Killer Move

She turned on her heel and marched back up the path. I followed quickly, casting a glance down the drive to see if any of the neighbors happened to be in view. I couldn’t see any, though that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone in one of the three houses visible from our yard, standing beyond a window that had just turned into a screen featuring an intriguing new TV show. Shocked and nonplussed though I was, I still found a second to worry about whether the incident had been witnessed by others. That was part of it. But I realized I was also wondering if someone might be watching us.

Or watching me.

Steph turned back to face me the moment I’d shut the front door. I’d had time to wonder whether she’d received the joke e-mail—I couldn’t recall whether she’d been on the list or not—and if this was a weirdly extreme reaction. Steph’s not a prude or too obsessed with being politically correct, but that was the only thing I could think of. Her face destroyed whatever minimal credibility the theory/hope had. She was furious, but there was something else in her eyes. They weren’t hard enough for it to be anger alone. There was the softness of hurt in there, too.

“Honey,” I said, reaching for the voice I used with clients when a deal had gone belly-up and the world needed making right. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“The sad thing is,” she said, her voice still at the reined-back snarl that I found more worrying than shouting, “I’m actually slightly relieved. In a bizarre way. I’d thought there might actually be something going on between you two. Okay, I didn’t think it, but the possibility had entered my mind.”

“Between who?”

“Oh shut up. You really think that’s going to play now? Don’t insult me.”

“Steph,” I said, disconcerted at how hard my heart was beating, “I have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Really.”

She started to say something, and this would have been a shout, but the words collided in her mouth and canceled each other out. Instead, she shook her head and marched off in the direction of the den. I followed.

The den, or family room (if you’ve got a family), is on the other side of the kitchen, a continuation from its open-plan cooking/eating area and sharing its view out onto the pool area. As I entered I saw that both of our laptops were lying open on the L-shaped sofa.

I stopped in my tracks. “What are you doing with my computer?”

“What you said you’d do two weeks ago,” Steph snapped. “And again a couple of nights ago. Pulling off the pictures from Helen’s birthday party. Remember?”

I started to protest, but I had nowhere to go with denial or self-righteousness. I had said I’d do those things, and it was also long-established practice for us to access each other’s computers as and when required. Why not? Neither of us had anything to hide. But it felt like an intrusion nonetheless, especially today.

I watched as Steph stormed over to my machine and banged a key. This caused the blank screen to blink back into life. Steph tried to say something, but once more it died in her mouth. She gestured at the screen instead.

I bent over the back of the sofa and looked. At first I couldn’t make out what I was seeing. A picture of some kind, but oddly framed: a skewed, multicolored oblong surrounded by near black, a short series of numbers in orange down at the bottom right.

Then it snapped into sense, and I realized I was looking at a photograph taken at night, through a window. The colored area showed the inside of someone’s house. A small, blurry blue-gray section was presumably a television screen. A portion of a blood-red sofa—which is what broke my first half-assumption, which was that the picture had been taken through one of our windows, of our den. Our sofa is pale blue.

The other thing that had broken it was the figure visible a third of the way along from the right side of the window. Also blurry, but flesh-toned, apart from a black bra. The hair that hung down almost as far as its horizontal line was a very dark brown.

“What the hell is this?”

“Bill, please. Spare me.”

I reached out and hit the cursor key. This brought up another picture, which was similar but in better focus. The edges of the objects within it were still fuzzy, suggesting that the photograph had been taken twenty or thirty yards from the window, using some kind of zoom. It was, however, sharp enough to tell both that the woman had removed her bra, and that she was Karren White.

There were twelve photographs. In all but four, the identity of the woman was clear. The others caught her from behind or at a nonrevealing angle, before and after she had removed her clothes and put on a terrycloth robe. They began and ended what was evidently a sequence taken from some vantage point near Karren’s apartment. I knew the building, near the bay at the north end of Sarasota, having sold an apartment there several years before.

“I have no idea how these got on my laptop,” I said.