Chapter 18: Photographic Evidence
Rain had been on the windows all afternoon, faint and steady, the kind that made the loft feel like the inside of a shell. Grace sat at one end of the leather couch with the laptop balanced on her knees, and Teresa sat at the other end with her feet tucked under her, close enough to see the screen.
"I found the old drive," Grace said. "I warn you, most of it's terrible."
"Terrible is fine."
"Most of it is Wayne taking pictures of his own thumb."
The first image loaded. A bullpen with grey light and old desks. A younger Cho sat in the foreground in a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a black tie, hunched over something on his blotter with his jaw set, looking like a man who had been interrupted mid-thought. Beside him, pressed up against the side of the desk with his weight on one hip, a tall lean man in a brown tie leaned back and grinned straight at the camera, holding a framed certificate up beside his face.
"That's Wayne," Grace said. "My husband. He'd just gotten some certificate. I genuinely can't remember what for. That was my first month on the team."
"He looks pleased with himself."
"He always did. That was the whole problem. Drove Cho crazy."
Teresa looked at Wayne Rigsby's face a beat longer than the picture needed. She knew the shape of that man. He had been in the dream with the yellow light and the overturned desks, dead on the floor. She didn't tell Grace. She wasn't sure whether the not telling was kindness or cowardice, so she kept her eyes on the screen and said nothing.
Grace clicked.
The second photo was blurred at the edges, taken from a distance through glass. Cho sat in the front seat of a sedan with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, still in the short-sleeved shirt and tie, a fat paperback open in both hands.
"Why did he wear the tie on a stakeout?"
"He always wore the tie. He claims it's a professional obligation." Grace smiled down at the screen. "I took that one. He thought he was hiding."
"He's in a car in a parking lot."
"He was very proud of that spot."
Teresa snorted. The sound surprised her a little, and she saw Grace's head come up, quick and pleased, before she looked back at the laptop and clicked again.
A black dress filled the next frame, and above it a hat the size of a tea tray, brim curving wide over a woman's face. Grace, buried under it, grinning with the deliberate comedy of the ridiculous.
"Undercover," Grace said. "I looked so stupid I made Cho take the picture just so I'd have proof."
"What was the assignment?"
“To get a thief to try to rob me. I had to look naive and rich.”
"Well, you pulled that off."
"I’ll say." Grace laughed.
The next photo was sharp. A round table in a dark room, amber light over it, three beer glasses lifted toward the camera. Cho on the left, mouth curved into a small, real smile. Wayne on the right, wide grin, leaning in. And between them, Teresa, wearing a red-orange long-sleeved shirt with her arms on the table, her hair cut to her shoulders in a long bob and a shade darker than it currently was, no makeup on her face at all.
She leaned closer. The woman in that picture was so young she looked like a photograph of somebody's cousin.
"How old was I?"
"Thirty-two, thirty-three. That was my birthday. The bar was the one under the freeway."
Teresa put a finger near the screen and didn't touch it. She could see the way the three of them leaned inward, shoulders overlapping, the way people sit when sitting apart has stopped occurring to them.
Grace clicked.
Wet asphalt, a parking lot behind a strip of storefronts, a black SUV with the driver's door standing open. In the frame, Grace had planted herself on that side with her arms folded and her chin tucked, doing a cop from a movie. Teresa stood at the front fender, one hand on her hip, shoulders squared, glaring at whoever was holding the camera.
Grace was not managing her face. The smile sat at the edge of her mouth, caught halfway up.
Teresa leaned toward the screen. "Did I always look like that in pictures?"
"Like what?"
"Like somebody made me stand there."
Grace laughed. "That one took twenty minutes of begging. I had to promise I wouldn't pin it to the board." She tapped the SUV. "It was the first time you let me drive."
"And that was worth a photograph?"
"Not usually." Grace angled the laptop so they could both see. "We were up in the hills above San Rafael, chasing a woman on a motorcycle. Forty minutes, and she slipped us at every light. You were in the passenger seat giving dispatch an education." She pointed at the frontage road in the background. "So I took the next service road, went off the shoulder through sixty feet of oak, and came down a hill right in front of her."
Teresa looked at the picture again. "You drove through trees."
"Down a hill," Grace said. "You were impressed. That's the only reason you agreed to the pose. You made Cho take it so I'd have proof."
Rain ticked at the windows. Teresa studied her own face in that parking lot, the flat mouth and the hard eyes, and found she believed every word of it.
Grace clicked.
A leather couch, dark, the kind that sat in a lobby that smelled of old paper. A man lay full length on it in a suit, jacket buttoned, shoes off and lined up on the floor, hands folded over his chest. A newspaper lay open across his face.
Teresa waited for the rest of the joke. There wasn't one. "Who's that?"
