Photographs Ch. 10

DISCLAIMER:This is included in the novel/novella category because of length. It is a mother/son incest story. There are also instances of abuse (two of them, which are not the focus of the story). As far as heat level, this story is quite tame, and if you are look for page after page of screaming sex, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want a STORY, please read on.

For the second time in her life, Christie woke in a hospital bed with no idea of how she arrived there, but at least this time she knew why. She opened her eyes to see a shadowed ceiling, tiles blurred in her vision. The three men she loved most came into view. Danny and Sean and Mike. Too groggy to see the look of concern on their faces, she reached out her hands to them as if nothing was wrong, but everything hurt. That small movement brought to mind what had happened in the entryway. She realized she wore an oxygen mask.

"Christie," Sean said. He held her hand gently. Danny took the other one.

"Steve?" she whispered.

"What did she say?" Mike asked.

"She said 'Steve'," Sean said.

"Dead," Danny said. "He's dead."

"How?"

She missed the look that passed between the three men.

"You rest now, okay?" Sean said.

Christie tried to nod, but even that was beyond her. A nurse came in then, scolding them for crowding the small room, and her brothers left. Danny refused to leave her side.

#####

While Christie lay in the ICU, Sean, a Los Angeles police detective, handled everything. Danny gave him the name of one of Christie's lawyer friends, who agreed without hesitation to handle the situation. Every professional who looked at the evidence agreed the Christie had acted in self-defense, but legal council never hurt. Sean instructed everyone in the family, including her parents, who had flown down from Washington, on how to deal with the press: say nothing no matter how they provoke you. He even took care of Danny's school issues, getting him a temporary leave.

His Uncle Mike made sure Danny had food and rest. In a whispered conversation during one of his meals, when Mike had dragged him to the cafeteria, Danny explained why Christie had married Steve. He told Mike and Sean about the photographs of the murder and about the storage area. He didn't mention the many times Steve had beaten Christie during the course of their marriage, but knowing that they were photographed, he suspected that if Sean and Mike found the storage area, that secret wouldn't be kept for long. It surprised him how relieved he felt to have it off his chest.

Back in her room, he kept his vigil, talking with her when she was lucid, sleeping when he must, and only leaving her side when forced to.

#####

The day after Steve's death, Christie spoke briefly with the police. Her parents arrived, and between them and her brothers and sisters-in-law she never seemed to have a moment to rest. Danny finally told everyone to leave and hulked over them as menacingly as a sensitive, sweet, 6'5" young man could. Considering that Sean, Mike, and her father were only a few inches shorter, he had to resort to begging.

"Two years," Christie said when they were finally alone. They had replaced the mask with tubing that ran to her nose. When she had stabbed Steve, the movement shifted a cracked rib, causing it to partially collapse her lung. She wondered if she would ever be able to swim laps again.

"Two years?"

"We managed two years without him discovering us."

"You think it was inevitable?"

"Maybe."

"He never really knew, though. We got very lucky."

She looked down the length of the bed at her blanket-covered body and snorted. "Lucky?"

"It could have been much worse."

"I suppose so." She looked at him. The door was closed, so she said, "I know I'm icky right now, but please kiss me."

He looked at her face, tilted his head to one side and then the other, and finally placed a kiss on her forehead, then another on her right cheek. Two spots that weren't swollen or bruised. "That'll have to do until you heal up."

"You get some sleep," Christie told him. "Go home." The room was bathed in warm light, and she found the soft beep of the heart monitor somewhat comforting. "I feel okay right now."

"I want to be here in case you..."

"I'm not going to die, Danny."

"But you might be lonely."

"Sweetie, I love you, but I would like a few hours to myself."

######

What Christie thought about, lying alone in her hospital bed, was not about the attack, or having killed her husband. She thought about how close she and Danny had come to exposure. The risk might have been worth it for the happiness it had given both of them, but it did give her pause. Danny didn't deserve to live this way. No matter that he called her Christie now, and not Mom, no matter that they were lovers, some part of her would always remain his mother. That part of her needed to safeguard his welfare. The pain in her chest from the thought of losing him hurt worse than the broken ribs and collapsed lung, but she needed to face the fact that they could not go on like this. She never wanted Danny to miss out on having a normal life just because she was too selfish to let him have one. When the right time came, when he was ready, she would not force him to stay.

