The Lonely Dead (9 page)

'It was him,' I said, quietly. 'It was Paul.'

She gripped me by the arm, her fingers strong and sharp. 'What you must
not think
is this was anything to do with him being in care, with the people who fostered him, who tried so hard to give him a life. It was not. Those people helped bring up Muriel and thousands more like her.'

'I know,' I said. 'My parents weren't my real parents either, and they gave me more love than I ever deserved.'

She was surprised, but gathered herself. She stood, and I understood my time was over.

At the door, as I stood on the porch, she put her hand on my arm again and said one final thing.

'I've spent all my life with young people, and on the whole I've enjoyed it a lot. But one thing about my view of the world changed in that time, and changed for good.'

'What was that?'

'I still believe we're all human,' she said, stepping back and closing the screen door. 'But I don't believe we're all God's children. No, I don't believe that at all.'

—«»—«»—«»—

I went back to the hotel because I wasn't sure what else to do. I ran out of steam when I hit the lobby and ended up sitting in the bar, staring out at the street through tinted glass. Everyone has their typical experiences, as discussed. This is one of mine.

I was spaced out and ticked off. San Francisco was a dead end. Mrs Campbell didn't remember the name of the family which had taken Paul in for good. In any event, they'd moved, and she didn't know where to. Her colleagues from that time were either dead or scattered. The trail had been severed, not least by the fire. 'I believed Paul had come back and set that fire, and I knew Mrs Campbell did too: just as I believed she understood that the young boy who had been found on the street alone had merely tolerated being moved from pillar to post until he was old enough to leave and make his own way in the world: when he would become the person to 'put things in place.'

When I reached for my wallet to pay for the first beer, I remembered I'd turned off my cell. I had a missed call. It could only be one of two people, so I hit callback without bothering to listen to the message.

She answered quickly. 'John?'

'No,' I said. 'It's Ward. Your phone tells you who's calling, Nina. Just look at the display.'

'Right,' she said. 'Silly me. Where are you?'

'San Francisco,' I said.

'Oh. Why?'

'I left my heart here. Came to pick it up.'

'Good move. How's it looking?'

'Barely used,' I said, and she laughed briefly. 'What's up?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Well, not true, things are going crazy. We had a double murder this morning; someone killed a Jane Doe in a nasty motel and then whacked a cop to underline his point. He left a hard disk in the woman.'

'Charming,' I said.

'Not very. It's LAPD's business, of course, but Monroe is all over it and thus so am I. Wondered if you would take a look at this disk. I had a copy done, unofficially. I know you used to do that kind of thing on a professional basis.'

'Sure,' I said. 'Though Bobby would have been a better bet for you. And even a byte-for-byte copy isn't going to be exactly the same as the original. But I'll take a look.'

'They've already found a note and a piece of music on it. This one has a real sense of theatre.'

'What's the music?'

'Fauré's Requiem.'

'Nice.'

'I haven't listened to it.'

'You should. Quite uplifting, given it's for dead people.'

She was silent for a little while. I didn't interrupt.

'Are you okay, Ward?'

'Sort of.' I told her, briefly, what I'd found out from Mrs Campbell. 'So that's weirded me out. Plus

I shrugged. She heard it. 'Yes,' she said, quietly. 'I know. I… I have this dream sometimes. I'm up at The Halls again, on the floor of the lobby building, after I'd been shot. You and John are out there in the houses, trying to find Sarah Becker. Bobby's gone, I don't know where. I'm on the floor, and I hurt bad, and somebody's coming to get me. And this time I think he might.'

'Shit,' I said. 'That sounds like no fun.'

'I had it again just three hours ago. It gets longer each time. I… sometimes I worry there will come a time when it doesn't end. Where he gets me, and I don't wake up.'

'Dreams last as long as you let them,' I said. 'Both good and bad.'

'Very deep, Ward-san.'

'Yeah. Sorry. I have no idea what I meant.'

She laughed, and it sounded a little more convincing this time.

'Okay, so, call when you've got the disk,' I said. 'I'll head down. There's nothing else for me up here.'

'It's sitting here on my table now,' she said.

