Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

afternoon,” Bartlett said. “Hello again, Ms. Bayles.” If he was curious about China’s presence here this morning, he didn’t mention it. He glanced around admiringly. “Very nice place Timms had here.” He bent to look at a wooden cabinet filled with wine bottles, appropriately slanted necks-down. The adjacent shelves were stacked with sparkling glassware. “Quite the pad, huh? He must’ve been a real party animal.”
    “Let’s get to work,” Sheila said. “China has to get back to town. She has something she thinks we should look at.”
    China led the way down the hall. “I made a quick tour of the house when I first got here this morning, looking for Timms.” She paused beside a door and turned to face them. “I saw the uneaten food on the table outside and thought he might be somewhere here in the house, sick or injured. I called and shouted but couldn’t raise anybody. So I came inand looked around. I didn’t touch anything but the doorknobs. And this is what I found,” she added, and opened the door. “In plain view. Having seen it, I felt I had a responsibility to let you know.” China was saying what a lawyer ought to say. Practicing or not, as long as she kept her bar membership current, she was an officer of the court. And Timms was not
her
client.
    “Damn,” Bartlett said roughly, under his breath.
    China had already given Sheila an idea of what they would be seeing, but still, the magnitude of it struck her almost dumb. All four of the room’s white walls were lined with erotic photographs, hundreds of them, most framed in either clear plastic frames or in simple black frames. They were artistically presented photographic studies of nudes of both sexes, provocatively posed, voluptuous, beautiful. Most photos featured one figure, some two, in various positions, at various angles. Most were black-and-white or sepia, a few were full-color. Some were quite small, others poster-size.
    Timms had obviously been into nude photography for quite some time, and in a big way, Sheila thought. He must have been the photographer—at least, he owned a great deal of photographic equipment, as Sheila saw when she opened a door to a closet, and he had signed and dated some of the photographs, perhaps the ones he was most proud of. But he had apparently taken some pains to preserve the models’ anonymity, for of the hundreds of photographs, most were of adult torsos, legs and arms. Rarely were the faces pictured, so if you wanted to know the identity of the subject, you were out of luck—unless, of course, the names were on the back of the photographs or Timms had kept a log of his photographic activities. Either was possible, Sheila thought. And Blount might have found something that would help with names.
    But while many of the good citizens of Pecan Springs and all themembers of Timms’ church would undoubtedly be horrified if they ever learned about Timms’ private passion, they were no more illegal than the XXX-rated films sold in the truck stops all along Interstate 35. Or so Sheila thought, until—
    She moved closer, pulling in her breath, frowning. On a section of the wall, beside the bathroom door, a couple of dozen smaller photographs were displayed—and they were
not
adults. They were nude children, mostly girls but a few boys, around the ages of eight or nine, engaging in some sort of sexual play. The faces were elfin and smiling or deeply serious and sad, the eyes large, the mouths tender, the nude bodies slender or rounded but always supple and lovely, fragrant with the bloom of youth. Unlike the other photos, there was no effort made to preserve the children’s anonymity—on the contrary, the faces were an important element of the photographs. They were documents of a fey and fragile innocence on the cusp of becoming aware of something quite, quite other.
    There was another thing different about these photographs, too. Most of them involved a nude adult male, as well, back always to the camera—and not always the same man. At a glance, she thought there might be three, maybe four different men involved. The male presence seemed to fall like an ominous shadow across the children’s innocence, a threatening portent, artful and symbolic—and pornographic.
    Beside her, Bartlett spoke in a thin, metallic voice. “Like I said, quite the party animal.” He set down his briefcase, opened it, and took out a digital camera.
    “Make sure the time-date stamp is set,” Sheila told