‘If you want to sit right over there by the window, I’ll go get what I’ve got from the den,’ she said.
I took a seat at the breakfast table and looked out the window at Kellie Shephard’s house. I could see people passing behind broken windows, and someone had set up lights because the sun was low and smoldering. I wondered how often her neighbor had watched her come and go.
Certainly, Harvey was curious about the life of a woman exotic enough to be a movie star, and I wondered if someone could have stalked Shephard without her neighbor noticing a strange car or person in the area. But I had to be careful what I asked, because it was not publicly known that Shephard had died a violent death.
‘Well, I can’t believe it,’ Harvey called out to me as she returned to the kitchen. ‘I got something better. You know, some television crew was at the hospital last week filming a feature about the trauma center. It showed on the evening news, and Kellie was in it, so I taped it. I can’t believe it took me this long to think of it, but my brain’s not working all that well, if you know what I mean.’
She was holding a videotape. I accompanied her into the living room, where she inserted the tape into the VCR. I sat in a blue wing chair in a sea of blue carpet while she rewound and then hit the play button. The first few frames were of Lehigh Valley hospital from the perspective of a helicopter swooping in with an emergency case. It was then I realized that Kellie was really a medflight paramedic, and not merely a nurse on a ward.
Footage showed Kellie in a jumpsuit dashing down a corridor with other members of the flight crew who had just been paged.
‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ she said on tape as they darted around people in the way.
She was a spectacular example of the human genome working just right, her teeth dazzling, and the camera in love with every angle of her fine features and bones. It was not hard to imagine patients getting major crushes on her, and then the film showed her in the cafeteria after another impossible mission had been accomplished.
‘It’s always a race against time,’ Shephard was telling the reporter. ‘You know even a minute’s delay could cost a life. Talk about an adrenaline rush.’
As she continued her rather banal interview, the angle of the camera shifted.
‘I can’t believe I taped that, but it’s not often someone I know is on TV,’ Harvey was saying.
It didn’t penetrate at first.
‘Stop the tape!’ I said. ‘Rewind. Yes, right there. Freeze it.’
The frame was of someone in the background eating lunch.
‘No,’ I said under my breath. ‘No way.’
Carrie Grethen was wearing jeans and a tie-dye shirt, and eating a sandwich at a table with other busy hospital personnel. I had not recognized her at first because her hair was below her ears and henna red, and last I had seen her, it was short and bleached white. But it was her eyes that finally pulled at me like a black hole. She was staring straight into the camera as she chewed, her eyes as coldly bright and evil as I remembered.
I came out of the chair and went straight to the VCR and popped out the tape.
‘I need to take this,’ I said, my voice on the verge of panic. ‘I promise you’ll get it back.’
‘Okay. As long as you don’t forget. It’s my only copy.’ Sandra Harvey got up, too. ‘Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I’ve got to go. Thank you again,’ I said.
I ran next door and trotted up steps into the back of the house, where cold water was an inch deep on the floor and dripping slowly from the roof. Agents were moving about, taking photographs and talking amongst themselves.
‘Teun!’ I called out.
I carefully moved further inside, stepping over missing areas of flooring and doing my best not to trip. I was vaguely aware of an agent dropping the burned carcass of a cat into a plastic bag.