I had been to Nina's house only once, and briefly, but I could picture it clearly. For just a moment, sitting on an uncomfortable stool with half a beer and the sound of generic chatter around me, I wished I was there now. There, or some other house. Something approximating a home.

'Don't let John meddle with it,' I said. 'I'll be there tomorrow evening. Can you put him on the phone?'

'He's out,' she said. 'I'll let him know you're coming.'

—«»—«»—«»—

I went up to my room and smoked my head off. It didn't seem to help my mood much, though it at least shoved the nicotine monkey off my back. I pulled the room's armchair over to the window, yanked the sash up, and sat looking out for a while. I saw tall dark buildings, and lights. I heard sounds of life from outside and below. I felt like I was sitting on the edge of a huge continent by myself, without tribe or hearth or hunting ground.

Slowly my depth of focus pulled closer, until I was looking at my feet instead, propped on the windowsill. Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much feted opposables, spending busy days carrying things and controlling machinery and touching interesting parts of people's bodies. They don't get to do any of that. Instead they just get pushed into small, dark leather places and forgotten about, and when they're let free they often seem little more than a strange fringe on the end of your feet.

In the end I fell asleep, and dreamed.

The place was some old town, a place of cobbled streets and teetering houses, with a compact square that held a farmer's market and stalls selling household things. I was young, teenaged, and I was in love with the gypsy queen of this market, a girl who was young, long-haired and beautiful, who glowed with the confidence of knowing every alley of this vibrant selling place, who had grown up in it and felt its forces and lives running through her: confident with beauty, unreachable but at the same time so gorgeous that she felt like everybody's love. There was a moment that felt like a real memory, a glimpse of her walking through the stalls with a couple of lesser girls in tow, her face the clearest thing in the world, surrounded by a tumble of dark hair shot with auburn lights.

Then later, I returned as a man, more confident but more dry, having lost in magic what I had gained in stature. The market had shrunk to a few stalls, revealing the streets — where before it seemed the market existed in a realm by itself, needing no such environment in which to live. I walked it, hearing echoes where before there had been only the sound of bargaining and laughter.

And then I saw her. She was working at a stall selling offcuts of cloth, mixed buttons, things made of plastic. Her hair was cut short, and had gone prematurely grey. She still looked young in the face, but had thickened, and seemed shorter, more businesslike.

I passed by the stall and saw her pushing something into a plastic bag, some two dollar purchase for an old woman. I realized she was now just a woman who ran a market stall. The princess I was returning to see, to show that I was now a man, and thus worth something, worth her gaze, had gone: all the more so because there was someone who took up her place in the world. If I hadn't seen her, I could still have believed that somewhere she walked, still wreathed in magic and sex and smiles.

But now I had, and could do nothing but walk a little way from the market, and turn and look back at it, knowing that my youth, my core, the thing that had driven me all these years, was dead. Only then did it strike me that though she had glanced at me, she had not recognized me; that though she was now just a market stall holder, I was not — and had never been — anything at all.

When I woke I turned groggily to the clock by the bed and was astonished to see only an hour had passed.

My cell phone rang. I picked it up, recognized the number.

'You're back,' I said.

There was a pause. 'It's Zandt,' he said.

'I know,' I said, foggily. 'You were out earlier.'

There was another pause. 'Ward, I'm in Florida.'

This made no sense to me either, but I went with it. 'Okay, good for you. So?'

'Yakima,' he said.

I sat up straighter. 'What about it?'

'I've got some information. Maybe. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense.'

'Well, I told Nina I'd come down to see her in LA tomorrow. Why don't I see you there?'

'You spoke to Nina today? Why?'

'She's after some whack-job and she wants me to take a look at a disk.'

'So where are you now?'

'San Francisco.'

There was a pause. 'Why?'

'I've been trying to track the Upright Man. Without much success.'

'Stay there. I'll come to you.'

'John, I just told you: I'm supposed to go meet Nina.'

'I don't want to go to LA.'

There was something off about his voice. 'Okay,' I said. 'I'll see you here.'

'I'll call you when I get in.'

And with that, the phone went dead. I was pretty sure that what I'd heard in his voice was that he was drunk.

I thought about that a moment, then called Nina back and said it would be an extra day before I could get down to her. I didn't say why. She said she'd overnight the disk to me instead.

