The Lonely Dead (15 page)

In March it turned out Bill had lung cancer. When he died four months later, Patrice could have picked him up with one hand.

14

Somewhere, on a screen, a young woman sits crying on her couch, captured in the past. The couch is saggy and covered in a suede-like material in dark rust. The wall behind it is white and holds a mirror and a large painting of tulips which is not altogether bad. The woman is in pretty good shape and tan but for pale triangles over her breasts; she is naked apart from a pair of tight white pants. In her right hand she is holding a cigarette; the left is in her hair, which is long and brown. Her face is wet and crumpled, eyes open but turned inwards. In front of her is a coffee table on which sits a large glass ashtray, two remote controls and a half-empty coffee cup. It is early on a Sunday morning, and she looks badly hungover.

She smokes her cigarette down and stubs it out. You see this in jump cuts, because even though you have been a member of this website for three months, the software you are using to watch it — the cheerfully named CamFun, a $12.95 shareware value — is set to update the image only every two minutes. Most people simply log into the web page using a browser like Microsoft Explorer. You are using CamFun because it enables you to save the pictures more easily, storing them onto the hard disk as a movie file of sequential images which you can re-watch any time you choose — which is what you are doing now, in fact, watching something that happened several weeks before. The site itself hasn't been updated for a few days, which is weird. The other reason you use the software is that you can select the frequency with which the image you see is updated. You can take advantage of the members-only fifteen-second update, or choose instead to be updated every third image, or every sixth — thus, every minute or two. This might seem perverse when you are paying $19.99 a month for access to the quicker rate, which is supposed to make the experience seem more real. For you it has exactly the opposite effect. A scene updated every twenty seconds looks like something filmed by a security camera: the way it samples reality implies that what is missing is not important. But it
is
important. The reality of the original is lost in those infinitesimal omissions. If you cut the gaps back to a minute or two, however, something changes. What's missing seems to swell, giving the images more weight, making them pregnant with duration: a daisy chain of moments, stasis toppling into sudden movement, a dance to stuttering time.

The period through which you wait for an update charges the scene with anticipation. Two minutes is enough to hop someone from one end of the couch to the other, as if by magic, or to take a freshly lit cigarette and burn it halfway down, apparently in an instant. It's enough to make a woman disappear, to zap her from couch to kitchen. To the kitchen. Back to the couch again. There she is… blip — she's gone. Where? Out of vision, off radar/the planet, and yet still within the apartment, one presumes. Blip — she's back again. Two minutes is real. Things can happen in it.

The fact that the woman is semi-naked is almost immaterial. Not completely, of course: the webcams of the fully clothed are a niche interest. They do exist, in droves, bright and intense young ladies with their weblogs full of Highly Individual Thoughts About, Like, Everything (how embarrassing if they ever got to read each other's, and discovered they'd had identical Highly Individual Thoughts), but they're of no interest to you. This woman is pretty. You like seeing her body once in a while. But you are not like all the other perverts, and ultimately it is
her
you are watching, not her breasts — which is just as well, because she does not reveal them often.

This woman, who has chosen to set up her life in this way, to have a window in her apartment through which people — men bathed in cathode glow or wreathed with flat-screen pallor, sitting in bedrooms and dens across the world — can peer. This woman, who has an acoustic guitar which she picks up every now and then, but not for long; who gets through a steady half-bottle of Jack Daniels a night when she's at home; who occasionally has noncommittal sex on this couch — encounters in which you are not very interested, hardly at all, though you do have some saved to disk and on those occasions you
did
increase the frame rate. She does not play to the camera during these events, and you half suspect that she has simply forgotten it is there.

