Really Dead

  The big screen came to life and the eerie unlit image looked like something seen through night-vision goggles. The camera was pointing at a small patio area outside of a closed door on the ground floor of a building. There was a light on the wall over the door and Glenn watched bugs flying into the light for a few minutes. Then it got really exciting — a large dark crab slowly crossed the patio.

  “Want me to speed this up?” Dex asked. “Unless you’re researching a documentary on the nocturnal habits of land crabs I’d like to get out of here before midnight.”

  “Go for it.” Glenn got more comfortable in his chair.

  The bugs flew faster. Another crab (or possibly the same crab) set a land crab speed record as it crossed the patio in the opposite direction. The door suddenly opened and a man and a woman walked outside in high speed Charlie Chaplin style.

  “Whoa! Let’s see this.”

  Dex slowed the images down, rewound to the door opening, and then let the footage play.

  The man had his hand on the girl’s elbow and was forcibly pushing her out the door ahead of him.

  “That’s Dan Shykoff, right?” Glenn recognized him from the photos in Kate’s digital picture frame.

  “That’s him. I don’t know who the girl is, though.”

  Glenn did. He was looking at Allie’s unpierced twin — Kate.

  They could hear voices, but the volume was way down. Dex slid something on the board and the volume increased.

  “Don’t try to pull a stunt like that on me again!” Dan Shykoff was angry. He and Kate stood on the patio, a few feet away from the door and close to the camera.

  Kate smiled a nasty smile. “Oh, Dan, that was no stunt. You will be getting me a job in LA.”

  “Like fuck I will!” He screamed. “Listen, you little bitch, you knew exactly what you were getting in to!”

  “Not quite. I know stuff now that I didn’t know when we hooked up.”

  “Is that supposed to scare me?”

  “It should!” Kate, too, was screaming. “I can make sure that this show of yours goes nowhere. You’ll lose a fortune.”

  “And just how are you going to do that? Let me guess, you’ve dug up some dirt on me …”

  “Better than that. If I open my mouth you’ll be in the middle of the biggest scandal to ever hit reality TV!”

  “Yeah, right,” Dan scoffed. “Darling, my life is an open book. I’m a walking scandal.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Dex muttered.

  “I’m well-known because of my scandals. Who the fuck do you think lets the press catch wind of them? Me! Controversy keeps me current.” He turned and started to walk back to the door. “We’re done. Don’t come back to Virgin Gorda tonight. Winnie will have your crap sent over here tomorrow.” He opened the door and looked at Kate. “Finish this shoot if you want, but know that you’ll never work for James again and you sure as hell won’t get a job in LA, I’ll make sure of it.”

  “You’ll be sorry!” Kate was close to screeching. “And so will James! His little hotel chain won’t look so good then. I bet he’d be more than interested to hear what I have to say.”

  Dan let go of the door, turned around slowly, glanced at the camera, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t what you’re talking about. You’re making no sense …”

  “So that’s how you’re going to play it? What are you going to do? Save it for a shocking big reveal in the grand finale?”

  Dan spoke with deadly calm. “Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Want me to spell it out for you?”

  “I’m done with this.” He turned and reached for the door handle.

  “I’m not.”

  Dan went into the building and slammed the door behind him.

  Kate walked right up to the camera and held her middle finger up dead centre in the lens. “Screw you, Dan! Maybe you don’t care about your image, but we both know that there’s someone here who cares a hell of a lot about their image! He won’t risk this show not going to air!” She walked out of the shot and the bugs continued to fly into the light over the closed door.

  “Do you know what that was about?” Glenn asked.

  Dex just shook his head. “I haven’t watched any of this stuff yet. Is this what you’re looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Glenn wanted to see the rest of the video that Ria’s source had picked out for them. What bothered him about what they’d just seen was that both Kate and Dan knew the camera was there. Being threatened could push someone to murder for silence, but Dan hadn’t seemed that worried and, more importantly, Kate had walked away … on both feet.

