Twenty-Seven Bones

10

Hokey went to bed early-tomorrow was her morning to volunteer at the rest home named for Lewis’s father and grandfather. Lewis watched Lou Dobbs on the TV in his study. Hokey was a member of the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society, so the satellite dish was mounted on the roof in the back of the stable/garage, where it couldn’t be seen from the drive.

The financial news was not good. Lewis made a few notes, then switched to a soft porn channel. But soft porn wasn’t making it either. Absent any of his other drugs, he needed something harder, so he went online, surfing his favorite voyeur-themed sites, of which there were dozens available. Most of it was pretty tame stuff, though: guys using peephole and minidigital cameras to take up-skirts or down-blouses, or capture their wives or girlfriends sleeping, peeing, bathing, or stepping out of the shower. Before the Net, Lewis wouldn’t have believed how sick so many people were.

Some of the sites, however, had membership areas, where for a premium Lewis could download jpegs and mpegs of real people having sex-real people who hadn’t known they were being spied upon. That had been Lewis’s secret passion (he didn’t really think of it as a vice) since he was a boy, even before puberty. (And wouldn’t Dr. Vogler have loved to hear about that; fat chance, Doc.)

It had gotten him in trouble more than once, but even nowadays, when thousands upon thousands of images were available on the Web for less than it cost to buy binoculars, he still found himself going out on the prowl occasionally.

Because it wasn’t only the images that Lewis craved, it was also the risk, the uncertainty, the thrill of the hunt. And unlike the stereotypical Peeping Tom of movies and literature, who stalks only the prettiest of young women, looks were not of paramount concern to Lewis. In fact, one of his more memorable strikes in recent years had involved his tenants in the overseer’s house, the Drs. Epp. And their so-called houseman Bennie-Lewis knew a thing or two about that household they wouldn’t have wanted broadcast to the general public.

Just thinking about the time he’d seen the three of them together gave Lewis more of a rise than any of the digital images he was accessing. One of these nights he’d have to check in on the old reprobates again, he promised himself as he logged on to yet another disappointing site. One of these nights soon.