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In his organized files she found an orientation disc for Columbia University, another marked class notes from a course titled Exploring the Image, Professor Leeanne Browning, from the previous year.
Piling up on you, Ger, she thought as she labeled them and sealed them into evidence.
She moved to his dresser, began to search through the neatly folded socks and underwear. Tucked among them was a small, cloth-covered box, and inside some of his treasures.
A dried rosebud, a shiny rock, an old ticket stub from Yankee Stadium, a scrap of cloth that might have been from a blanket.
One of the toss-away coasters often found in clubs. This one had Make The Scene scrolled across it in electric blue letters. She sealed that and a business card for Portography into her evidence bag.
She stepped back, took stock. Live here, but you don’t work here. This isn’t your work space. Got to keep that separate. This is your mother’s place, the place you come for a nice, quiet meal, for a good night’s sleep. But it’s not where you create.
Haven’t been here in awhile. She ran a fingertip through the light layer of dust on the dresser. So much work to do. Too much to do to come home and relax. To come home and not find your mother waiting for you.
“Eve.”
She looked over at the doorway where Roarke stood. “Finished already?”
“Not much there. He has a thirty-day clearing system. If you take the units in, you could dig out the deleted transmissions, but from here, without any tools, you’ll only get the month. And he wasn’t the chatty sort. He ordered pizza about three weeks ago, and fresh flowers for his mother’s grave—”
“Location of cemetery?” she interrupted.
“I’ve got it for you, yes. There aren’t any transmissions to or from friends, relatives, acquaintances. He’s left his mother’s voice announcement on the unit.”
“But his voice is on there. We’ll get a clear voice print.”
Something moved in his eyes before the shutter came down. “Yes, that’s no problem.”
“You want me to feel sorry for him because he lost his mother? Because you’re still close enough to your own grief to relate in some way. Sorry, fresh out of sympathy here. People die. It sucks. You don’t deal with grief by murdering three innocent people.”
“No, you don’t.” He sighed. “There’s just something pathetic about this place, about the way he’s living here with his mother’s things. Her clothes still in the closets, her voice still on the machine. I’ve been working out there and found myself looking up, time and again, at her face. Do you see what he’s done?”
“No, what has he done?”
“He’s made her into an angel. From all reports, she was a good woman, maybe a special one at that. But human, mortal. It’s that he hasn’t accepted, you see. She isn’t allowed to be human, so he deifies her. He’s killing for her, and God knows, it doesn’t seem she deserves it.”
“It’s her you feel sorry for.”
“A great deal. She would have loved him, wouldn’t she? Loved him very much by all accounts. Wouldn’t she love him still, even after all he’s done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t suppose we ever will. Here’s Feeney now,” he added, and stepped out.
Had he been talking about Gerald Stevenson’s mother, Eve wondered, or his own?
She cleared the bedroom for the sweepers and huddled with Feeney. “Where’s McNab?”
“Ah, he nipped into the other bedroom there. Said he’d give Peabody a hand.”
“I bet it’s not his hand he’s hoping to give her.”
Feeney could only wince. “Please. Don’t put such pictures in my head.”
“I like to share, since they keep getting jammed into mine. Pictures,” she repeated and gestured to the wall. “I don’t think he’s here. No nice little photos sitting around his mother’s room. There would’ve been. She’d have had some of him in there, or sitting around.”
“Mothers tend to,” Feeney agreed.
“Figures, especially given his line of work or interest. So he cleared out any images of himself, just in case.”
