The Escape Diaries (18 page)

           
I
wasn’t smiling anymore.

           
Labeck
snapped off the NBC channel. “Where’s the nanny tape?” he asked.

           
I
took it out of the toolbox and handed it to him. Labeck popped it into an
elaborate computer that transmitted images to a large wall screen.

           
“This
is the NSRT,” Labeck said. “It has a two hundred fifty times resolution.
Ordinarily zooming in that close would blur everything to a dot matrix, but it
has an override to provide focus. It can check for light-dark tonal contrast,
filter out extraneous sounds, and do a one one-thousandth of a second breakdown
for running speed.”

“Uh-huh.” I
hadn’t understood a single syllable.

           
“The
FBI has a program like this, except not as good.” He tore his eyes away from
the electronic gizmos and looked at me. “Tell me your lawyer had this film
analyzed before the trial.”

           
“Technology
was not his strong suit. I don’t think he could tell a DVD player from a waffle
iron.”

           
“What
was
his strong suit?”

           
“Oh,
Sterling was pink-skinned and white-haired and dignified looking. He came from
an old, reputable law firm. I figured that just the fact he’d taken my case
lent me credibility.” Sitting next to Sterling Habenmacher at the defense
table, I’d felt protected, even cosseted. He patted my hand a lot. He told me
not to worry. He smelled like pumpkin pie spice. He billed at a thousand
dollars an hour. It hadn’t occurred to me until much later, when I was sitting
in a cell at Taycheedah, that Sterling Habenmacher hadn’t for a single moment
believed that I actually was innocent.

           
The
prosecution had been required to share the evidence they planned to present
with the defense, which included the nanny cam tape. Sterling hadn’t even
watched the tape; he’d spent an entire day of the trial wrangling with the
judge and prosecution, explaining why the tape should be excluded as evidence.
Despite all Sterling’s objections, the judge had ruled that the tape would
indeed be entered as evidence. The fact that we’d tried to suppress it worked
against us; the video was all the more powerful when it finally was shown to
the jury.

           
“No,”
I said. “The film wasn’t analyzed.”

           
Labeck
shook his head in disgust. He pressed a button and the video began to play.

“So that’s your
house,” Labeck said. “Your husband’s office?”

I nodded. Seeing
the familiar room was a jolt. “The people who owned the house were named
Subramatti,” I said. “They were both cardiac surgeons and worked long days at
the hospital, so they had a nanny caring for their kids. They turned the first
floor library into a playroom, with kids’ books on the lower shelves and
medical texts on the top. The spy cam was hidden inside a book with a hole
drilled in its spine.”

           
When
we’d moved into the house, Kip had immediately claimed the playroom as his
office.
Office,
what a joke! Kip wasn’t the type to lug home a briefcase
full of contracts. He kept Scotch in the file drawer and used his computer to
surf for porn. He hadn’t bothered to toss out the medical journals; maybe he
felt the ponderous volumes lent his office a certain classiness. Since neither
Kip nor I were top-shelf dusters—or bottom-shelf dusters for that
matter—we never discovered the camera
,
hidden behind a copy of
Liver
Flukes and Hookworms.

I turned my
attention back to the screen, back to the day my husband had been murdered. Kip
is at his desk, back turned, the top of his head visible over the high-backed
leather swivel chair. One bare elbow juts out and you can just make out a
swatch of short-sleeved shirt. He’s on our landline phone, the cord stretched
between desk and chair. His voice is a low, indistinct murmur. What light there
is in the room comes from the lamp atop his desk and from the computer screen.

           
A
door opens. Off-camera, but the sound is audible. A woman walks into the room.
Her back is to the camera so her face is hidden. She has dark, shoulder-length
hair, a long-sleeved, floor-length nightgown, and bare feet. She’s wearing
rubber gloves, the kind you use to wash dishes. Kip doesn’t hear her come in.
Now the gun in the woman’s right hand becomes visible. The woman walks up to
Kip, raises the gun, fires a single shot. Kip slumps and falls against the desk
lamp, which crashes to the floor, dousing the light. The room goes black.

