Neil McMahon - Dead Silver

While I stared, she told me how this had happened. During the past years that her father had been in the nursing home, the main house had been occupied by a lowlife shirttail relative. He'd run it into the ground, using it as a crash pad for cronies and girlfriends, and when the pack rats invaded this outbuilding, he'd never lifted a finger to stop them.

Renee had made a game start toward swamping out the mess, clearing pathways here and there and trying to rake it up. But it was unpleasant work, and heavy-a hell of a lot to take on for a woman to cope with by herself, while mourning her father to boot.

I had to admit, realizing that this why she was courting my assistance was something of a comedown.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have touched it. I was no prima donna, and I'd done my fair share of grunt work through the years. But by now I was well qualified in a range of skills that were much in demand, from heavy highway and commercial concrete work through any kind of framing-my specialty-to high-end remodels. About all this called for was a flat shovel and a strong stomach.

Then again, I didn't know anybody else who'd touch it, either; she'd be stuck with it herself. I decided that a day or two of slogging through rat shit wouldn't kill me. In a metaphorical sense, I did it often.

"I could start tomorrow, if you don't mind me banging around on Sunday," I said. It would probably take longer, but I could miss Monday out at Split Rock and make that up next weekend.

Renee didn't answer. She looked straight at me with her solemn gaze, like she was trying to make up her mind about something. I could just see her front teeth touching her lower lip. And it seemed to me that her eyes showed more than her earlier anxiety-pain, and maybe even fear.

Then she threw me a curve that eclipsed everything else.

"There's a lot more to this, Hugh," Renee said. "I found something really creepy. I don't know what to do. I need somebody I can trust. But I know it's not fair of me to ask you. So if you want to leave, go ahead. Just please don't say anything to anybody."

That was a lot to take in during those few quick, breathy sentences.

I was gun-shy about a lot of things these days and I'd started looking at people more warily, for good reason. But my sense of Renee's sincerity hadn't faltered.

I decided to go ahead, but to step very carefully.

"I'll listen, Renee, and I've gotten pretty good at keeping my mouth shut," I said. "I can't promise more than that."

She gave me an anxious smile. "That's a lot."

I walked with her back to the main house, this time noticing the many rock outcroppings on the mountainside that boundaried the property's rear-the primary homes of pack rats. There must have been a thriving community in there, aggressively expanding its turf.

Renee had gotten the bigger house pretty well cleaned up from the tenant's trashing. It was a splendid old place-nine-foot ceilings, oak floors, and the kind of finely wrought trim that had become as extinct as gaslight streetlamps.

She left me in the kitchen and went to another room. A minute later she came back with a manila envelope and shook out its contents on the table-a dozen bits of ragged-edged paper, ranging in size from a postage stamp to a playing card.

"I found these when I was trying to clean, mixed up in the rat gunk," she said, arranging the scraps and flipping some over.

I was puzzled, and more so when I realized what they were: fragments of photographs. The images were unclear-the colors had faded with time, and the rats had both chewed them up and stained them-but when I started to make them out, the strangeness factor of this day took another jump.

They appeared to be nude shots of a young woman. In a couple of them, she was wearing a costume-cowboy boots, a fringed leather vest opened to bare her breasts, and, in the only one that showed a complete face, large dangly earrings and a cowboy hat tipped rakishly low above her mischievous smile. It was hard to judge their quality; about all I could guess was that they weren't from a magazine or straight computer download-they were printed on photographic paper. There were no markings on the back, no clue as to who the photographer might have been.

I'd started to understand why this would upset Renee. Her father had always seemed a dignified, somewhat austere man, and no doubt that was how she wanted to remember him. Finding his study despoiled by vermin had to be yet another blow that she had suffered since coming here-a cruel trick of fate that mocked and underscored his ruined life. Learning that he'd kept a stash of cheesy porn would cheapen his memory further. But the way she was treating this like a nuclear secret seemed a bit overblown.

Just as I was thinking that, Renee touched the fragment that showed the model's full face, with the earrings and hat.

"This is Astrid," she said.

Her words took a few seconds to register, but when they did, they hit hard.

Astrid was Professor Callister's second wife, the one who had been murdered.

Renee and I talked the situation over for the best part of another hour. After she assured me that she was doing fine and had everything she needed, I headed home. My notion of going downtown had vanished, although I still wanted a stiff drink.

The afternoon was deepening toward evening as I drove back toward Canyon Ferry Lake. Houses became sparser and traffic disappeared. My truck had been over those roads so many times it practically handled itself, like an old horse heading for the barn. I let it do the work; I had plenty to think about.

Not surprisingly, Renee clung to the belief that her father was innocent of Astrid's murder. The job she had in mind for me was tied to that, and was far more intriguing than just cleaning up the rodent superfund.

It centered on the photos of Astrid. Renee had made the realization that originally, there must have been a lot more of them. Only a few of the fragments that she'd found fit together; when she laid them out on the table, they were like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. She'd gone back and looked through desks and bookshelves and everyplace else accessible, and even raked carefully through the rat debris-that was why she'd cleared the pathways I'd seen-but still came up far short of the total.

She suspected that the rest of them might be stashed someplace she hadn't been able to get to-maybe inside a wall or floor cavity. The rats had found them, chewed them up like everything else, and dropped scraps around haphazardly. She wanted to find the missing fragments in the hope that they might contain some detail, like handwriting or other marks, that would lead to information about Astrid's murderer-and that this, in turn, would help to vindicate Professor Callister.

So Renee had asked me to tear into the carriage house structure, in search of the missing photos.

Several questions hung unanswered. There was no hint as to who the photographer was, but Renee was convinced that it couldn't have been her father. He'd had no interest in that sort of thing-never had so much as a Playboy magazine lying around. He'd have found salacious photos of his wife offensive, especially after her death.

Then what were they doing in his study? One far-fetched possibility was that they comprised evidence relating to the real murderer's identity, and for some reason he'd held off revealing it-then had been incapacitated by his strokes.

Another scenario that occurred to me was even less likely but more disturbing. I didn't mention it to Renee. Sex killers often kept souvenirs, usually objects with some intimate connection to the victim. They would handle these or otherwise use them to heighten their pleasure in reliving the crimes. During my years as a newspaper reporter in California, I'd become well aware of such instances, and difficult though it was to imagine Professor Callister like that, they'd included outwardly normal, pleasant men who harbored hidden evil sides.