#####

Two days after Steve attacked Christie, Sean and Mike took a few hours to deal with the storage area.

"That was far too easy," Mike said as the walked out of the small office.

"She was stupid and not very well trained. And the word "terrorist" and a badge still have a lot of cache these days," Sean said.

They both would rather have been at the hospital, watching Christie, but they knew that if the photographs were here, they had to get to them before some clerk watched the news and connected Steve Tyler with the storage area's customers.

Sean and Mike scanned the list of renters the clerk gave him. Steve Tyler was not among them. They worked through the list slowly, thinking about each name. There were two John Smiths, but the name Carlton Avery practically leaped off the page. In school, Steve had almost idolized Avery, a handsome, brilliant teen who had a habit of cutting people down in such an amusing, clever way that even the most kind-hearted laughed. Someone with great potential who was privately a sadistic bully. Steve would have probably ditched Mike and Andy for Avery's company if the boy hadn't considered Steve inferior.

"Carlton Avery," Sean said to Mike. "Even I remember him."

"What is the likelihood that the real Carlton Avery has a unit here?"

"It would be a rather large coincidence."

"We can't get in without a warrant," Sean said. Both were police officers. The laws they might be breaking could end their careers.

"Steve did."

"What are you talking about?"

Mike pointed to the large sign that posted the storage area's hours and rules. "It closes at 9:00 p.m. on Fridays. Danny said he was here later than that."

"Drive around the block," Sean said.

Weeds grew at the base of the chain link surrounding the area, and in some places it sagged and was pitted with rust. Razor wire topped the fence, but no cameras protected the buildings within. The property ran the length of the entire block, with a tall gate at the back, letting out into the next street over. Mike parked the truck and they got out to investigate. A set of bolt cutters rested on the passenger seat between them. Mike picked them up and together they quietly they left his truck to find a way in, and then unit F168.

If they hadn't been trying to be inconspicuous by parking the truck half a block away, they never would have seen the hole in the fence, hidden behind a particularly tall stand of star thistle and the dumpster for a dry cleaners next door. Sean slipped between the thistle and the dumpster to examine the hole.

"Look," he said to Mike. The wire had not come loose; it had been cut from the support at the corner where one length of chain link abutted another. Sean thought about that for a moment. "If he came here at night a lot, then he might have made that hole himself."

"Whatever he has hidden here, he doesn't want anyone to find out about it. No cameras. Did you notice?" Mike asked.

Sean looked at the little map swiped from the counter in the office. F168 was located far in the back, out of sight of the office. While they slipped through the fence and made their way to the unit, Mike said. "No warrant, no probable cause."

"I think we have worse crimes in our past," Sean said. "No one's ever going to know about this. Let's just not get caught."

"If we have to cut that padlock, they'll know," Mike said.

"I brought a replacement."

"Good."

As it turned out, the lock was a keyed padlock, and Sean pulled on latex gloves and began to work on it. He had it open in a couple of minutes. There was no electricity to the unit, but it was daylight, and they had come prepared with flashlights. They shined the flashlights around and whistled.

"Will you get a load of that?" Mike said, pulling on his own gloves. "It's like a Wal-Mart photo center."

What they found inside was photographs. Thousands of photographs lined up in neat rows in long plastic trays that rested on heavy duty shelving. Within the trays, the photos were grouped, separated by cardboard dividers that said the name of the persons in them. Sean and Mike flipped through a few.

"Hey isn't this that Miranda chick that was in rehab so many times?" Sean said, holding up a photo of a woman with two men, mid-coitus. They found several that had subjects having sex and clearly unaware of the photographer that spied on them.

"He was a frickin' peeper," Mike said.

"Are you really that surprised?"

"No. Not really. The guy always gave me the willies."

"No he didn't. You liked the guy once upon a time," Sean said while holding a photo up and shining his light on it. "Mark Williamson with another guy."

"I didn't like him after he convinced Christie to marry him at eighteen. Look here."