           
Someone
pounded on the door and I jumped. I’d been four years in the past, watching my
husband being murdered. I mentally regeared to the present: Channel 13, the
NSRT, Labeck.

           
“Radon,”
Labeck hissed. I snapped on my mask, snatched up a television remote control,
and began running it along the tiles, hoping that radon was the kind of
substance that loitered around floors. Labeck cracked the door. There was a
familiar yapping noise.

           
“This
thing yours?” a man growled. I caught a glimpse of Bob, Labeck’s cameraman
buddy. He shoved Muffin into Labeck’s arms. “I need to use the van. This little
bugger almost took my arm off when I lifted his crate. Want me to step on it
for you?”

           
Labeck
shrugged. “Tempting, but no. I’m dog-sitting for a friend.”

           
“How
much you want to bet your friend never comes back for it?” Bob said.

           
He
left, chortling. Labeck closed the door and dropped Muffin, who instantly made
a beeline for me, snarling like a small grizzly. He lunged for my ankles, but I
held up a warning hand. Apparently remembering the spanking, he abruptly halted
and started yapping at me, a high-pitched sound in the same irritating tone as
a dental drill.

           
“Shut
him up,” Labeck said.

           
“You
shut him up!”

           
“Shut
up!” we yelled in unison, but Muffin kept barking.

           
“Here’s
the plan,” Labeck said. “We feed him. If he’s eating, he’s not barking. I’ll
get something in the cafeteria. Don’t open the door to anyone.”

           
Duh.
After he left, I tried to grab Muffin, but he danced just out of reach, barking
so hard there were times when all four feet were off the floor.

           
“Let’s
play fetch!” I said with feigned enthusiasm. “Fetch? I throw something and you
chase it. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

           
I
didn’t have a ball or a stick. I took off my shoe—actually Labeck’s old
shoe, still wet from Vanessa’s bathtub—and tossed it across the room.
Muffin was after it in a flash. He picked it up in his mouth, swaggered around
with it for a minute, but then didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He
dropped it and started barking again. I bent to retrieve the shoe. Muffin
immediately snatched up the toe end. I yanked on the heel end. We each tugged,
Muffin growling fiercely, but now he just seemed to be play-acting. Was it possible
the wretched creature was having fun? Did Vanessa ever play games with her
dogs? Or was their social life pretty much limited to
Attack, Kill
?

           
Muffin
was actually kind of cute, I noticed for the first time. His fur was soft gray,
his underbelly white. He had a teddy bear head—wide and round, with black
button eyes and whiskers like bristle brushes. His teeth were white and
needle-sharp. Vanessa probably filed them to points every night. Although he
only weighed about as much a large cucumber, he was surprisingly strong;
muscles rippled beneath his fur.

           
There
was a knock on the door. “Open up,” Labeck called in a low voice. In full bay,
Muffin raced over to the door. I had to hold him by the collar while I opened
the door wide enough for Labeck to slide through. He came in and set a paper
sack down atop a desk. Demonstrating a surprising agility, Muffin sprang up
onto a stool, then onto the desk, poking his snout into the bag.

           
“No!”
Labeck said sharply, shoving him away, setting him on the floor. Muffin coiled
himself to spring again. Labeck tossed him a ham sandwich. Accustomed to eating
out of an embossed porcelain bowl, Muffin happily scarfed the sandwich off the
tile floor. Labeck gave me dibs on the remaining sandwiches. I picked egg
salad; he had tuna and lettuce. He’d even remembered pickles, bless
him—large, juicy, sliced dills. We sat on swivel chairs, eating and
washing down the sandwiches with chocolate milk while Labeck replayed the
video.

           
“Who
knew that camera was in the room?” Labeck asked.

           
“Well,
I
didn’t. Neither did Kip. He would have wanted to—” I stopped,
reddening.

           
“Do
home porno?”

           
“Probably.”

           
“Did
Vanessa know it was there?”

