Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page B

“Not enough to make everything look fucking incandescent.”
    “There is always light,” repeated Ilkka. “Buried beneath the earth, even. Not everyone can see it. But I do.” He leaned forward, scrutinizing me. “Just as you see something else. It is there.…”
    Hs finger hovered alongside my right eye, the raw scar that had not yet healed. “A flaw behind your retina. I can see that, too. Odin traded one eye for wisdom and the gift of true sight. Perhaps you have done the same, yes?”
    He drew back, and we gazed at the photos.
    “All these people,” I said. “Did you see some flaw in them?”
    “I know nothing about any of them, except what I have told you. But they deserved to die. They were unclean: Their own darkness had invaded them. Whatever light they possess now, it came from me.”
    “Is this it?” I stared at the table. “Just these five?”
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    “Anton told me there were six.”
    Ilkka remained silent. I stared at his chiseled face and ice-gray eyes, trying to make sense of all this. I caught no chemical whiff of fear or adrenaline, nothing to signal that he’d touched any weapon other than a shutter release. He might be crazy, but he was telling the truth.
    Part of it, anyway. Ilkka Kaltunnen might be lying about that sixth photo, but he wasn’t the murderer. Someone else was. Anton? In which case Ilkka was blackmailing him, despite the fact that Ilkka was inextricably bound to whatever had happened out there in the snow, beneath the ice. Not just complicit in any cover-up or failure to report the murders, but in whatever bizarre belief system had left at least five people murdered, their deaths unnoticed and unmourned.
    I’d never heard of a murderer who kept a court photographer, but there’s always a first time. Ilkka either witnessed each killing or he was tipped off before the blood cooled. He got his money shot and split.
    And money definitely would be an object. Large-format images like these cost a bundle to produce. No commercial lab would have developed or printed them without asking questions or calling the cops.
    Photographers are like professional stage magicians. They admire each other’s work and share tips but seldom reveal exactly how the trick was done. I figured I’d give it a shot. “How’d you process them?”
    Ilkka pointed to an adjoining room. I walked in and found a huge machine, sleek and white as a plastic coffin beneath a translucent plastic tarp—a first-generation Chromira LED printer. He must have socked away a small fortune to pay for it: In the ’90s, this rig would have set you back fifty grand plus change.
    But it would also allow you to produce your own prints in-house, with no embarrassing inquiries about blood on the snow. I saw another door at the end of the room, with half a dozen light switches beside it. I was willing to bet that was where the big color negs were processed, in an equally expensive rig.
    Yet as far as I could see, the only thing Ilkka had ever used it for was a sequence that produced just five photos. Where was the sixth photo that Anton had referred to? Ilkka had told me he mostly shot in digital now, and there was no sign of any other oversize prints, unless he stored them in the map chest. What photographer invests a hundred grand in equipment he hardly uses?
    A rich, obsessive control freak locked into some crazy-ass death cult. He and Anton deserved each other. I returned to the table, where Ilkka gazed transfixed at his own work. “It’s good, isn’t it, Cassandra?”
    “It’s brilliant.” I meant it. “I’d still like to know how you did that.”
    The overhead light candled the lenses of Ilkka’s glasses as he smiled but said nothing.
    “What if you and Anton can’t agree on a price for these?” I asked. “You got other buyers lined up?”
    “That’s none of your business.”
    “So you’re just selling him these prints and the negs?”
    “There are no negs. I’ve destroyed them