“Ah, yes. This is a very old technique.” Leeanne set the box on a table, removed a bit of tape, then aimed the tiny hole that had been shielded beneath it toward Eve. “A handmade box, the photographic paper inside, the light outside with the pinhole as the lens that captures that light, and the image. I’d like you to keep still,” she told Eve.
“That box is taking my picture.”
“Yes. It’s the light, you see, that creates the miracle here. I ask each of my students to make a pinhole camera like this, and to experiment with it. Those that don’t understand the miracle, well, they may go on to take good pictures, but they’ll never create art. It isn’t all technology and tools, you see. It isn’t all equipment and manipulation. The core is the light, and what it sees. What we see through it.”
“What we take out of it?” Eve asked, watching her. “What we absorb from it?”
“Perhaps. While some primitive cultures feared that the camera, by reproducing their image, stole their souls, others believed that it gave them a kind of immortality. We have, in many ways, blended those two beliefs. Certainly, we immortalize with imaging, we steal moments of time and hold them. And we take something from each subject, each time. That moment again, that thought, that mood, that light. It will never be exactly the same again. Not even a second afterward. It’s gone—and it’s preserved, forever, in the photograph. There’s power in that.”
“There’s no thought, no mood, no light in a photograph of the dead.”
“Ah, but there is. The artist’s. Death, most certainly death, would be a defining moment. Here, let’s see what we’ve got.”
She covered the hole on the box again, then slid out a sheet of paper. On it, Eve’s image was reproduced, almost like a pale pencil sketch.
“The light etches the image, burns it into the paper, and preserves it. The light,” she said, handing the paper to Eve, “is the tool, the magic. The soul.”
“She’s really interesting,” Peabody commented. “I bet she’s a terrific teacher.”
“And as someone who knows how to manipulate images, she had the skill to dick with the security discs on her building, shift the time stamp. Her alibi, therefore, has holes. So we give her, potentially, opportunity. Means—she clicks there. Method, another click. Give me motive.”
“Well, I don’t . . .”
“Set aside the fact you like her.” Eve merged into traffic. “What’s her motive for selecting, stalking, and killing two attractive college students?”
“Art. It all deals with art.”
“Deeper, Peabody.”
“Okay.” She wanted to take off her cap, scratch her head, but resisted. “Controlling the subject? Controlling the art in order to create?”
“On one level,” Eve agreed. “Control, creation, and the accolades that result. The attention, anyway, the recognition. In this case we have a teacher. She instructs, she gives her knowledge, her skill, her experience, and others take it and go on to become what she hasn’t. She’s written a couple of books, published some images, but she isn’t considered an artist, is she? She’s considered a teacher.”
“It’s a very respected, and often under-appreciated vocation. You’re a really good teacher, for instance.”
“I don’t teach anybody. Train maybe, but that’s different.”
“I wouldn’t have the shot at a gold shield, not this soon, if you hadn’t taught me.”
“Trained you, and let’s stay on target here. The other level is taking from the subject and seeing them as just that. A subject, not a person with a life, a family, with needs or rights. A subject, like—I don’t know—a tree. If you’ve got to cut down the tree to get what you want, well, too bad. Plenty more trees.”
“You’re talking to a Free-Ager here.” Peabody shuddered. “Talking about indiscriminately mowing down trees hits me in a primal area.”
“The killer isn’t killing just for the thrill of taking a life. It isn’t done with rage, or for profit. It isn’t sexual. But it is personal. It’s intimate—for the killer. This person, this specific person, has what I need, so I’ll take it. I’ll take what they have, then it becomes mine. They become mine, and the result is art. Admire me.”
“That’s a pretty twisted route.”
“It’s a pretty twisted mind. And a smart one, a cool one.”
“You think it’s Professor Browning?”
“She’s connected, so we line up the connections. Who knows her, and Hastings, and the two victims? Who had contact with all of them? Let’s find out.”
She started at Juilliard, at the theater department. At some point in their young lives, Rachel Howard and Kenby Sulu had intersected.
She sent Peabody off to make the rounds with the photograph of Rachel while she made her own.
When her ’link beeped, she was standing at the back of a rehearsal hall watching a bunch of young people pretend to be various animals.