If another man touched her, Victor lost all interest in fucking. He wanted to beat the crap out of the guy and keep the female for himself.
At sixty seconds he hit pause. He studied her frozen face, the frowning dark eyebrows, and suddenly it hit him.
He had seen her before.
16
Anthony stood at the curb waving. From a distance he might have been a father putting his child on the school bus, except that the bus was an airport shuttle and the person waving back was sixty or seventy years old. His mother looked ready for battle, her hair helmet freshly lacquered, frozen in place. Beneath her gray wool coat, she wore a new pink tracksuit, suitable for walking the beaches of Jupiter, Florida, with his aunt Doris.
He watched the bus disappear down the street. Then he went back inside the house, where clocks were ticking. This was not a new situation. It had been true his entire life, but he had only just noticed.
Tick, tick.
The kitchen clock had a jerky second hand, like an old man with a tremor. The digital display on the microwave oven had been flashing 12:00 for twenty years. In the living room was a grandfather clock that had belonged to Grandma Blanchard. Every half hour it bonged long and low like a foghorn. If Anthony stood sideways in front of it with both arms outstretched, his other hand would be touching an anniversary clock, which chimed on the quarter hour but ran two minutes fast.
Why did his mother, or any human being, need so many freaking clocks?
From somewhere in the house his phone rang.
He scrambled downstairs to his headquarters and found it on the desk, ringing and vibrating, jumping like a cricket. Its excitement was understandable. The phone was not accustomed to ringing.
“Who is she?” a male voice barked.
“Who is who?”
“Who do you think? The girl in the video.”
The grandfather clock bonged portentously.
“How should I know?” said Anthony. “I never saw her before in my life.”
“I beg to differ.” Excelsior seemed out of breath. “You seen her a bunch of times. She was in that first batch of photos you sent me, way back in October. And again in November. And again on January fifth.”
This was news to Anthony.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“Hell yes, I’m sure.”
“Hang on, let me look.” Anthony sat at the computer and located the folder for October, the first set of photos he’d taken last fall.
“Okay, I have October open. What number?”
“Zero one one,” Excelsior said.
Upstairs the cuckoo clock started up, a half second behind the grandfather clock. BONG cheep cheep. BONG cheep cheep.
Image 011 showed a small, slender woman—a type he saw often in Boston, youngish but not young, in narrow jeans and a strange, choppy haircut. The overall effect was confusing, like a person going out of her way to be unattractive. Her eyebrows were very dark, which made her look angry. The haircut looked self-inflicted, the work of a mental patient or an untalented child. Such women did not appear on television, where everyone was attractive, or in Grantham, where no one was.
“Are you sure that’s the same one?”
“Are you blind?” Excelsior seemed ready to choke. “Now look at November seventh. Number zero zero four.”
BONG cheep cheep. BONG cheep cheep.
Image 004 showed a woman in a blue rain slicker. She had eyes, a nose, a mouth. Only the eyebrows were similar. If not for the eyebrows, she might have been anyone.
“I’m not great with faces,” Anthony admitted. “But yeah, I guess there’s a resemblance.”