At one end of the shelves, they found four trays that simply had "Christie" written on them in marker. Even with the beating Steve had given her before she killed him, nothing could have prepared them for what they found when they began randomly pulling out photos. Beatings. Steve fucking Christie, her body covered in welts and bruises. Photos of a strap in his raised hand, about to deliver a blow to her back. Christie bound and gagged, clothespins on her nipples. Steve raping her with foreign objects.

"Look at her expression," Sean said. "That ain't sexual excitement."

"She looks...," Mike's voice caught and he swallowed.

"Hopeless," Sean finished for him.

They both stood there for a long time, Mike with silent tears streaming down his cheeks. "She never said a word," he said.

"Stupid little fool. Sweet, generous little fool," Sean said, his voice cracking with emotion. "She endured this for our sakes, you know."

"And Danny's, I'll bet."

"Look closely at these photos," Sean said.

"I'd rather not."

"No, look. If you look at several you'll see how careful the little shit was. He never hit her on the face or neck, or the lower arms or legs. I'll bet he never broke a bone, either."

"If he had we would have discovered it," Mike said.

"Yeah. It was very controlled. Scarily controlled sexual sadism. I think there's a lot more to Steve than we ever knew. Did you ever suspect this?"

Mike shrugged. "I was on deployment when she got married, but Mom said she had no enthusiasm about her wedding and cried herself to sleep the night before. So, yeah, I wondered."

"I did a little at first, too, but she seemed to thrive. Even with all this, and a baby, she went to school and had a career."

"Our girl is one tough cookie."

"She was so young," Sean said. "And so naive and sheltered. She probably thought she was being noble or something. Sacrificing herself for us."

"She was probably scared to death. This is our fault, Sean."

The cardboard labels in the Christie trays held the year the photos were taken, going back twenty-six years to when Christie was only ten. Mike pulled out the very first photo, one that showed ten-year-old Christie in a yellow bathing suit at the public pool.

"I remember this suit," Mike said. "It was her first two-piece and she was so proud of it I got tired of hearing about it."

Sean looked over his shoulder at the photo. "He took that from outside the fence, in the bushes by the parking lot," he said. "A peeping tom hiding in the bushes and spying on a ten-year-old girl in a bathing suit. He was what? Twelve? Early but, unfortunately, not unusually so."

"She sure was pretty," Mike said, looking at a photo of Christie in a tutu at a dance recital.

"And it attracted the attention of a nut-case."

Sean pulled out another photo. Christie was about fifteen, lying naked on her bed. "This was taken from above," Mike remarked. "He put a remote camera on the ceiling fixture."

Sean scraped at something stuck to the photo. "My God, is that cum?"

They hastily put the photos back as they had found them. "What's next?" Mike asked.

The next set of shelves held plastic bins, seven of them. Inside each was a file folder with a tidy ledger of sums, with a date beside each, and a name and address. With the folders were mostly photographs, but a few bins held video tapes, computer disks, or what looked to Sean like audio recordings. The photographs left no doubt.

"Blackmail," Sean said.

"You know," Mike said. "I always thought they lived too well. Portrait photographers can't make that much, even with famous clients, and I know his celebrity photos sometimes get only a few dollars. Even with Christie's practice, they couldn't afford that house they live in."

"Yep, but he probably got a lot for some of those candid shots he took while hiding in people's closets."

"It's probably a short step from peeping tom to blackmailer, since he spies on such famous people. But it's not the obvious one."

"Nope," Mike said from the set of shelves on the opposite wall. "The obvious next step is over here."

More plastic bins, even smaller this time, and more photographs, each cataloging a rape. Sean counted the boxes.

"Twenty-eight," Sean said in a low voice. "He's raped twenty-eight women."

They could only stare for a moment and try to comprehend the enormity of a serial rapist getting away with it that many times, for so many years.

"Twenty-eight that he's bothered to photograph and catalog," Mike said. "There could be more. He traveled all over. Every one of these women could be in a different city. That's how he got away with it for so long."

"Probably. Look at the dates," Sean said. "The first few years only have one or two each, but there's five in the last fourteen months. He was escalating." He looked at several of the photos. "And getting more brutal. It was only a matter of time before he killed someone."

