The 56th Man (36 page)

"I'm trying to find an old friend."

"Oh." The librarian wore no lipstick and had
only a watch for jewelry, yet she possessed a strange (if flat)
grace. "Your English is very refined," she said, blushing.

Ari gave her a long look. "University of
Baghdad," he answered.

"Really? Well, your teacher was first-rate."
She ventured a naughty moue. "Even if he forgot to include
'yearbook' in your vocabulary."

"Yes. Professor Yahya Abdallah."

Arrested on suspicion of espionage. Ari
learned later that the charges were trumped up. The professor had
made a mildly disparaging remark about the regime to a Brit
reporter, who had turned around and spiced up the quote into
borderline treason before broadcasting it on BBC World. The
professor had died in prison.

The librarian rested the yearbook on a narrow
table and backed away reluctantly. With a small gesture, Ari
invited her to join him. She smiled and shook her head. "I have to
get back to the reference desk. Someone's sure to have locked up by
now." Her smile took a wan downward turn. "I've become more of a
hacker than a librarian."

Ari quickly found Moria Massington's picture
in the senior section of the yearbook. 'Youthful freshness'
described the portrait with fair accuracy. Could he ascribe that
simmering gleam in her eyes to simple teenage buoyancy? Or was
there something else behind that knowing look. According to Tina,
Moria had only been using product for a couple of years.

You could see the future in Moria's eyes. But
which future?

There it was, in print, right under her
name:

'Our Moria. What can we say? She can charm a
moonbeam off the Moon. Aspires to a degree in Business. Shop at
Moria's in 4 years!'

Considering this was the year she had
graduated, Moria had undoubtedly possessed an identical copy of the
1992 yearbook. Was it surrounded by the signatures of her friends?
Did it contain shy little notes from boys in love with her?

Ari turned to the index. Moria was listed
four times, more than most of her peers. There was no listing for
Jerry Riggins. He had gone to a different school. Nor did he see
Tina Press. Perhaps she had also gone to a different high school.
Or she could have married and kept her husband's last name after
they split--an assumption based on Tina's invitation to share her
bed with him. He went to the next listing for Moria.

Senior Prom. Moria, dressed like a princess,
standing beside a strapping young man in a tux.

'Don and Moria outsparkle the stars at the
annual bash. Is there more to this than tripping the light
fantastic?'

Don. Ari rifled through the senior class and
found Donald Bland.

'Don's going places, no doubt about it. Where
will we see him next? On the Moon?'

Ari grunted. The yearbook editor had moondust
on the brain. If Don had gone places, Moria had not followed. She
had ended up roughly where she began.

He found the next listing, a photograph of
some kind of school club. Moria was the only standout in a drab
lot. Ari read the caption:

'Esperanto rules!'

He chuckled, then flipped to the final
listing. A pyramid of six cheerleaders standing firm for the
camera, with Moria at the apex. He looked closely at one of the
girls beneath her:

Tina.

You met Moria at the shopping mall, Tina? Why
did you lie about that?

He looked more closely at the picture,
twisting his head in an impossible attempt to see beyond the
pompoms.

He sat back and closed his eyes.

All the old Rebels of '92 will miss you.
Remember the pyramid?

Moria had one sterling quality that almost
made up for her grievous faults: she knew how to maintain a
friendship.

"Mr. Aladdin? There's a workstation free
now." The librarian was drawn over to the table by Ari's smile.
"You found your friend?" She glanced down and saw the cheerleader
pyramid. She seemed disappointed. "Oh. Her. Are you a reporter? You
could have told me. Anyone can look at this."

"You're speaking about...?"

"Moria Massington. At least that's the name I
knew her by."

"You knew her?"

"I would see her in the hallway at school.
That was long ago."

"An eternity."

The librarian blushed and smiled. "It is when
you're a woman and thirty." She cocked her head, then reached down
to the yearbook and turned back to the senior section. "Here. You
can see I didn't exactly belong in Moria's crowd."

Ari found himself looking at a young girl in
a formal gown who was painfully aware of her unbecoming acne. He
mused over the picture for a moment, then raised his head.

"And now you've blossomed into a radiant
vision."

Her blush deepened. "Do they really talk like
that where you come from?"

