The Delilah Complex

Twenty-Three

Out on the street, the wind swirling around us, pushing us toward each other, I dreaded how we were going to say good-night.

“Is Dulcie home?”

Surprised by Noah’s directness, even though I shouldn’t have been, I shook my head before I could stop myself.

“So you don’t have to go right home?”

“No, but I should. I have an early patient.”

“Too early for you to come to the station and look at the photographs that we asked the Times to withhold?”

Then his mouth moved, the corners going up, and his eyes twinkled in the light of the street lamp and he smiled. All-knowing and seductive. A laughing smile without any sound. He’d got me. And he knew it. He’d probably done it on purpose. Teased me into thinking he was asking one thing but offering something else entirely. Was he getting me back for not returning his calls last July?

Torn between wanting very much to see the photographs and being embarrassed, I took a deep breath and inhaled the crisp night air. In it, I smelled something familiar. But what?

And then I knew, it was Noah’s cologne: rosemary and mint.

Looking away from him so he couldn’t read what I was thinking or feeling, I told him yes, I’d like to see the pictures.

It could have been 10:00 a.m. instead of 10:00 p.m. at the station. We walked through the busy lobby and crowded halls, up the stairs, down the hall, around a corner and into the office Noah shared with Mark Perez.

The room was unexceptional. Institutional, well-used furniture, windows that needed to be washed, scratchedup tables, worn wood floors. But despite the drab anonymity, the room crackled with the detectives’ energy. A row of jade plants and ivy in colorful pots sat on the windowsill-green and healthy looking, though I couldn’t imagine much sun made it through those windows. There was a Mardi Gras mask hanging from the silver lamp on Jordain’s desk.

But the focus of the office was the south wall. It was covered with photographs, notes, maps and reports: a collage of images and papers, some sections enlarged so much they were just patches of color, mosaics without meaning.

But they did mean something.

Noah took my arm in an impersonal way and led me to the far right section of the wall.

“Start here.”

Two shots were side by side, each taken from an identical angle. It appeared the photographer had stood about two feet in front of the bodies. This specific point of view distorted the perspective of the corpse so the feet were larger than normal, as was the penis, but the chest and the head were diminished.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded but wasn’t sure; these men had not just been killed, they had been sexualized. The bruises around their wrists, necks, ankles and testicles, which Betsy Young had described to me, were vivid purple, black and blue. Shades of violence and abuse. For relief I looked at the background, which was plain gray and smooth. Not a wall. There were no bumps or cracks, no suggestion of windows, doors or ambient light. I thought that I should know where they were but I couldn’t focus.

“Where are they?” I asked Noah.

If he thought it was strange that my first question was about the walls, he didn’t say so.

“We don’t know yet, but we think that gray expanse is a studio backdrop. Many photographers have rolls of different drops in their studios, and depending on what they need, they just pull down the effect they want.”

I nodded. I knew exactly what he was talking about. When Mitch was starting out he’d worked as the assistant to a director who shot food and tabletop commercials. I’d seen backdrops like that.

“By pulling it down and all the way out he’s covered the floor, making sure to conceal any clues,” Noah continued.

“It would be far too obvious to assume the killer is a photographer, right?”

“No. Nothing is ever too obvious. But we had a professional look at the shots, and he said the exposures are somewhat amateurish and the developing is uneven. He feels that whoever took them is at ease with a camera and understands composition but isn’t someone who shoots for a living.”

I sat down in the chair opposite his desk, facing the collage, unable to stop staring at the pictures.

“That means the photographer is self-taught or someone who studied photography somewhere. After all, he’s developing the shots himself.”

“That last part fits the profile,” Noah said. “Serial killers are loners. They feel isolated, disconnected from society. Misunderstood. The killings can even be a misguided way to connect to people. Either to the victims or to the people who are going to be distraught over the deaths. They work alone, and I’m pretty sure that this guy didn’t take these shots into the corner One-Hour Photo. He’s probably got his own darkroom.”

“Can you say that’s he’s a serial killer with only two victims? Maybe there was a reason he needed to kill the two of them and now he’s finished. It might be all over.” I was still staring, riveted to the images of the pale corpses.

Noah answered me, but I didn’t hear him; I’d noticed something in one of the photographs.