  Dex moved the cursor up to close the KITCHEN TREE camera folder when Glenn remembered what Doc had said about the foot being refrigerated or frozen. There’d be freezers and refrigerators in a kitchen. “Hang on. Can you show me some more footage from that camera?”

  “It’s not on Bear’s list.”

  “I know, but I’d still like to see it. We can watch it fast. I just want to see who came and went that night. And early the next morning.”

  Dex obliged. They watched the rest of Scene 4, but Glenn didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. All of the people who entered and exited the kitchen were wearing kitchen whites with a Butler B embroidered somewhere on their uniforms. Dex started playing Scene 1 from DAY 38 at high speed, but Glenn got him to rewind and play it at normal speed when someone raced into the picture and through the door to the kitchen. The person was a woman, her sculpted body clad in lycra, a long ponytail swinging as she ran. All Glenn could see was her backside … and she had a great backside. Dex sped the footage up again. The morning kitchen shift started to arrive just as the sun was lighting up the day. Then a second non-Butler-uniformed woman came out from the kitchen. Her hair was pulled back from her stern face and she was wearing a dowdy suit. What Glenn really concentrated on was what she holding in her hands — a Butler B’d white dishtowel that was wrapped around something. He stared at the object. It was so well wrapped up that he couldn’t tell what it was … but he could make a pretty good guess.

  “Okay, let’s get back to Bear’s list now.”

  They sat through many hours of dark shots from the night of Kate’s disappearance, but the only things Glenn saw on the sped-up material were more fast-moving crabs, people driving to and fro in golf carts that would have had to been fuelled by nitrous oxide to actually go that fast, an extremely fit, tall woman running along an unlit road in the dark at sprint speed (was she the woman who ran into the kitchen?), a group of drunk people singing off-key as they stumbled down a paved road that led to a block of hotel rooms (with their voices sped up they sounded a bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks), and one sex scene. Dex didn’t slow the footage down for that. Even so, they could easily see a young man and woman having a From Here to Eternity moment on a beach, complete with waves crashing, passion that took them further than just kissing, minus the bathing suits. Then things got interesting again.

  EXT. Rear wharf camera/Day 37. Once again Ria’s contact had selected Scene 4. A group of people were doing something to a small dinghy that was docked at the end of a long wharf. Unfortunately, the camera wasn’t close enough to show exactly what they were doing. They couldn’t make out what the people were saying to each other either, but they could clearly hear the laughter. Whatever those people were doing they were enjoying it.

  “What happened on the island that night that you’re so interested in?”

  “I won’t know what I’m looking for until I see it.”

  “That was weak.” Dex raised his eyebrows (the muscles on his forehead pushed his hair piece up a bit) and restarted the footage.

  A man walked into the shot. He was heading down the stairs to the wharf — and he was carrying a limp body. Dex sat up straighter in his chair and slowed the images down quickly. He didn’t need Glenn to tell him that they were watching something out of the ordinary. The man carried the body to the
end of the wharf and, with the help of a group of people there, he put the body in the dinghy.

  “Yo, Ted!” Someone close to the camera yelled out. “Dan’s looking for you. He wants you in the kitchen, like now!”

  “Coming!”

  Someone, possibly the man who’d carried the body to the dinghy, ran up to the camera.

  He yelled over his shoulder to the group on the wharf, “I’m going to turn the camera off so Mr. Shykoff and Mr. Butler won’t know for sure who’s here.”

  He got so close to the camera that his face filled the screen entirely.

  “Idiot! Sticking his face right in the camera was a sure fire way of making sure James and Dan know he was there.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Ted Robarts, one of the contestants.”

  The screen went black.

  Dex looked at the list on the screen of Glenn’s phone, then clicked open some folders and bins on his screen, and then looked back at Glenn’s phone. “There’s a disc missing. Bear wrote down Ext. North End Tree Camera/Day 37, but it’s not here.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not here?” Glenn tried to sound less interested than he actually was.