"Patrick Jane." Grace said it evenly. "He was a consultant at the CBI."
Something moved at the back of Teresa's mind, low and faint, the way a word moves when it's on the edge of the tongue. She held still and it went quiet again.
"Why is the consultant asleep?"
"He slept most days. He hated his desk."
"And nobody minded?"
"Plenty of people minded." Grace kept her eyes on the screen. "He did plenty when it counted. He just did it in a way that got the rest of us yelled at. When there wasn't a case, it was better for everyone if he was asleep."
Teresa waited for her to say more. Grace didn't.
She clicked.
Four people around a desk buried in paper and ribbon. Teresa in the middle with a bright cylinder in both hands, Rigsby leaning in with his jaw open, Cho beside him watching like a man at a card table. And next to her, the same blond man from the couch, sitting with one hand flat over his eyes like a child playing a game.
"He's guessing," Grace said.
"Guessing what?"
"What's in each one. Before you open it."
Teresa looked at the hand over the eyes, at the grin under it. "Did he get any right?"
"He got all of them right. Every birthday, every year." Grace's mouth did something complicated. "It was obnoxious."
The next picture loaded. An office, grey carpet, fluorescent light. In the middle of it stood a miniature horse, brown and white, wearing a blanket with HAPPY BIRTHDAY stitched across it in blue. Two agents in the background had their phones up.
Teresa turned and stared at Grace.
Grace laughed so hard she had to set the laptop on her knees.
"He got you a miniature horse," Grace said. "For my birthday. It came up the freight elevator."
"What did I do with it?"
"You never told me."
Teresa turned back to the screen, mouth open, and Grace clicked fast, the way a person clicks when they've decided the conversation ends here.
A lobby with red carpet and a chandelier somewhere out of frame. Four of them in a line. Cho in a tuxedo, Rigsby in a tuxedo, the blond man in a tuxedo with his bow tie, and an older man beside him with grey hair and a face like a retired boxer. Teresa stood in the middle in a strapless velvet gown, black, with makeup on and bangs cut straight across her forehead.
She smiled before she knew she was going to. "I knew it."
"Knew what?"
"That I owned something that wasn't a work shirt." She joked before she touched the screen near her own face. "The bangs."
"That was a good night," Grace said. "That's Virgil Manilli, on the right. He was our supervising agent. He retired three years before everything fell apart."
Teresa wasn't looking at Manilli. In the photograph, the blond man stood close to her. Not too close, close enough. His head was tipped toward hers and his mouth was crooked with some joke he was about to make, and she had her chin down and her lips pressed together hard, fighting a smile like it cost her something.
She looked at that for a while.
Grace clicked again.
The same man, the same tuxedo, alone now on a low stage with a microphone in one hand and his other arm thrown wide. The house lights were up on a room full of tables, and every face in the frame was turned toward him.
"He emceed," Grace said. "The charity thing. He just took the stage."
Teresa didn't answer. The thing that had stirred in the back of her head when the couch photo loaded had come back, and this time it stayed, a pull like a hand on the back of her collar. Not a memory. She knew better than to call it that. It was the shape where a memory had been, the way a coat holds the line of a shoulder after the coat comes off.
She couldn't have said what she felt. She only knew it wasn't the same as the beer glasses, or the horse, or her own face in a parking lot with her jaw set.
"Teresa?"
"I'm fine."
Grace didn't answer that. She clicked.
The next frame was a face, close up. Teresa's own face, tipped down over a paper plate, mouth open around the point of a slice of pizza the size of her hand, brows pulled together hard in the middle.
"What was I eating?"
"Pizza. We always got pizza when we closed a case." Grace angled the screen. "That was the night we thought we had it. Then about an inch into the slice, you found the thing we'd missed. I took the picture right then."
"How long after that did we actually close it?"
"Eleven days."
Teresa looked at her own frown. "So it was the last happy bite."
"It was the last bite before you started telling everybody to get back to work. Including me."
She turned the page on the folder and let the pictures run.
The light in the loft had gone grey, then amber. Somewhere in the middle of it Grace got up and put the lamp on and came back. Teresa watched herself through a decade. In a conference room writing on a whiteboard with both hands. In a hospital hallway with coffee and no sleep in her face. In a bar with her chin on her fist, laughing at something outside the frame. Grace narrated all of it in the same level voice, the way a person reads a ledger, and the stories were funny, or terrible, or both.
A tall woman in a black robe and a crown, standing in a bullpen with a bucket, grinning. "That's me at Halloween. Mary, from the nursery rhyme. You made me carry the bucket around all day."
Then a man with a baby. Wayne Rigsby, twenty pounds thinner, sitting on the edge of a desk with a bundle of blue blanket in his arms, holding it out at arm's length like it might go off. In the corner of the frame, a dark-haired woman was turned away, caught mid-laugh.
