The woman was Senegal Firth, a candidate for British Parliament, favored to win until she withdrew one month prior to the election. Controversial. I didn’t remember details.
I checked the date of the magazine. Seven months old. Ms. Firth had been vacationing on Saint Arc when the photo was taken. It was an unflattering shot of a photogenic woman: late forties, interesting eyes, brown hair, very fit in a navy blue two-piece that clung.
I flipped inside. More candid swimsuit photos. I read enough to understand that Ms. Firth was outraged by the breach of privacy and was threatening to sue.
Sniper photographers were welcome, apparently, on Saint Arc.
The other magazine, also French, was for orchid aficionados.
An odd combination.
The front of the blind looked down onto the pool, only fifty yards away, but it was insulated from the property by a sheer ledge that dropped a hundred feet onto lichen gray rocks. The ledge rimmed the mountain, so it was a quarter mile or more to the house on foot.
As I closed the magazine, two women who’d been on the beach came into view, very tall, bony, towels over their shoulders. They were so close, I could hear bits of conversation-American women, middle-aged, Midwestern accents.
As one of them leaned to step out of her bikini bottoms, I felt a creeping revulsion. I reached to drop a curtain that covered the viewing window. This cozy little camera blind was a nasty little place. Violence can be done in silence. I’d come to gather intel and evidence, not to ogle unsuspecting women. Let the ladies swim in private.
I opened the cooler-several champagne bottles inside, two empty, all of them warm. A thread of spider’s silk angled from the table to the window frame. It takes a spider several hours to construct a web, but this lone thread was older-no spider in sight.
No one here today. That might soon change. Women were renting the house, and tomorrow was Sunday. I remembered Shay telling me there was nothing going on at the nearby resort the night the men showed up-a Sunday night.
I got busy.
I pulled on surgical gloves. One by one, I opened the videocassettes and used a pocket knife to cut the magnetic tape where it bridged the rollers. If the camera’s computer didn’t flash an alert-media error-the cassette spools would turn, the tape would not.
I left two cassettes intact, securing them separately in plastic bags. If the day came when I needed fingerprints, they might be useful. I also bagged several cigarette butts-DNA. A roach butt went into another baggie. If it had been infused with a synthetic drug, forensics labs could identify it.
From a waist pack, I removed one of two tiny digital recorders I’d brought, then a remote microphone the size of a pencil eraser. The recorder was voice-activated. It had enough memory to record twelve hours of conversation.
After several frustrating minutes, I figured out how to reduce microphone sensitivity-I wanted conversation, not twelve hours of birds chirping. I tested it, sealed it in its case, and hid the recorder under moss along the inside wall. I’d just found a spot to clip the microphone when I heard leaves rustling… the crack of a branch… another… then a muffled male voice, very close.
Visitors.
I knelt and parted the netting: two men coming from the north, where the road angled close to the forest. White guys, early twenties, with tangled black hair. Each carried a backpack. One also carried a tripod; the other lugged a bag of ice.
They were twenty yards away, facing the blind’s entrance, making it impossible to leave the way I’d entered. Instead, I took a last look at the microphone, then burrowed under the netting at the south wall and crawled on my belly into some ferns.
I gave it several seconds, then turned and faced the camera blind, pulling leaves closer for cover. I also unholstered the palm-sized Colt. 380 clipped inside the back of my pants. I confirmed there was a round in the breach, then held the pistol ready as I waited.
I couldn’t see the men as they entered the blind, but I could hear them whispering in patois French. I caught a few words, but understood little. I heard the ice chest open; heard the measured, metallic sounds of a tripod being set up.
Fifteen minutes later, they were joined by a third man. After that, they whispered in English-islander English, which was only slightly easier to understand than French, and almost impossible to hear.
I was getting them on tape, but I didn’t want to wait. I decided to risk it. I left my soft spot in the ferns, crawled to the blind, and put my ear against the netting. There was the flicking sound of a lighter lighting a joint, and the clink of a bottle.
I found a hole in the webbing wide enough for one eye, and took a look. The third man wore a red bandanna tied pirate style, blond dreadlocks spilling out from beneath. Open white shirt with cuffs, hairless chest, skin tanned butterscotch. Shay’s guy in the video. He stood smoking a cigarette while the others shared the joint and drank beer, in no hurry. The impression was they were done for the day even though there was no camera mounted on the tripod.
They’d rolled up the canvas curtain and were watching the women. I couldn’t see the pool, but I knew what the men were seeing from their whispered jokes and laughter. I could read their facial expressions-distaste; pained locker-room grimaces at the sight of forty-year-old women swimming naked. They traded clinical assessments. Made cruel and graphic comparisons. But they watched, anyway.
Pointless cruelty invites a violent response.
I had the pistol in my right hand. I slipped it under the netting, then touched the gun sights experimentally to each man’s head, one by one- an adolescent demonstration that a professional wouldn’t do. Stupid. This was personal business, not an assignment. I couldn’t go running to the U.S. Consulate in Grenada if local law enforcement came after me. But it was so damn tempting.
The three continued to joke about the women as I lowered the Colt and turned my eye away from the netting. Listening was bad enough without seeing their facial theatrics.
It was another ten minutes before they tired of the subject and said something useful.
I heard, “Mon, do you really ’spect me to screw them women tomorrow night? Put our hands on them ol’ ladies? I goan have to drink myself blind first.”
Translation: I’ll have to drink myself blind first.
In the same dialect, the man with the pirate bandanna-Bandanna Man-whispered, “Then you better start drinkin’ ’cause those ladies are the golden egg, what you’re seein’ down there. Them women are rich.”
“Okay, man, okay. I’ll do it, but I ain’t likin’ it.” Laughter.
The third man’s accent was more French than islander. “Then what we sittin’ here for? We’ll be seeing them too soon as ’tis. Burnin’ up all our drinkin’ time tonight don’t make no sense. Dirk?”
“Yeah, man.”
“Wolfie’s comin’ with the camera tomorrow. That right? You tell that pompous fool be on time. We meet him at the Green Turtle, six o’clock. You hear me?”
“Yeah, man, doan worry. It takes a bottle of rum before I go blind and deaf.”
They were laughing as they left, one by one-a standard security precaution that told me they’d done this before. I crawled to the edge of the camera blind and got a good look at them sneaking away through the rain forest toward the road.
Beryl and Shay had given me descriptions of the men who’d lured them into the swimming pool. Two looked European, possibly Dutch, jet-setter Shay had told me, but they were locals with French-West In-dies accents. She’d also described the butterscotch islander with blond dreadlocks, but I would’ve recognized him, anyway. Shay’s partner.
These were the guys. They’d be back tomorrow night.
So would I.
I gave it five minutes, then took another look inside the camera blind. It was now supplied for tomorrow night’s filming. Snacks, Red Stripe beer wedged around a block of ice, the tripod, and a sleeve of three new videocassettes. Would Wolfie, the cameraman, notice broken cellophane wrappers?