This woman who was, for some reason, sitting crying alone on a Sunday morning four weeks ago. You have watched this movie before, and find it fascinating for reasons you cannot quite understand. She blips to invisibility, stays hidden for another two-minute beat, then is back on the couch. She has lit another cigarette in the meantime, and is wearing a blue towelling gown. Her hair has been pushed back to fall behind her ears. She is no longer crying, though her face looks drawn and glum. She is looking to the side, out of a window, you think, though you have never directly seen that wall of the apartment. Two minutes later her feet are on the coffee table and she is looking at her knees, the cigarette almost finished. She looks tired, and resigned to something or other.

How many thoughts have passed through her head in that time? What were they? You cannot tell. Somewhere between her and you that information has been lost, trimmed from reality by the processes of digitization and transfer and storage and re-transfer and projection in red, green and blue. It seems obvious that the loss occurred somewhere in that process, at least, but perhaps it did not: maybe it was only at the very last second, as the information tried to leap the gulf from the screen to another human's mind, that all was lost. All the differences in the world are as nothing compared to this: the difference between being you and being me. It makes the chasms between gods and men, between men and women, between dead and alive, seem almost trivial.

You are you. She is someone else. Between lie the stars.

You watch, and you speculate, and you think. You can do all this without knowing the answers, without having to engage with the mundane truth. It might be something trivial or boring: a broken nail, a bent fender, the sudden and vertiginous realization that she's approaching thirty and still doesn't have a child. It might be something else, something darker and sharper and outside of your world or understanding: a bad experience with a client (you vaguely assume she might be a whore); bad news about a friend (some predictable drug-fuelled auto-da-fé); some other bad bit of bad news of the kinds that this bad old world always has up its bad sleeve. It doesn't matter. That is the beauty of this webcam, of all webcams, of the internet itself — of our world as it has become. You can observe, and interpret, or just let the images welter there in front of your eyes, until you've had enough. Then you can quit the file and close the hidden folder where it rests, and get up and walk away. It is like the news, glimpses of Iraq or Rwanda. It is someone else's life, someone else's problem. You are safe from it.

Or so you think — until an hour and a half later, when two FBI agents turn up at your house while you and your wife are eating dinner. You realize then, far too late, that gaze is two-way even on the internet. You listen, hot-faced, in the final moments of the period in which your marriage is straightforward, as the female agent tells you the woman called Jessica is dead, and that in the last three months the expensive computer in your study logged more watching time on her site than anyone else.

You have been her biggest fan, in other words, and the FBI want to talk about what happened to her, as do the policemen outside; and your wife looks like she was carved out of cold white marble; and you cannot Quit out of this, and there is no escape.

—«»—«»—«»—

Forty minutes later Nina came out of the living room, leaving the Jessica fan — whose name was Greg McCain — sitting opposite Doug Olbrich. She joined Monroe, who had been listening from the hallway. McCain was bolt upright in a corner of the couple's nicely distressed leather couch. He was in his mid-thirties and had an expensive haircut of the kind Hugh Grant used to affect. He had requested that his lawyer be present. Maybe McCain should have been left to his own devices in the meantime, but Olbrich was sitting silently opposite. Sometimes that kind of thing worked.

Monroe turned to her. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'His wife alibis him for around the time Ryan was shot. She says he left for work at about quarter of eight and she's so evidently pissed at him that it seems hard to believe she'd back him up out of loyalty.'

'Discovering your husband likes watching women on the web is not the same as dropping him for the murder of a policeman. Or believing him capable of it. Either way, it's not impossible to get from their house to The Knights in a quarter-hour.'

'No, but it would be hard. And I've had another thought.'

'Which is?'

'We've been assuming the man who killed Jessica was also the man who killed Ryan.'

'Well of course. I don't think that's a useful…'

'Charles, listen. Jessica was dead maybe forty-eight hours when we found her; hard to pin it down because of the heat. The story we have is that a man murders a woman, in private, and then a day or so later comes out and kills a policeman as a 'look at me'. As I said at the time, this is extreme behaviour.'

'Explain it another way.'

'I can't. Yet. I'm just saying that the only link between the two events is proximity.'