"That's Ben," Grace said. "Two days old. His mother was Wayne's girlfriend then." She let that sit. "He isn't mine, biologically. I want you to know that. He's mine in every way that counts, but he isn't mine by blood."
Teresa waited. Grace's jaw moved once and settled. She clicked on.
Then the dress.
Long, rose pink taffeta, cut full to the floor, with a wide sash and a skirt that stood out from the body all by itself. Teresa had her hair back in a clip, one hand flat on the fabric at her hip like she was holding the thing down. She was looking straight at the camera and trying very hard to look pleasant. It wasn't working. Her mouth had the same shape as the pizza picture.
Grace's whole face went soft. "That's you. Trying on your bridesmaid's dress. For my wedding."
Teresa leaned in. The woman in the pink taffeta looked like she'd been asked to hold a snake.
"I thought you got married right before the CBI closed."
"I did."
"So this is from then."
"No." Grace looked at the screen a moment. "This is from the first time I was going to get married."
Teresa didn't know how she'd known that Grace had married near the end. Nobody had told her, as far as she could remember. She glanced sideways at Grace to see whether she should ask.
Grace got there first.
"Craig O'Loughlin. He was an FBI agent, and he was working with the people we were building a case against the whole time." She said it like a weather report. "They wanted access to a protected witness. He was going to marry his way into my life to get it. I found out about four days before the wedding."
Teresa watched her. "What happened?"
"I shot him."
Teresa sat back. The rain ticked on the window behind her.
"He shot you first," Grace continued. "Through the shoulder. He showed up at the cabin where we were hiding the witness. You drew your gun first, but he already had his ready. You caught the bullet. I put two in his chest." She reached over and clicked the picture away. "So that dress never got worn. I married Wayne four years later, in a county office in Sacramento, and you stood up with me in a grey suit."
Teresa looked at her hands. "Thank you."
"For what?"
She didn't have a good answer for that. "For saying it plainly."
"I don't see the point in the other way."
They went back to the folder. The light outside the tall windows went to slate, and the room got warmer with the lamp on it, and Grace kept talking. Cho asleep at his desk with a legal pad for a pillow. A suspect in a bunny costume. An office Christmas with tinsel duct-taped to a ceiling tile. A bar in the rain. A courtroom hallway where Teresa had stood in the same blue blazer in three separate photographs, one of them blurred.
"You wore that blazer to court eleven times," Grace said. "I counted once."
"That's strange."
"Everyone has a favourite blazer."
"I mean that you counted."
"I was twenty-nine and there was nothing else to do."
At some point in the third hour Grace stopped reaching for the trackpad between pictures and started narrating the gaps instead, which was how Teresa learned about the horses, and the office, and the time the whole team got food poisoning off a witness's chili.
Then the last one.
A small room with a stone fireplace and a low couch, and Teresa curled sideways on it in a sweater, knees up, a glass of white wine lifted at the camera in a toast. Her hair was similar to how it was now. She looked loose in the shoulders the way people do at the end of a long week.
"When was that?"
"Canyon Creek, Washington." Grace sat back. "You were the chief of police there. Small town up near the pass. You did two years."
"I was a cop first."
"You were a cop first. Then you came to the CBI and I met you. Then you were a small-town chief.”
Teresa stared at the wine glass, at the firelight on it, and felt the floor of her own life tilt a little, the way it did whenever the pieces got added and the total came out longer than she could hold.
Martha came down the stairs at that point, in a silk robe over a tracksuit, hair pinned up, and crossed the room at speed.
"Don't get up. Either of you. I'm cooking." She went through the kitchen doorway and banged a cabinet open. "I have decided. There is a chicken, there are forty cloves of garlic, and there is wine that Richard will not miss."
Grace shut the laptop. "I'll help."
"You will not. You'll sit."
"I'll help."
She set the laptop on the coffee table and went after her, and the two voices moved into the kitchen and got lost under the sound of water and a knife on a board.
Teresa stayed on the couch. The laptop sat closed in front of her, an inch from her knee.
She was thinking about the man with his hand flat over his eyes, guessing what was in each wrapped box. The way his head had been tipped toward hers on that red carpet. Grace had used the past tense and moved on, and Teresa had let her.
She put two fingers on the edge of the laptop and didn't open it.
"Patrick," she said, quietly enough that the kitchen wouldn't hear it.
The word came out easily. It always had, apparently. It felt like a word she'd said ten thousand times in rooms she couldn't remember, and something under her ribs pulled hard and low when she said it now, the same pull as the photograph. She pulled her hand back and sat still with it, and let the knife keep going in the kitchen.