'Fine,' I said. Then: 'Is John back yet?'

'He was. He went out again.'

'He's hard to tie down.'

'You said it.'

We said goodbye.

I turned back to the window, and looked out at the city some more. It ignored my gaze, as cities do.

8

Nina was just heading into LAPD the next morning when the call came in: a cop in patrol division had gotten a strong hit on the photo of the dead girl. She swung a turn which had twenty drivers hammering on their horns, and headed for a bar called Jimmy's, over near where La Cienega hit the Boulevard.

There was a black and white and an unmarked with a flasher parked outside already. Nina added her car to the collection and hurried inside. The bar was dark and smelled of spilled beer: the air felt worn, as if it had passed through the lungs of too many people who couldn't sit up straight. She spotted Olbrich standing talking to a guy who had long hair and a glassy smile that said if he'd known this kind of heavy shit was going to break out, he wouldn't have had that huge joint before he left home.

'This is Agent Baynam,' Olbrich said as she approached. 'Don, why don't you tell her what you've told me.'

'Her name's Jessica,' the bartender said. 'That's for sure. And I know she lived in West Hollywood. I'm pretty sure also her second name is Jones, I think she said that a couple times and I know people here called her JJ, but … you know, not everyone…'

'Uses their real name. I got you,' Nina said. 'Jessica was a regular?'

'Yeah, then some. Lot of nights. Some afternoons.'

'She a hooker, Don?'

'No.' He shook his head vigorously. 'Absolutely not. She was going to be a singer or something once, I think. Think she said that one time. She was pretty enough, that's for sure. She's a waitress now. Or was, I guess, shit.'

Olbrich prompted him. 'And she was in here on Saturday night, you think?'

'Yeah. She came in around five with a girlfriend. Don't know her name, but I've seen her around before. Black, long straight hair. It was two for one pitcher night so, you know, they both got loaded pretty fast.' He coughed. 'The girlfriend's more of a full-on goodtime person, and I'm pretty sure she ended up at a table with some guys and took off with them. JJ just kind of hung out for a while, then she was sitting with this other guy.'

'What guy was that?' Nina's voice was even, but her chest suddenly felt tight. Olbrich was good, and kept out of it.

'I was telling the officer here. Don't know the guy. I only noticed because…' He shrugged.

Because you were
kind of sweet on Jessica,
Nina thought.
I understand.
'Did she often meet up with guys?'

'Pretty often,' the guy said. He looked away, apparently at the rows of battered tables and chairs he had to put in place.

Nina nodded, watching him.
And one night, maybe
several
nights, a wet kiss on your cheek bought another pitcher after the money had run out, yes? And do you still think about that sometimes, though for her it was a nothing, forgotten forever by the second swallow?

'Anything unusual about this one?'

He looked back at her. 'He was just a guy. He had short hair. Kind of good-looking, I think. That's all I can tell you. It all got busy after that, and next time I looked it was late and JJ was gone and someone else was in the booth. You could talk to the girls who were working the floor, they might have served them. But they won't be in until tonight. Except Lorna, she'll be on lunch.'

There was a shout from the doorway, and a uniform stuck his head in. 'Lieutenant?'

The policeman turned. 'You got it?'

'We do.'

Olbrich jerked towards the door with his head. 'We got an address, Nina. I'll go with you.'

'She really dead?' the bartender asked.

'Yes,' Nina said. 'She's really dead. I'm sorry.'

He nodded, and turned away.

When Nina got to the door she glanced back and saw the man slowly wiping a cloth over a table in a bar that he had to keep working in, and she thought: we never really know who we leave behind.

—«»—«»—«»—

The address was Apartment 7, 3140 Gardiner. When Nina's car got there, Monroe was already outside with two cops.

'He moves fast, doesn't he?' Olbrich said.

'You better believe it.'

The building was three storeys high and dirty white. A staircase went up the outside of either end. Nina walked up to the second storey and waited with Monroe while one of the detectives tracked down the building's super.

Monroe looked at her. 'Feeling better this morning?'

'Fine,' she said. He spoke quietly, and so did she. 'And thank you for your concern, Charles, which is not at all beginning to bug me. Anything useful from Profiling on the note?'