  “I mean it’s not here. We didn’t get it in the last shipment.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Dex started to write a note at the same time Glenn did. “I’ll ask Bear about it. That camera was installed on day thirty-seven, so maybe they had some problems getting it up and running. The disc Bear wanted you to watch would have been the first disc from it.”

  Glenn planned to ask Ria about it.

  His note written, Dex closed all the bins in the folder labelled Day 37. “That was all the footage from day thirty-seven. The rest of the stuff on the list is day thirty-eight. They managed to send the next disc from the north end camera. Let’s start with that.”

  Glenn and Dex watched the sun light up a new day at record speed. The camera was pointed at a small backhoe that was parked beside a stack of lumber in what looked like a clearing on the top of a hill. The bucket on the front of the backhoe was filled with sand. Dex said the disc had six hours of footage on it — and during those six hours there was absolutely no human activity. The only exciting moment came when a large spider crawled across the lens of the camera. Dex opened the folder named Beach/JI Commercial (Albert Go Boom) next.

  “What does JI stands for?” Glenn asked.

  “Judy Ingram, another contestant.”

  Glenn knew that the production was close to being finished. “Are she and Ted Robarts the finalists?”

  “The confidentiality clause that I signed precludes me from confirming or denying that comment.” Dex put his hand on the mouse and opened the bin labelled Camera 1/RC.

  The big screen came to life. A large television crew were milling around on a beach, Glenn couldn’t identify anyone in the shot but they all looked like they were waiting for something. An incredibly sexy woman in a bikini was standing waist-deep in the water; a man in scuba gear stood near her.

  A male voice loudly said “Recording!”

  “Hang on!” Another man, this one wearing large headphones and holding a long pole that had a microphone on the end of it, shouted and pointed to the sky.

  They could hear the whine of an airplane nearby.

  The cameraman who’d shoot the footage they were watching pointed his camera up toward the sky and they could see a propeller plane flying high above the water. Then, in jerky movements, the camera spun around one hundred and eighty degrees to show an extreme, and out of focus, close-up on a man’s face. He looked a bit like a younger Clint Eastwood and had a long scar that ran along the left side of his jawbone.

  “Da plane! Da plane!”

  “Rob! What the hell are you doing?” An unseen female laughed.

  He laughed and started to turn the camera back around to face the beach. “Tattoo, from Fantasy Island, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I bet Dex gets it,” the man replied off-camera.

  From the smirk on Dex’s face it looked like he had got the joke. So had Glenn.

  Had that been Bobbie? Glenn hoped not. He didn’t want to put that face next to the name that made his blood pressure rise. It was too good looking. Camera 1/RC — Rob Churcher. Damn.

  “Do the slate!” someone off-camera yelled.

  A girl wearing a floppy sunhat ran into the water and held up the slateboard. “Judy Ingram’s Butler Hotel commercial, scene three, take one.” She held the slate up for a minute or two and then walked back to the beach.

  The diver put his hand on the shoulder of the hot babe, gave her the secondary mouthpiece from his oxygen tank, and then they too went under the water.

  Someone yelled, “Action!”

  The woman rose out of the water and started to walk slowly toward the beach. The camera that had shot the footage they were watching stayed aimed at the water as the woman walked out of the shot. Then it zoomed in on a small boat coming around the rocks just offshore. A big orange ball of fire shot up out of the boat, the person who’d been sitting in the boat blew up and out, and the bow of the boat immediately pointed down into the water. The boat sank quickly, bow first. Once it was completely submerged the screen went black.

  “There are four more cameras on the list for this.” Dex didn’t seem even slightly fazed by the surprise explosion.

  The fourth video of the explosion was shot from somewhere behind the stern of the boat. The camera also captured a group of people who were standing on a point as the boat pulled away from the shore, heading out to the rocks. They were laughing (without sound). One of the men was holding what looked like one of Brandon’s video-game controllers. The boat pulled away and, from the angle of the camera, Glenn could see that the supposed person in the boat was strapped into place with duct tape. Even his beige hat was attached to his head with a strip of the silver tape. The now familiar ball of fire rolled out of the boat, the stern rose out of the water, and someone knocked on the door of the editing room. Dex froze the image on the television screens.