"When we mean it," Ari said.

The librarian looked over her shoulder, as
though convinced he was speaking to someone else. "Oh dear. I think
I'd better get you to that computer, Mr. Aladdin." Then she gave
him a jovial reprimand: "If that's really your name."

"I can show you my lamp."

"Oh dear!"

She hastened out of the reference stacks with
Ari close behind her. She showed him to one of the atrium
workstations, next to a young man seated at the end of the row who
hunched close to his monitor when the librarian shot him a look.
She gave Ari a temporary user name and password, tossed another
warning glance at the young man, and returned to the reference
desk.

Ari logged on and brought out the 2 gigabyte
SanDisk that he had taken from Sandra's courier pouch. He inserted
it into the tower's SD slot and waited. Nothing happened. He opened
the directory menu and clicked on the F drive. After a moment, the
screen filled with thumbnail views of jpg files.

It was the Riggins crime scene.

He wanted to see the pictures in the sequence
in which they were taken. He clicked on the 'details' button. The
thumbnails vanished and he clicked on 'date modified'. Slowly, he
worked his way down the list.

01:01:34 12/24/2005: The back door, smashed
in. Judging by the time indicator on the bottom right hand of the
screen, the CSI photographer began snapping pictures around forty
minutes after Jackson and Mangioni radioed in. Ari did not know if
this was evidence of efficiency or the reverse. There were very few
murder investigations in Baghdad these days. The most detailed were
those performed by Americans whenever Americans were accused of
murdering innocent Iraqi civilians.

01:02:04 12/24/2005: The back door again,
from a slightly different angle.

01:04:56 12/24/2005: The back door from
inside the house. Someone had to have swept up the broken wood that
must have littered the hallway's linoleum floor. There was not even
a splinter in sight.

There were a few more pictures of the door,
plus a couple of the kitchen. Then came the living room.

01:08:31 12/24/2005: Jerry Riggins. Officer
Jackson had not been exaggerating, except Ari did not get the
impression that Jerry had been staring at the Moon when he was
shot. The green easy chair was facing the picture window, yes, but
it seemed to Ari that the victim had been caught in the side of the
head while turning to face the killer. The camera flash was
reflected in the window, as well as several silhouettes. There was
the cameraman, a man in uniform whose face was indiscernible, and a
large man wearing a sports jacket. That face, too, disappeared at
the edge of the reflection, but Ari was sure it was Carrington.

The cameraman had shifted position as he took
shots from numerous angles. He had worked his way to the front of
the body, apparently leaning sideways to avoid stepping in the
blood-soaked patch on the carpet. Ari finally saw the Christmas
tree, though with the gruesome remains of Jerry Riggins' head in
the foreground. The tree was strung with decorative lights, but
they were not on. Perhaps someone had switched them off because
their reflection in the window had interfered with the
cameraman.

"Oh shit."

Ari turned to find his neighbor leaning over
to gape at his monitor.

"What kind of sick shit are you looking
at?"

Ari leaned the other way for a view of the
young man's screen. A naked couple was making lust against a wall.
The stud-star pulled out, forced the woman down on her knees, and
came in her face.

"And what kind of shit is this?" 'Shit'
sounded odd on Ari's lips. He could swear with almost miraculous
felicity in Arabic, and could roll out his
stramaledetto's
as well as any Italian. But there
was a crude sonority to the fuck/shit lexicon that he found hard to
emulate. He had discovered long ago that oaths and humor were among
the most difficult cultural interchanges to negotiate. But Ari's
neighbor took no notice of the stiff pronunciation.

"Hey!" The young man yanked away. "This is
freedom of speech, man."

"Are you exposing yourself?" Ari glanced
down. "Are you ejaculating in your pants?"

The young man rolled away a couple of feet,
twisting in his chair.

"Leave me to mine and I'll leave you to
yours," Ari whispered. "Agreed?"

The young man jutted out his jaw and
presented a crooked sneer. He looked like a wild boar. His eyes
shifted.

Ari quickly went back to his screen and
opened a new window. The young man performed a rapid alt-tab. When
the reference librarian arrived, she saw Fox News on Ari's monitor
and lectures on medieval philosophy on the young man's.

"Everything all right?" she asked.

