Page 18 of Blood Game

“She brought me the film to archive, and then enhance for the exhibit—Bankside Gallery in London. She wanted certain photos enlarged and the detail sharpened. A lot of detail can get lost when enlarging from a small image, and some of the filmwas so old it was beginning to deteriorate. She was afraid it would be lost forever.

“It took a lot of work to restore the photographs. There were a few where there was no film, just the finished photograph. Those I had to take digital prints, then work with the images. Painstaking shit. But it was worth it.”

And a great deal of very expensive equipment by the looks of it. Kris stared up at those photographs, a lifetime's work, pictures of the Allied landings at Normandy, soldiers caught in those moments of life and death, expressions haunted as they shared a cigarette. And others—a young Frenchwoman with a cat leaning out of a second-story window, the building scarred by bombardment, a single flower in the pot on the windowsill, struggling, surviving against the larger subject of scarred buildings and the street below filled with tanks and soldiers.

She'd seen some of Paul Bennett's work before, images that appeared in the media years before when he passed away, again on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, and in photographs Cate had displayed at the Tavern. But those photographs didn't compare to the ones she saw now.

The detail was so much sharper. Background images seemed to leap out at her, and those other images, the faces, their eyes seemed to look straight at her, each one like a haunting work of art.

“This is incredible,” she whispered.

Innis was an artist, with an eye for the emotion to be found in those photographs.

“I've played around with photography for years,” he explained. “The way a shift in the light changes everything, a single image that can bring out so much. Firinn, Cate called it.”

“Truth,” Kris recalled.

Like father, like daughter, she thought. Truth, in the images captured in Paul Bennett's photographs, and truth in Cate'scareer and the stories she had told and then written. She stopped in front of the next photograph and stared at the enlarged photograph.

Like the others, it was a simple black-and-white photograph. There was nothing remarkable about it. Nothing and everything. It was identical to the photograph attached to the message Cate had sent.

“I've sent you something. We need to talk.”

“What do you know about this photograph?” she asked Innis.

He shrugged. “When I first saw it, I thought it was very like a photograph a tourist might take—you know, on holiday, castles, ruins, paintings, things like that. It didn’t fit with the others he had taken. And it was one of the ones with no film, just the photograph. But Cate was quite taken by it. She tucked a print of it in her notebook.”

There were other photos, British troops, landing craft, German bunkers above the beaches, civilians caught in everyday life trying to survive, a young man with a rifle hung over one shoulder, and a young woman with dark hair and equally dark eyes, dressed in a heavy coat, her hair windblown. But it was her gaze that caught Kris’s attention as she stared over her shoulder, something the camera caught in that moment when the photograph was taken. Something almost intimate.

“French Resistance,” James said, staring at the image over her shoulder. “There were a great number of them who worked with the Allies during the war, providing information, even doing some of the dirty work themselves. The outcome might have been different without their help.”

“You know your history,” Kris said, with more than a little surprise.

He shook his head. “Required study. I didn't care to have Sister Margaret Alice twist my ear off for not paying attention. She was a tyrant about history.”

She tried to visualize that as they left the dark room. Somehow the image of James Morgan, dutiful student, and Catholic school didn't exactly come together.

It was after seven in the evening. She'd spent the better part of the day at the café, and she had nothing. Except that photograph, no clue what it meant, or the reason Cate had sent it.

The evening crowd had begun to arrive—couples, singles, groups of others, Luna intense at a computer as she challenged another player and sent all her warriors into battle, while Innis coached another customer on gaming strategies.

It always amazed her the time spent in gaming rooms like the café. Didn't people have lives?

As they left the café, she caught a glimpse of the evening news on an overhead screen. Brynn Halliday, who dominated the evening news in London, had just finished her previous segment.

She was Sky News’ rising star in a tough, no-holds-barred business, and polar opposite of Cate in both talent and reputation. Tabloid journalism was more her style, where anything was fair game, even if it meant stretching the truth, twisting it, or no truth at all. Video images flashed across the screen about a train wreck outside Brussels, several cars derailed, passengers dazed and bleeding.

Sensationalism. The tabloid press and the internet.

“The woman is a shark,” James commented. “Anything for a story.”

Kris heard the disgust in his voice. “You don't like her.”

“It's the smell of blood, and she doesn't care whose blood, as long as it boosts her career. She did a piece last year on military families who've lost sons and daughters in the Gulf War, causing more pain for people who were already in a lot of pain.”

They stepped out into the cold night air. She had declined supper at a nearby pub with the excuse that she would grab something at her hotel. She had calls to make. It was after hours in London, but still early in New York. She couldn't put her publisher off any longer. She hit the door lock on the key fob, then suddenly stopped as she rounded the front of the rental car.

“Well, isn't that just about perfect,” she muttered. The front tire on the driver's side was flat.