One Cold Night

Donna’s photographs. Dave’s gut cramped at the sight of the two of them together and then cramped tighter at what he saw next: recent photographs of Susan, Lisa and Becky, cut up and overlaid with images of Jesus Christ.
    “And we thought the guy liked plants,” Dave said to Johnson, who raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
    Halfway up the wall was the article about Dave, its two photographs dead center: as a young beat cop on the street, and more recently with his lovely family. The nauseous tickle he had felt just before the article came out had been a warning he should have heeded, but he had respected his sergeant’s wishes and cooperated with the reporter. Loser, he had stupidly called the groom. And now he knew, without a doubt, that exposing himself and taunting his nemesis had been a terrible mistake.
    On the wall above the article was a photograph of Dave and Lisa together, taken on Water Street. He remembered the day: It was summer, he had picked Lisa up at Glory’s house on his way back from work andthey were stopping by the shop to visit Susan and discuss that night’s dinner. Lisa, he recalled, had mischievously suggested a meal of chocolate. You could almost see that day’s heat in the photo; it had the fuzzy, unfocused quality of a ninety-degree afternoon.
    Dave’s eyes drifted from the photograph down past the article to a hand-scrawled caption below it, written directly on the wall in black marker.
    I am slain in the spirit.
    Slain in the spirit. He had heard that somewhere before.
    “Do you know what this means?” he asked Johnson.
    Johnson came up next to him and read the words.
    “It kind of means you’ve died to make room for Jesus in your heart.” Johnson shrugged. “The guy’s born again.”
    There it was, Dave thought, the toxic fusion of love, insanity and religion. So Adkins was born again; no big surprise there. What confounded him was why any sane person would be so willing to accept the blunt fallacies of a promised redemption.
    He scanned the wall, trying to pull the clutter of images into focus. Was it a clutter? Or was it some kind of puzzle constructed by Adkins’s God-addled mind? There were so many pictures of Susan and Lisa, especially Lisa. The photos of Becky were small, grainy and few.
    He turned around to look at the window where he had first noticed the light of the grower’s lamp and the ghost of a face withdrawing. Perched on a shelf was a timer; so the light had turned off on schedule before, not because of Bruno’s shouts from the street. Presumably the timer had turned the light back on, since it was glowing now. Dave also noticed that only one of the two windows was festooned with greenery. The other window was empty behind a drawn white shade, the plastic kind that curled at the edges and snapped up when you least expected it.
    He then noticed that the telescope on the tripod in front of the single chair was in fact not a telescope. It was a camera with a telescopic lens. This way, Adkins had been able to do two things at once: watch the street for his prey and gather their images. Photograph them. Document their existence.
    Susan and Lisa.
    How long had he been watching them?
    “You live here?” Dave asked the woman at the door.
    “This is Evelyn, Detective,” Johnson answered for her. “She lives downstairs. Her son does maintenance in the building.”
    “You know the guy who lives in this apartment?” Dave asked Evelyn.
    “Of course,” she answered somewhat primly; he could tell the activity excited her, that she was lonely, and he understood that.
    “Who is he?”
    “David Strauss,” Evelyn answered, obviously proud to bear forth the information. “A professional photographer. A very pious man. A good man.”
    Those three statements, following his own name, struck Dave as pure dissonance.
    He nodded, glancing casually at Johnson with a silent admonishment to wipe the surprise off his face. It was a poker game; you could afford to give nothing away.
    “Could you tell me,” Dave calmly asked Evelyn, “what this David Strauss looks like?”
    “Oh, sure. Blond, blue eyes, not so tall and not so handsome like you, Detective, sir.”
    It was a compliment difficult to absorb at the same moment that Dave’s mind tried to process the information that, for some reason, Peter Adkins was trying to mask himself in Dave’s identity.
    “Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch!” Ramos’s high-wire voice squealed into the living room,