The Triggerman Dance

John feels his breath catch, hears it catch. He stares at the tableau. The way it feels to see it now takes him back to the way it felt to be there. He brings in a deep breath and exhales. John wonders if his knees might buckle. And he knows for sure that whatever information his face reveals is being easily recorded by the man in front of him. Holt's expression is so ordinary that John can't infer the tiniest meaning from it.

"We'll talk tomorrow night, John. If you feel the need Big dinner. Lots of big doings. Got to have everybody whistle the same tune."

"Okay. Sure. All right."

chapter 35

As John Menden watched a young woman wash a stained dress in a spring, Joshua Weinstein stared briefly at Sharon Dumars in the muted light of the County Crime Lab Audio-Visual room. He silently shook his head and resumed his pacing. He could not stop the pacing, only interrupt it for brief, anguished moments of worry. He worried that the Sheriff-Coroner's deputy who had lost Snakey in the county's paperwork would change his mind and blow Joshua's operation to smithereens. He worried that Walker Frazee had found out about Snakey, and was ready to fire him. He worried that everyone knew he had slept with Sharon Dumars. No image of her tanned, strong, beautiful body was enough to dispel the fear that he was about to be exposed as a traitor to Rebecca. It is hell being me, he thought, looking at his watch and shaking his head again, his big Adam's apple traveling up and down his throat like an elevator as he swallowed.

Kenwick, the Bureau's crack AV man, sat stooped beside Sharon, looking into a Fuji editing machine through which was running the VHS format tape of Rebecca Harris meeting her end in the Journal parking lot. He was running the frames one-by- one and Joshua had heard nothing but Kenwick's steady, deep breathing for the last five minutes. Kenwick wore headphones to listen to the soundtrack. Cute, thought Joshua, considering there was no goddamned soundtrack. Kenwick had been flown in from Washington, accompanied by Walker Frazee. Joshua had felt nothing but disaster brewing since the two got off the Bureau jet.

Why analyze my precious videotape, Joshua thought: what was there to say? If there was ever a case of content over form this was it. They'd already run it through the infrared scanner for prints. Four thumbs, all perfectly delineated, all John Menden's Did they enjoy watching Rebecca die over and over again? Only Walker Frazee and his captious lab men could ruin a free lunch. If this wasn't enough to earn a search warrant, what was? Owl had performed, and they had won.

Kenwick finally straightened and removed the padded head phones. He was a big man with the features—Joshua; thought—of a bison, right down to the curly brown hair that began just above his forehead as abruptly as a piece of carper and crept around the expanded bottoms of his heavy earlobes. Watching him come down the jet ramp with Walker Frazee beside him was like watching a vaudeville act. His voice had the resonance of an opera baritone.

"It's not complete," he announced, fastening two black eye on Joshua. "It's not intact."

"What do you mean, not complete? He didn't shoot the whole tape, if—"

"—That isn't what I mean. I mean, we have the image here. But the soundtrack has not been transferred."

"What happened?"

"No accident. It was recreated this way."

"This isn't the original?"

The big bison head shook a shaggy negative. "This is a dub, Sans soundtrack. Second, perhaps third, generation. Listen. Watch."

Joshua sat down, Kenwick handed him the headset the started the tape in motion. Rain. Oranges. The Journal. Then, Rebecca.

.Josh watched her pick her way through the parked cars, trying for all she was worth only to make life a little easier on Susan Baum. It amazed Joshua that he could watch this now. It took all the self-control he could muster to watch this tape as dispassionately as he might an evening news clip of college basketball. Rebecca as evidence. Rebecca as a clue. Rebecca as forensic date But surely as there was no soundtrack to the tape, there was soundtrack in Joshua's mind and it said: You loved her, she betrayed you, she died. And as Joshua listened to that voice inside him, he wished again that he had something more to give Rebecca than the bitterness of his rejection and the fury of his revenge. I can only give you what I have, he thought. I can only give you back what you left me.

He snapped the headset off. "If there's no sound, what am I listening for?"

"The hiss. The hiss tells us that the original sound strip received input. The copy was run with a soundtrack of its own— silence. Or near silence, except for the hiss."

"You're positive this is not an original tape?"

"Absolutely."

Kenwick looked at Joshua with his big lugubrious bison eyes. "The sound strip must have contained something that someone was not supposed to hear."

Joshua sat back and stared at the now-blank editing screen. "So it exists?"

"What exists?"