Monroe shook his head. 'Hell of a coincidence, don't you think?'

'No. They could still be connected. Just not the same guy. Which means Jessica's killer could be in some other part of the country by now. Or he could be happily sitting at home, with an alibi for the wrong day.'

Monroe looked away then, and spoke unusually quietly. 'Why would someone else kill a policeman?'

'I'm just saying if we work with the idea then we have a different question to ask Mrs McCain.'

He nodded. 'Do it,' he said.

—«»—«»—«»—

Gail McCain was in the kitchen. She was standing looking out of a window onto the yard, and her back was straight. Nina wondered what the woman had been assuming the evening would hold. The couple had no children, so their quiet, civilized meal would have most likely been followed by a little television or gentle work, two people sharing their affluent, child-unfriendly space.

'Is my husband under arrest?'

'No,' Nina said. 'Not yet.'

'So we don't have to entertain you here any longer.'

'You could refuse to, certainly. In which case the LAPD might have to arrest you so we could talk somewhere else. Knowing those guys they'd break out some of the extra big flashing lights, the ones that really shine into the neighbours' windows.'

'If they had reason to do that, you'd have done it already.'

'Are you an attorney, Mrs McCain?'

'No. I work in television.'

Something in the woman's voice or face heated one of Nina's brain cells half a degree. She turned to the policewoman who was standing by the door. The officer was short but stockily built and stared impassively across the corridor. Her hair was in a ponytail, pulled back so tight her forehead looked hard enough to flatten a nose like putty, or batter through walls.

'How about that?' Nina said. 'The lady works in television. Pretty cool, huh?'

'Whatever,' the policewoman said, without moving her eyes.

Nina shrugged at Mrs McCain. 'Officer Whalen is notoriously hard to impress. Me, I think television's fabulous. So well
done'

'It's just a job.'

'But it's such an important one, isn't it? Friend of mine, guy called Ward, has a theory says producers are the new priests, and their job is to mediate between the common man and the heavenly realm the other side of the screen. Say the right thing, be the right way, and you'll put them in a reality show or a soap or the new
Friends,
zap them straight to the Emmys at the right hand of Whoopi Goldberg. You feel like a priest, ever?'

'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'I don't blame you. I don't understand Ward half the time either. But my point here is that being a lawyer would be a lot more use to you, right at this moment. You sure you understand the situation?'

'I believe so.'

'You understand we are investigating the murder of a woman called Jessica Jones, found dead on Wednesday morning. You understand that Jessica was a web girl, and your husband was a member of her site. This entitled him to view a webcam in Jessica's apartment, which frequently showed her in the nude.'

The woman spoke through clenched teeth. 'I understand all of the above.'

'Good. Would you say your husband was technically competent?'

'What do you mean?'

'Computers. I see there are several in his den. Is he good with them?'

'I think so. He fixes mine, if it goes wrong. But…'

'Thank you. Now, in general your husband doesn't look like a likely suspect. Which is why we're glad to have you both voluntarily assisting us, and why we're here quietly, without the big lights. For the moment. I just want to ask a few questions, and you're done. Okay? You told Lieutenant Olbrich that your husband left for work on Wednesday morning at around seven forty-five, is that correct?'

'No,' the woman said, coldly. 'I told him Greg left at
exactly
that time.'

'How can you be so sure?'

'Greg always leaves at quarter of eight. That's what time Greg leaves.'

'But presumably sometimes it's a little closer to eight, and sometimes it's a little earlier? Your husband's also in television, I understand? I'm assuming sometimes he has to make sure he's there early. It's not like punching a clock, right?'

'Yes, but…'

'So he must have early meetings, on occasion.'

'He does, of course.'

'And while he generally leaves at seven forty-five, there will be times when he could have left the house at quarter after, or even a little later. What makes you sure that on the morning in question he left at this default time?'

The woman looked irritable. 'Because I just know. Look, Ms Baynam, are you married?'