  “Hey, Dex,” the receptionist came in holding a big box, “this just came for you. I need your signature.”

  While Dex signed the papers the receptionist had handed him, Glenn stared at the big screen. The fire ball was frozen in the air just above the boat. The head of the person had separated from the body and was in the process of exploding; the hat that had been taped to it was flying through the air. The body, too, was in mid-flight, one arm dangled off the torso. So what? He’d seen the boat explode already and Ria had told him that the head and the body were made out of Styrofoam. What did this have to do with Kate? Her foot had been found before this was shot and it hadn’t been near the exploding boat.

  The boat. Glenn stood up and looked more closely at the screen. Why was there so much duct tape on the bottom of the boat? Was that how the special effects team had attached the explosives? But the tape covered almost all of the surface area that was still sticking out of the water. And it looked like it had been strapped over something lumpy. The lump was too big to be just explosives. That much fire power would have obliterated the boat, but the boat had sunk pretty much intact. So what was strapped on the bottom of it? It couldn’t be. Could it?

  “Hey! That’s Phil,” the receptionist pointed at one of the men standing with the group on the screen. “What’s the date on that?”

  “Last Friday.” Dex let the last few minutes of the scene play out.

  “That is so cool. He made it to the final.”

  The boat sank quickly, taking the duct-taped lump with it, and the man the receptionist had called Phil laughed and slapped high fives with two of the people who’d been standing near him and then walked out of the shot just before the screen went black. Glenn recognized the man’s face, he’d been the one who’d carried the body to the dinghy the night before Kate’s foot was found, and he was the person who’d turned the camera off. But Glenn couldn�
�t shake the feeling that he’d seen him somewhere else. He couldn’t remember where, though. “I thought his name was Ted?” The hairs on the back of Glenn’s neck bristled.

  “Oh, yeah,” the receptionist started to back out of the room. “Phil’s just a nickname. His real name’s Ted.”

  “He’s a friend of yours?” What kind of nickname was Phil?

  “We go way back. It would be so awesome if he won, but I’ll have to wait like everybody else to find out if he does. Dex’s the only one who’ll see the final shipment of camera originals. Right, Dex?”

  “Yeah, just me and the hundred or so other people working on the show who signed confidentiality agreements.” He waved his hands to shoo-shoo the receptionist out of the room. “Now get out of here and forget what you just saw.”

  “My lips are sealed.” She closed the door.

  Dex clicked to open another folder and the screens came back to life.

  Glenn saw more than he wanted to of the show in production. It was obvious that the crew shot more footage of their goofing around than material that would actually end up in the final show. They’d be able to put together one heck of a blooper reel! Some of the footage had sound and Glenn recognized James’ voice a few times, but he never showed up in any of the shots. The aerial footage over the beach where Kate’s foot was found didn’t really show anything useful. In the first shot the cameraman had zoomed in on a small white object in a tidal pool. The foot. It had to be. In his second shot it was blatantly obvious that he was more interested in the girl raking smooth the footprints in the sand than he was in the scenery. He’d done an extreme close-up on her body, moving slowly from her head, down her body to her feet. Her back was to the camera and through her thin T-shirt he could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. As the image moved down her legs Glenn acknowledged to himself that she had great legs. Then the shot widened out or pulled back, or whatever camera people called it, and he could see the tidal pool again. When the girl looked up and smiled and waved at the cameraman, Glenn recognized her face from her starring role in the From Here to Eternity scene. (She was fully dressed for the beach scene and without the night-vision camera he could see that she had Day-Glo-pink bangs.) She picked up the white object and threw it out into the sea. The cameraman followed the path of the object, but he wasn’t zoomed in close enough for Glenn to see it clearly.