Last Call

Jack closed the website.

Andie was silent. Then she looked at Jack and said, "I'm glad Theo didn't watch."

"So you see it like I do? This is not acting. 'Reality Bitches' means it's real?"

"No doubt about it," she said. "Theo's mother was raped. Before she was his mother."

Chapter 38

Andie ate di

Suddenly she was counting minutes as the theme song from Rent played in her head.

She popped open another diet soda and unwrapped her spicy tuna roll from the local sushi-on-wheels. The bright side was that she was impressing her supervisors and proving herself worthy of advancement to the elite criminal profiling unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico. With every di

Fu

She glanced at the phone. Every now and then, she felt the urge to call her former supervisor to see if returning to Seattle was an option. Jack, however, had made that impossible. Even though he was in and out of her life in the span of two weeks, people would have said she jumped on a plane and flew across the country after getting dumped by the former governor's son.

A few more dates with Jack, and maybe it would have been true.

Good thing he wigged out.

Her appetite was gone. The files on the floor called out to her. Each stack was its own case, another investigation, a different victim. Andie had one of those filing systems where the work piled up – literally. Even so, she couldn't stop herself from going back to her computer and that movie again.

The FBI's tech experts had cleaned up the downloadable version of the film and burned it onto a disk, which she now inserted into her PC. It still had its shortcomings – shaky frames, grainy images, poor lighting. The geek masters were good, but they weren't magicians.

Andie let the frames advance in slow motion. It was like laying out the pieces to a puzzle with two parts. One, who raped Theo's mother? Two, why did Isaac want Theo to see it? So far she had the faces of two drunks – the heckler and his friend – in a dark room somewhere in the early 1970s. Those guys were in their fifties now, and it would be impossible to find and identify them if she didn't nail down the location. The answer had to be on this disk, and Andie was determined to dissect it from every angle. Portia's striptease in the darkness. Her argument with the drunks. The ensuing frenzy, the mad chase down hall, the -

Andie hit pause. Something had caught her eye.

She rewound several frames, still in slow motion, and watched even more intently. A flash of light brightened the screen, and she hit pause to freeze the image. The white flash had been the camera's spotlight reflecting in a mirror on the wall. She advanced one more frame – and there he was.

The cameraman.

Whoever had posted this film on the Internet had gone to some effort to protect the guilty, carefully editing out frames that would reveal the attackers' identity. Apparently they'd missed this split-second appearance of the cameraman in the mirror. Andie burned the image to a separate CD and took it upstairs to the tech floor. By definition, these guys had no life, and of course someone was still there after hours.

"Be

Crumpled candy wrappers and empty soda cans littered the work area around Be

"What…now?" he said, swallowing.

Andie showed him the disk. "Can you clean up a still image for me?"

"Right this minute?"

"Pretty please?"

Be

Andie felt a headache coming on. She liked Star Trek, but this was the price she paid for pretending to love it just to stay in the good graces of the all-important tech guys. "I don't know. Martin Landau?"

"Corrrr-ect!"

"Really?"

"Yup. And then in a truly interesting twist, after Landau left Mission Impossible, Leonard Nimoy joined that show to play the role of disguise expert-"

"Be

He took it and inserted it into the computer. "Sure."

The image popped onto the screen. Be

"Can you fix it?"

"Let's see." Be

"How's that?" said Be

"Great. Can you do anything with his shirt?"

"What about it?"

Andie pointed. "There's some kind of artwork on it, I think."

He trained the zoom onto the man's chest, and after another round of computerized adjustments, the shirt started to come into focus.

"It's a frat house," said Andie.

"What?" he said, still tinkering with the image.

"Those are Greek letters on his shirt. This was a fraternity party."

Be

Andie studied it. "Pi Alpha Delta," she said.

"Hope that helps," he said.

"More than you know," she said. She thanked him, brought the disk back to her office, and printed out the still images of the cameraman, the heckler, and his friend. Then she called university information to find out if there was a Pi Alpha Delta fraternity on campus.

There was.

Andie tucked the printed photographs into her purse and bolted out of the office.

It took twenty minutes of dodging speeding motorcycles on the expressway and another ten of winding through residential neighborhoods to reach the university's main campus. Pi Alpha Delta was actually located off-campus, one of five fraternity houses directly across from the intramural athletic fields on a busy four-lane boulevard. Andie parked her unmarked sedan in the church lot up the street, walked a half block to the house, and wondered how many frat boys had used the acronym as a bad pickup line – as in, "Come on over to my PAD."

Andie had yet to confirm that the PAD house existed in the 1970s, but from the looks of it, she was betting yes. The unadorned one-story cinder-block construction with low-slung roofline was the typical hurricane-resistant style of the 1960s that only a Florida architect could love. She walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell at the front door. It seemed surprisingly quiet inside. Apparently, even frat boys stopped to recharge their batteries every once in a while.

The door opened, and a muscular young man wearing only nylon jogging shorts and flip-flop sandals greeted her. If Andie had to guess, she'd say he spent more time working on his suntan and his six-pack abs than his studies.