           
“Vanessa
knew everything. Somehow she got hold of our house keys and made copies. She’d
come over to snoop when we were gone, go through our bathroom cabinets, check
what we were using for birth control, look through our mail. She must have
discovered the nanny cam while she was poking around one day, because she told
the police to check it right after Kip’s body was discovered.”

           
Labeck
scowled at Muffin, who’d snorked down his own sandwich and was now looking up
at us, growling, demanding another one. “The nanny cam was a low-tech cheapie,”
he said. “Its time-dating feature wasn’t even activated, the focus is fuzzy,
and everything looks completely amateurish. Probably the owners installed the
camera themselves.”

That would fit
with what I knew of the Subramattis, who were so cheap they’d dug their
rosebushes out of the lawn and taken them along when they moved. They would
have begrudged the few bucks it required to install a professional surveillance
system.

“I think they had
the camera plugged into an outlet so it would continuously charge,” Labeck
said. “The videotape was magnetic and the recorder mechanism was
motion-sensitive, so it only turned on when something triggered its sensors.
Theoretically, you could record for years. Who else knew about the nanny cam?”

           
“Vanessa
might have told some of her friends. And of course the Subramattis knew, but
they moved to California.”
 

           
“If
it’s not you in that video, then who is it?”

           
I
nudged away Muffin, who was climbing my leg trying to get at my sandwich. “The
jury could never get past that. If it wasn’t me, who was it—my evil twin?
It even occurred to me that Vanessa might be a shape shifter or
something—but no matter how much she hated me, she would never have hurt
Kip.”

           
“What
about whatshername? The carrot-chomping debutante?”

           
“Prentice?
Why would she want to kill Kip? She was probably going to be the next Mrs.
Vonnerjohn. Anyway, she had an alibi for that night. I forget exactly
what—she was shaving her celery sticks or flogging the servants or
something like that.”

           
Once
the tabloids had gotten hold of the story, they’d run with it in their teeth,
vilifying Prentice as
The
Other Woman,
the scheming rich girl
who’d broken up my happy marriage. True, Mazie Maguire had shot her husband in
cold blood, a very bad thing to do, but Prentice Stodgemore had been carrying
on with a married man! I’d received the sympathy vote by a wide margin while
Prentice, relentlessly pursued by the media, had been forced to sneak around
town in a head scarf and sunglasses.

           
“Enemies?”
Labeck asked.

I
shook my head. “My lawyer hired a detective agency to investigate that angle.”
“What about the people your husband worked with? Maybe he stole someone’s

client.”

“Kip never did
any work, so he probably never stepped on anyone’s toes.”

“How’d he keep
his job?”

“Nepotism at its
most flagrant.”

“Maybe someone at
the company was cooking the books, doing insider trading?”

“I don’t think
Kip would have picked up on that. He didn’t know a debenture from a denture.”

Labeck polished
off his sandwich and stuffed the wrappings back in the bag, then returned to
the video and started doing some complicated slicing and dicing on the
computer. Finishing my own sandwich, I crammed the extra lunch napkins up my
pants legs to absorb the bathwater. When I turned out my sodden pants pockets,
the baggie of money
fell out. I’d forgotten about it.

           
I
pulled out the bills. The bag had leaked and the money was soggy.
 

I flipped through
the cash, my spirits going as damp as the bills. A measly tenner and some
singles, wrapped around a square of stiff, glossy paper. It was a snapshot, I
saw, rolled to fit inside the bills. I picked it up and studied it.

The photo looked as though it had been
taken with a cheap flashcube camera back in the pre-digital days. A boy of
about fifteen and a man sat side by side on a sofa. Some of the color had
leached out of the photo, but it was possible to see that the boy was
dark—Mexican or Puerto Rican—and the man was white, maybe in his
thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair too yellow to be natural. He was
shirtless, wearing Hawaiian print shorts and nothing else. He was slumped
across the couch, one arm around the boy, one arm flung up to half-conceal his
face. Impossible to tell his eye color; they were the devilish red produced by
cheap flash. No telling where the photo had been taken—it was an
anonymous, dingy room with liquor bottles lined up on a windowsill.