'Not yet. And you don't think there will be. Why?'

'Profiling didn't really work for the Washington sniper, did it?'

'That's a completely different…'

'No it isn't. They decided it had to be a white guy because the perceived wisdom — based on a not-very-scientific study done a pretty long time ago — is that the majority of serial killers are white, and so any report phoned in about a black guy was ignored. Meanwhile a couple people said they saw white trucks, and so suddenly that's what everyone's looking for, despite the fact white trucks are the Starbucks of the highway and
not
seeing them would be unusual. The licence plate of the killer's blue car is run through the system half a dozen times because of suspicious behaviour, but no, it's not a white truck and he's not a white guy, so we're not interested. The profilers say killers never work with other people — except, um, this one did. We shouldn't have been listening to them anyway: anyone with a brain knew from the start this was not a serial killer but a multiple murderer on a politico-religious mission, in which case anything profilers say is irrelevant. All it did was cloud the issue, and it could do the same here. I'm just not sure I believe in their shtick any more.'

'So why did you ask me if they'd come back with anything?'

'To try to steer you away from further solicitous enquiries.'

'Nina, when are you going to tell me what happened last year?'

'I already done told you, boss,' she said, smiling sweetly. In her head, however, she reminded herself to be careful. Monroe was many things, but he wasn't stupid.

At that moment Olbrich appeared at the stairs with a bunch of keys. 'Zinman's taking a statement,' he said, heading for the door to Apartment 7, 'but the guy's got nothing for us. Kept herself to herself, blah. And he's as dumb as a bag of rocks. We set?'

Guns now in hand, Nina and Monroe nodded.

Olbrich knocked on the door, waited, and received no response. So he unlocked the door and opened it slowly.

'This is the police,' he said. 'Please step into sight.'

Nothing happened. He opened the door a little further. This revealed a fairly large room, about twenty feet square. Electing to wait outside, this was all Nina saw until the two men had gone in and called an all-clear. Nobody home.

When she stepped into the apartment she saw a coffee table and a tired red couch in the middle, and a computer workstation under a window on the far side. The computer was grey and cheap-looking. There was a small red light at the bottom of the monitor, but the screen was black. A television sat to the side of the workstation, where it would be visible from the couch. For optimum viewing it would have been moved a couple of feet to the left, but there it would have blocked the door to the bedroom, where the two men were. A thin black cable was running in there across the floor from the computer workstation. Before following it Nina took a few steps the other side of the sofa, and peered into a small kitchen with a big window overlooking the street. It was tidy. As she turned back she noticed a battered-looking guitar propped up in the corner behind the sofa. It was dusty and missing a string.

In the room's remaining corner was a small desk. A couple of notepads. Nina carefully lifted the cover of one and glanced at a page. Doodles. Stuff that looked like lyrics. One sentence, 'Rain that never washes', had been written and then crossed out.

'Come look at this,' Monroe said.

The bedroom was small, enough space for a double bed, a small vanity and that was that. A tiny bathroom stood off the bottom end. The bed was unmade. The men were looking at a small object on a tripod to the side of the bed. It was to this that the black cable ran.

'Camera,' Olbrich said.

'Webcam,' she corrected. 'See where the cable goes?'

She followed it back into the main room and over to the workstation. Turning her hand over so her fingertips were out of the way, she gently moved the mouse.

The screen of the monitor flickered and woke up. In the centre of the screen was a window which took up about a third of its extent. It showed a picture of the side of the bed Monroe was still standing by.

'I'm not going to touch it,' she said, 'but you're going to find a cable modem feed out the back of this machine. Jessica had a website where people could watch her.'

'From where?' Olbrich asked.

'From anywhere in the world.' She stood back from the desk. 'Bad news. Our suspect list just jumped into the tens of millions.'

—«»—«»—«»—

Three hours later she was back at Jimmy's and sitting in an upper room that belonged to the owner/manager, who wasn't called Jimmy.