"Yes," the two men said in unison. Ari was
abashed that the woman had gone from being an object of flirtation
to an arch foe in one easy flash.

"That's good. Let me know if I can be of any
assistance."

"We will," the men answered, both startled by
a bolt of awareness. They had unwittingly and unwillingly become
allies.

The librarian made her flat-footed way back
to her desk. Ari and the young man turned away from each other and
alt-tabbed back to their respective studies.

Ari was once again surprised by an erection.
Could he have possibly been effected by the young man's
pornography? Or was it the lingering oatmeal warmth of the
librarian? He could not continue like this.

His biological embarrassment deflated as he
re-focused on Jerry Riggins' bloody, empty eye sockets. A voice
seemed to call Ari from a vast, blind chorus. He angrily dismissed
the memory of Rana's face when he turned her over in the
courtyard.

He skipped ahead to Moria Riggins.

"Sicko shit."

Ari whirled, but the young man was still
planted firmly in front of his screen.

"
Neek
Hallak
," Ari snarled.

Moria had been sitting on the edge of her bed
when she was shot. Facing the bedroom window, although Ari doubted
she had been watching the moon. Her eyes bulged slightly from the
hydrostatic shock, but at least they were still in her skull. Her
powder blue robe was cinched at the waist. Ari clicked ahead
rapidly to a photograph of the slippers. They were plain, pale
blue, matching the robe. There was a wavy pattern in the fabric
along the edge of the soles. Most definitely a water stain, but was
it recent? From the picture it was impossible to say if they were
still wet. Ari noted several framed portraits on a nearby dresser.
Using the sliding toolbar, he shifted the image up and zoomed. Mr.
and Mrs. Massington and their two children. The boy looked to be
around sixteen. Tina Press had told Ari that Moria’s brother had
been killed in a car wreck.

He studied Tom Massington, the Tin Man who
had banished Moria from his will. His face bore the harsh
contentment of a man who made difficult decisions at other peoples'
expense. His son showed that same contentment, but without the
harshness. He would have grown into it, as Tom Massington himself
no doubt had, and become the spitting image of his father.

In comparison, Heather Massington
seemed soft and unfocused. Ari saw none of the stern beauty
concocted by his imagination and Tina’s description of her as a
cold fish. Nor did he detect any hint of the
femme fatale
. Yet there was hidden strength. She
had broken from her husband when it came to their daughter,
choosing to leave Moria in her will. And to Ari’s eye it was
obvious she had strayed from the marriage bed. Looking at young
Moria at fourteen or fifteen years of age, he smiled grimly. The
resemblance to the illicit lover was striking. Tina had told him
Heather shed no tears over her son. Yet Tracy Mackenzie said
Moria’s mother had been completely distraught when she made her one
and only visit to the Riggins house after the murders. The love
child still bore the largest part of Heather’s
affection.

01:27:20 12/24/2005: Joshua Riggins' bedroom.
And here the deception, or self-deception, became most transparent.
Joshua's body was lying sideways on the bed. He was barefoot, but a
small robe lay under him. Ari could see cartoon characters woven
into the robe's fabric. One arm was still inside the sleeve, while
the other lay curled at the waist. Most striking, though, were the
streaks on the front of his pajama shirt. Saliva, thick mucous,
tiny pink rivulets that Ari could only see on zooming in. Had
Joshua been sick? Yet it did not look like vomit, nor was there any
sign of vomit on the rumpled bedsheets. And where was the ghosting
pattern mentioned in the matrix worksheet? He zoomed in closer.
Just as the image began to blur in over-focus, he thought he could
see flecks of blood on the shirt front and at the knees. The
pattern was at waist-level.

The following picture was a close-up of the
head wound. Ari studied it for a moment, then clicked to the next
file. He immediately noticed something odd on Joshua's nightstand.
A gaudy Batman clock was half hidden behind what at first looked
like a blue and white bundle of cloth. He zoomed in and saw a
facecloth surrounded by small beads of water. There was an open
prescription bottle next to the pack, but when he attempted a
closer look the image blurred. It was as though the cameraman had
predicted his complaint, because the next shot was a close-up of
the bottle. Zooming blurred this picture, as well, but at least now
he could pick out the small letters at the bottom left of the
label: Valium.