Dead Silver

33

Just about twenty years had passed since the last time I'd opened my eyes in St. Peter's Hospital. While I didn't have any clear memories of that experience, there was still a familiarity this time around-antiseptic smells, equipment hovering over my bed, tubes sticking out of me, and the feeling that my head was duct-taped onto my body.

Then I became aware of a Cheshire cat-like grin, floating in the vague distance across the room. It took me a few seconds to focus on the rest of Madbird around it, leaning against the wall with his arms folded.

"How's it going there, Hawkeye?" he said.

"You're just a bad dream," I muttered, and closed my eyes again.

"Must be the dope they been giving you."

"Have I been here long?"

"Overnight. It's Wednesday morning, about seven-thirty."

Several more seconds passed in silence.

"How many times did I fire?" I asked, with my eyes still closed.

"Four."

"Nothing?"

"I guess you took out a bathroom window and beat up on some plaster. But hey, it ain't all bad-if you'd hurt him, you probably would of got sued or thrown in jail."

"That was my plan all along. Just scare him off."

"Hell, yeah. Thinking on your feet like that, that's where you white guys got it over us. We'd shoot him, and then we'd be fucked."

But Madbird had far more important news than my marksmanship score. He had talked with Gary Varna.

Renee not only called the police while the shooting was going on, she'd stayed on the line and told them that the attacker had run into the woods behind the house. They'd arrived in time to cut off his escape, and found him hiding.

He turned out to be Travis Paulson. And it turned out that Paulson-who had never married, and lived alone-had a longtime hobby, which he'd kept carefully under wraps.

A search of his house revealed a sophisticated photography studio, along with an extensive photo stash of more than twenty women, ranging in age from late teens to forties, all posing nude.

The collection included a duplicate set of the prints of Astrid that we had found in the carriage house. Without doubt, Paulson was the photographer who had originally taken them.

Which went a long way toward explaining his fascination with Astrid's earring. The only other time he had seen it was sexually charged.

In the photos of Astrid, she obviously knew what she was doing and even appeared to be enjoying herself. That also seemed to be the case with most of the other women. But a few told a different story. In these, the models were obviously unconscious-and he was having sex with them.

He was insisting to the police that these encounters were also consensual-that the women had knowingly allowed him to give them a date-rape drug. But the cops knew that was bullshit, and it gave them a lot of leverage.

That was all the information that Madbird had at this point. But it carried a terrible, wonderful implication.

Although Paulson claimed to know nothing about the cache in Professor Callister's study-he insisted that he had given that set of photos to Astrid and never seen them again-the evidence now pointed at him as the one who had planted it there. He admitted that he himself was the photographer; he'd been friendly with Professor Callister and familiar with the layout of the carriage house.

From there, things fell into place. He'd known that Madbird and I had started tearing into the study, and when he saw Renee wearing the earring at the funeral, it was clear that the cache had been discovered. He'd tried to get Renee alone at dinner to find out how serious a threat this was. When she refused, he'd decided he couldn't risk letting it go any further, and he'd lain in wait to stop her.

Travis Paulson had stepped into the limelight as the murderer of Astrid and her lover.