a bead of glass on one end of the tube, two tiny wires running from the other. In the light I wasn’t sure, but the wires looked white and black. The whole thing wasn’t much longer or thicker than a matchstick.

“Easy to place, easy to hide, gives a stable enough image,” Burchett continued. “You have the right software, you can clean up whatever it provides pretty nice. Not terribly expensive, either. The technology’s gotten to the point that this is bush-league stuff.”

“Hurrah for technology,” I said.

Chapel finally spoke up. “Rick? How long to get this stuff out of her house?”

“Take us maybe an hour to disconnect everything, get it all pulled and all the little holes spackled so that you can’t much tell they were ever here.”

“Then do it,” I said.

“Then what?” Chapel asked.

“Then what
what
?” I asked.

“There’s a question of the tape.”

“Potential tape,” Burchett said. “Miss Bracca got home four days ago, that’s nearly a hundred hours of video if the perv who did this kept it all. That’s not likely, Fred. Gets expensive.”

“Just one tape is a problem, Rick. None of us wants to see a ‘Bracca Uncovered’ video hitting the Web.”

“No, don’t suppose we do.”

“Then I want to know who did this. And I want to make sure they don’t have anything damaging to my client.”

“More damaging,” I said, but I said it softly, and neither of them heard me.