'Sounds like a bar's name,' Mr Jablowski had said, when she asked. 'Whereas mine doesn't.' Alerted by Don the barman to the morning's visitors, he'd elected to be on site for once. He was strangely dapper for a man who owned what was basically a beer-pit for the afternoon alcoholic crowd, but there are a lot of drug dealers who don't jack the product either. Don meanwhile had gone home for a few hours, to 'chill out'. The investigators had his address, but she privately didn't think it was one they were going to visit. She was no profiler either, of course — which was why, on her suggestion, a plainclothes was following the barman home.

Another detective and an agent were out in the sparse lunchtime drinking crowd. One of the waitresses who'd been on duty the night of Jessica's last visit was due to arrive soon, and an eye was also being kept out for men who fitted an extremely generalized description. Things were going nowhere fast out there, in other words. Back at the girl's apartment, the opposite was true. It was being ripped apart, and investigating officers from three separate agencies were ploughing into anything they could find: reading, photographing, dusting.

Nina, meanwhile, was talking to a young black woman called Jean. Jean had come in looking for Jessica because they'd been due to hook up the night before and her friend had never showed. Also because she wanted a drink. Don had pointed her straight in the direction of the cops, and kept her heading that way even when she remembered she'd much prefer to be somewhere else.

'Cam whore?' Nina said, repeating what the girl had just said.

Jean shrugged. 'That's what it's called. Don't mean you do nothing like having sex or whatever. 'Cam girl' is okay too.'

'Jessica never entered into sex for payment, as far as you're aware?'

'Hell no. Nor me neither, lady, get yourself straight about that.'

'Working girls are not allowed on the premises,' Jablowski said, smoothly. 'I'm very strict about that.'

'When you're here, which sounds like it isn't very often. Sir — I wonder if you could leave us alone for a moment?'

The owner left. Nina let a pause settle. 'And so, Jean, I take it you're a cam girl too?'

'Yeah. I, uh, I put Jessica onto it. But like I say, it's not like…'

Nina looked her straight in the face. 'I'm not suggesting it's like anything at all, Jean. Cam whoring is a field of which I'm almost entirely ignorant. I need to know about it, though, and I need to know right now. It could have a lot to do with why Jessica isn't around any more. So why don't you just tell me how it is?'

The girl sat back, lit up a cigarette, and talked.

Hooking was one thing, she said. Everybody knows where that's at. Putting up a cam, that was different. You never met no one, you took no risks, you encountered no bodily fluids. You never even
did
nothing, not really. Just took your clothes off. Do whatever you'd be doing normally, but naked. Watching TV. Cleaning the kitchen. If you had a boyfriend round, maybe you left the camera on, maybe you pointed it the other way. Whatever. Weird thing was that for some of the watchers, the less you did the better. Jean had a day one time when there was lots of shit going down and she didn't slop around in her underwear, just plain forgot about the camera and got on with her life like a normal person — and next morning she had a tray of sweaty emails wowing her for such 'great teasing'. Men were whacked out when it came to sex, Jean believed. Just when you thought you'd got them figured out, they did or said something made you realize you hadn't scratched the
surface
of how fucking weird they could be. She had a weird-ass impulse, every now and then, to fuck with their heads. To sit around looking fine and then hold up a piece of paper saying, 'I cooked some skanky vegetarian crap last night and the apartment still smells like a cow's insides'. To wander just out of the range of the camera's gaze and do something
really
rude and sexy, that would pop those guys' eyes out if they could only see it. Or to let rip with a life-changing fart and sit there and smile into the camera, knowing that no matter how big and flat their screen, it wasn't telling them everything there was to know about
her
world.

'You said you got Jessica into this,' Nina said. 'How did that come about?'

'I met a girl at a party, like eighteen months ago. She was doing it already and she gave me an email address for this guy who sets up sites. This dude calls himself the Webdaddy, and never mind how fucking creepy
that
is, but basically he knows the science bit. You email him a picture; he emails you back and you talk some about 'boundaries' — like how naked you will go, what else you'll do, if you got a boyfriend and if you'd do things together, if he's on for it, stuff like that. If Webdaddy likes you, he mails you a CD with some shit on how to set it up. You get yourself cable internet and go over to Circuit City and buy a webcam for fifty bucks. Everything else, he takes care of it. Your site, your billing, the works. End of the month, a cheque arrives. Simple as that.'