bed. Gretchen picked it up as Josie fanned through the rest of the book to see if there was anything else pressed into it. There was nothing. She tossed the book back onto the bed and studied the photo. It was of a young man with blond hair. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans with a workbelt hung low around his waist. Something about the tension in his smile suggested he was uncomfortable being the object of the photo. Behind him was a wall with a blue tarp hung on it and next to that, a doorway that looked as though it led to a set of steps going downward. Josie said, “This is Ambrose, the guy from the basement waterproofing company that Beverly was flirting with.”
Gretchen peered at it. “Yeah, that matches up with the driver’s license photo we have of him.”
“This must be the house on Hempstead.” Josie pointed to the doorway. “He’s on his way down to the basement to work.”
“Yeah,” Gretchen agreed. “And I’ll bet that tarp is one of the tarps the killer used to wrap up Beverly.” She took the photo from Josie and turned it over, but the back of it was blank.
Josie picked up Pearl in the Mist and shook its pages. Only an old bookmark fell out. She set it down and grabbed False Memory, flipping the pages. Three photographs fell out. One by one, Josie lined them up so they could study them. One photo was of Vera and a man standing in a kitchen, a sink and stove behind them. The photo had caught them in profile, facing one another. The man was thin and a head taller than Vera. He looked as though he was in his mid-thirties from what Josie could tell. He had short brown hair and light stubble covering what they could see of his face. It looked as though the picture had been taken from behind a doorway, as half the photo showed a close-up of wooden molding. Josie pointed to it. “She took this without them knowing.”
Gretchen nodded. “You think this was Vera’s drug dealer? Or her friend?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We really have no way of knowing when this was taken, but it’s the only contact we can definitively establish between Vera and someone besides her co-workers and old clients.”
They turned their attention to the next photo. Josie’s breath caught in her throat as her late husband’s face smiled up at her. It was Ray at sixteen years old in his baseball uniform. His cap was pushed up just a little, the way it used to get when he’d wipe the sweat from his forehead. He was leaning on a fence, his elbows hanging over it. Behind him, Denton East’s baseball field was filled with other players, out-of-focus blobs against the green grass.
“It’s creased,” Gretchen said, pulling Josie from her memories of that time. She picked up the photo, and Josie saw where it had been folded. Gretchen turned the flap up and there was teenage Josie, only part of her face visible. She’d been standing on the opposite side of the fence to Ray, leaning in to give him a good luck kiss. There had been many games and many moments like this, Josie remembered. It had been an exciting season for the Denton East Blue Jays. Josie hadn’t missed a single game. The players had always come to that section of the fence before each game to receive a last round of well-wishes from family and other students. There was always a crowd there. What Josie had never realized was that Beverly had been somewhere behind her in that crowd, taking a photo of Ray without either of them knowing. Or had Ray known? Had he seen Beverly take the photo? Had he let her? Had something been going on between them after all?
“Look at this one,” Gretchen said, setting the photo of Josie and Ray back onto the bed and picking up the last one.
Josie shook her head slightly, trying to rid her mind of thoughts of Ray and Beverly so she could focus on the present. The photo was of a man lying in a bed. He was naked, on his side, facing away from the camera, and only his back from the shoulders down and a sliver of his hip had been captured. “Look,” Josie said, pointing to his left shoulder blade. “That’s a tattoo of a skull.”
Gretchen leaned in, slipping on her reading glasses, and