“Take care of my drunk Irishman. I can’t live without him either.”
He blinked those blurry eyes in confusion. “What, Brian?”
“No, you idiot. You.”
“Oh.” He grinned at her again, so foolishly her throat burned. “That’s good then. Makes us even. ’Night now.”
“Good night.” She stared at the blank screen, wishing she could just reach through it and haul him back to where he belonged.
The computer was just detailing her matches when Peabody and McNab strolled in. “Summerset’s fine,” Peabody told her. “He gets the skin cast off tomorrow and can start walking for short periods.”
“Picture me doing handsprings. Matthew Brady, Ansel Adams, Jimmy Olsen, Luis Javert. Who are these guys?”
“Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, the Daily Planet,” McNab supplied.
“You know him?”
“Superman, Dallas. You’ve got to get more exposure to pop culture. Comics, graphic novels, vids, games, toys. See, Superman’s this superhero from the planet Krypton who’s sent to Earth as a baby, and—”
“Just the highlights, McNab.”
“He disguises himself as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent and comes to Metropolis to work at the Daily Planet, a newspaper. Jimmy Olsen’s one of the characters, a young reporter and photographer.”
“Photographer, check. And the other two?”
McNab shrugged his bony shoulders. “Got me.”
“Ansel Adams was a photographer,” Peabody supplied. “My father’s got some of his prints. Nature stuff, powerful.”
“And Matthew Brady.” She went to the computer for that one. “Another photographer. Three for three. No other matches in family names, street address. And behind door number two?”
Her eyes went flat and hard. “We’ve got a winner. Not Luis but Henri Javert, photographer, primarily known for his portraits of the dead. Came to popularity early this century in Paris. Though Shadow Imagery, as this art form was termed, went quickly out of fashion, his work is considered the best of the style. Examples of his work can be viewed at the Louvre in Paris, the Image Museum in London, and the International Center of Photography in New York.
“McNab, get me everything you can on Henri Javert.”
“On it.”
“Peabody, there’s a couple dozen matches here for Luis. Trim it down. Children,” she said with a fierce grin, “we’ve got his scent.”
She worked until she thought her eyes would bleed, worked long after she’d sent Peabody and McNab off to do whatever they were going to do on the gel bed.
When her thoughts began to blur as well as her vision, she crawled into the sleep chair for a few hours down. She didn’t want another night alone in the big bed.
And still the dreams found her, and tugged her with icy hands from exhaustion to nightmare.
The room was familiar. Terrifyingly so. That hideous room in Dallas where the air was brutally cold and the light was washed with dirty red. She knew it was a dream and fought to will herself out of it. But she could already smell the blood—on her hands, on the knife clutched in them, splattered on the floor, seeping out of him.
She could smell his death, and the vision of it—of what she’d done, what she’d become to save herself—was etched on her mind.
Her arm screamed with pain. The child’s arm in the dream, the woman’s who was trapped in it. It was burning hot where he’d snapped the bone, burning cold up to the shoulder, down to the fingertips that dripped with red.
She would wash it off. That’s what she had done then, that’s what she would do now. Wash off the blood, wash away the death in the cold water.
She moved slowly, like an old woman, wincing at the sting between her legs, blocking out the reason for it.
It smelled metallic—the water, the blood—how could she know? She was only eight.
He’d beaten her again. He’d come home, not quite drunk enough to leave her be. So he’d beaten her again, raped her again, broken her again. But this time she’d stopped him.