Mike held up four photos from four different rapes. "Who do these women remind you of?"

Three women were all pretty and dark haired. The fourth was blond, but statuesque and beautiful. "It's Christie. They were surrogates for Christie," Mike said. He started opening boxes and pulling out photos. Most of the women resembled Christie to one degree or another. "I'll bet he wanted to do this to her all along. All these years, of being so controlled, I wonder what sent him over the edge."

"Careful," Sean said. "We need to leave this like we found it."

"Sean," Mike said from where he was crouched down at the bottom shelf. "Found it." He pulled out a box with what they came for -- the photos from the night Andy raped Christie.

"There's so many," Sean remarked. "He was there the entire time, taking photos while Andy raped our sister."

Mike held up two photos that weren't as clear or perfectly framed as the rest. "He raped her, too. Steve raped her."

Looking at them, fury blossomed in Sean's chest. Mike growled and slammed his fist into the metal support for the shelf. "I wish he wasn't dead so I could kill him myself," he said.

"Yep."

There was a desk at the back of the unit, with a computer. A diesel generator supplied the power. Sean fired it up while Mike went through more photos to see if there were any of Christie that they missed. A password blocked Sean from gaining anything useful.

"We'll need that hard drive. He might have digitized the photos of us."

Mike searched the desk and found a piece of paper with what might be passwords taped beneath a drawer.

"Sloppy for such a meticulous guy," Sean said.

In the desk drawer Mike found a lock box. It was easy to pick open and revealed jewelry, large and small pieces. All of it looked valuable.

"Add burglary to peeping, blackmail, and rape," Sean said.

"Geez, he's a one-man crime wave."

Mike returned the jewelry to the box. "Stupid," he said. "No one's going to the police if you take photographs of them doing something they shouldn't, but burglary has to be reported for insurance."

"Probably just stuff lying around on dressers that he couldn't resist taking while he was there anyway. Are we done?" Sean asked.

"I think so," Mike replied.

"Let's pop the padlock on that back gate and bring your truck around. We're going to take the computer, the monitor, and the generator. Make it look like a computer was never in here. What should we do with the rest?"

"We burn it," Mike said. "Fill the back of the truck, take it somewhere, start a bonfire."

"Mike, think about it. Twenty-eight unsolved cases. Women who need closure. We could send in the photos anonymously."

"Christie needs closure. She needs this part of her life to be over with. If we turn this in, it's going to be an even bigger media circus. Her life will just go from one nightmare to a different nightmare. A serial rapist? Decades from now the press will still be revisiting it. And what about Danny?"

"Why don't we let Christie decide?" Sean asked.

Mike shined his flashlight around the unit, surveying the thousands of photographs. "I still say we should burn it. You know what Christie's choice would be. She never thinks of herself."

Sean looked around and finally said, "Let Christie decide. She was his victim, too."

#####

"We found the storage unit." Sean had said. "The problem is taken care of."

Both Sean and Mike had refused to say another word about it for the next three days while Christie recovered. Both of them returned to work, but visited when the could. Danny only went home when Christie told him he stank.

When the doctor finally let her get up and shower, she stood in front of them, arms outspread, and said, "See? All better now. Talk." Then they had to help her back into bed.

"I know something is up," she said. "I'm going home in an hour or two, at which point Mom will be underfoot. Now's a good time if you have something to tell me."

Sean jerked his head toward the door, looking at Mike. "Door," Sean said. He looked down at his sister while Mike did this, and then said, "You're an idiot."

"Hey!" Danny said.

"You needed privacy to tell me that?" Christie said.

"I love you, Sis, and I'm going to forgive your idiocy because you were just a kid when all this began, but I just want to go on the record saying that I think you're a sweet, loving, foolish idiot."

"If I was an idiot, it was for your sake," she said.

"That's the part that makes you an idiot."

"How much does Danny know?" Mike asked.

"Everything," Danny said.

"No, not everything," Sean said, and he took her hand, sat at her side, and told her everything.

#####

"I'm not terribly surprised," Christie said when Sean had told her every last detail. She felt a little sick, but not surprised.

"Me neither," Danny said. "We even wondered if he was a rapist."