The Lonely Dead (16 page)

'I'm not, no.' The brain cell heated up another half degree.

'It figures. If you were, you'd know what I was talking about. When you're married to someone, you know what's going on in their world. Too much, maybe. You get your own life and half of the other person's. I know when Greg's busy, when he's up against it at work, when something's going haywire and meetings start popping up all over the day. No, I don't carry his diary in my head and I can't always quote chapter and verse. But I know what's going on in his life.'

'So… I'm sorry: so you knew about the webcam thing? You knew he was spending time watching girls getting naked, having sex, live on the internet?'

'No I didn't, but that's

Nina cut in smoothly. 'Different. Of course. You know everything about Greg, apart from that, and that's perfectly reasonable. Men are sneaky about that kind of thing. You can't be expected to know about it. There's probably a detail or two he doesn't know about you either, right? That's also fine. That's married life, from what I understand — but, you know, I'm only guessing. Looking in, from the cold, dark wastes of spinsterhood.'

'I didn't mean…'

'Of course you didn't, Gail. But otherwise, apart from these little details, you'd say you have a solid understanding of Greg and his schedule and his life.'

'Yes. Yes I do.'

'Excellent. You've been very helpful.' Nina heard the doorbell ring from the other side of the house. 'Sounds like the cavalry has arrived. I think the Lieutenant is finishing up with your husband anyway, so we're going to be leaving very soon.'

Nina smiled warmly, and started to walk away.

Then she turned back and asked, as if enquiring after the name of her interior designer; 'What was your husband doing on Monday evening?'

The woman stared at her. 'Excuse me?'

'What was your husband doing on Monday evening? From your understanding of his schedule?'

'He…'

Nina watched as the woman realized she had hesitated too long, that the question, dealt unexpectedly out of nowhere, had penetrated a weak defence she hadn't realized she had to build. 'Was he out, that evening?'

'Yes. He… he had a meeting. A late meeting.'

'How late would that have been?'

'I don't remember. It was late.'

'This was a meeting relating to his work?'

The woman saw Nina staring at her.

'Yes,' she said. 'I think.'

—«»—«»—«»—

'We're going to go,' Olbrich said, quietly. He, Monroe and Nina were now alone in the kitchen. 'Two people at his company confirm he was at or near his desk by the usual time on Wednesday. He was out late Monday evening, as you found, and it wasn't a meeting. What it was, he claims, is a strip club with a client. The alleged client is now back in England.' He looked at his watch. 'McCain has no personal address for this person, and so we're going to have to wait until UK business hours to chase that down. But frankly…'

He tailed off.

Nina yawned massively. 'We don't have shit to hold him on and he doesn't look like the guy Jessica was seen with in Jimmy's.'

'Right. Yes, he watched Jessica. Yes, he occasionally goes to strip clubs. When he 'has to'. Nice work if you can get it. Any more than that and he's a dead end. His lawyer's with them now and he's pumped up to fight, and he's got a point. We either have to make this serious or leave it alone for now.'

Monroe shook his head and stalked out into the hallway.

Olbrich looked at Nina. 'What's his problem?'

'Doesn't like leaving empty-handed when we came in this heavy.'

'It was his call. I told him it should be more subtle.'

'Monroe's more of an 'Advance straight to Go' kind of player.'

They followed her boss along the hallway and stopped outside the door to the living room. Nina was expecting sass from one or other, and most certainly the lawyer — it seemed like everyone in television or movies was forever talking back to the police nowadays, and so everyone in real life felt they had to do it too, as if to stay in character — but there was none forthcoming.

Olbrich apologized without apologizing. Monroe asked that they take no out-of-town trips for a few days. Nina was going to just breeze on out without a backward glance, but then she heard her name being called in a female voice.

Go ahead, sister,
she thought, as she turned.
Push a little harder and just see what happens.

The McCains were standing together facing her. Their lawyer had faded to the back of the room and wasn't looking happy.

'My wife says I should give you this. My lawyer disagrees.'

The husband was holding something out to her. It was smaller than a paperback book but about as thick.

'What is it?'

'A portable hard drive. I, uh…'

His wife looked at the floor. 'Get on with it, Greg.'

'There are some pictures on it,' he said. 'Movies, too. Recorded from the site. I don't know whether it's any use but…'

His wife finished for him. 'We don't want it in the house.'

Nina took the disk. 'That's very helpful.'

Once it was out of his possession, the man's shoulders seemed to slump with relief. Nina realized that far from being an all-out disaster the evening might even work in his favour. A minor middle-class guilt, now blown into the open, fate taking the secret out of his hands. Sure, his wife would give him hell for it, and be hurt, and he was going to have to accept the role of house scumbag for a while. It would sure as hell Come Up In Conversation.

But it wasn't a secret any longer, and being able to throw open the windows of your dark private rooms can be worth quite a price. His wife wasn't going anywhere: they had this lovely life together and who the fuck wants to start dating again? A couple of months down the line this evening's embarrassment might even have been parlayed into a revivified sex life.

Some people just float.

'I didn't know she was dead,' he said. 'I'm sorry to hear about it.'

'The circumstances have not been widely reported, and we'd like to keep it that way.'

He nodded, looked away. His wife took a step back, as if unconsciously detaching herself from the evening, but then came forward with her husband to see Nina to the door: to see her off the premises, in effect — woman dealing direct with woman in a way men never really seemed to realize was going on. Saying things without saying, pushing without raising a hand.

As she walked down the path to the cars Nina made her own small side-step in her head, and slipped the disk into her pocket before it was visible to the men. Tomorrow it would join the rest of the evidence, such as it was.

Not tonight.

15

I got to Nina's mid-morning. The cab driver who dropped me off looked down at the house dubiously.

'You live here?'

'A friend of mine does.'

'Brave friend,' he said, and backed off up the road.

I walked down the vertiginous driveway that curved around to the front of the house. I had been to Nina's only once before, briefly and three months previously, sleeping on the sofa for a night after she, Zandt and I had returned Sarah Becker to her home and family. Nothing good seemed to have happened to the house's exterior since. The property was old school California Modern: a row of square rooms with a kink for the kitchen turning it into an L, like a very small motel. Possibly something of a big deal in the late 1950s, a kind of low-rent Case Study house, but from a stone's throw away you could tell its days were numbered.

I knocked on the door. 'It's open,' a voice said, from a distance. When I stepped inside I could see Nina out on her balcony, talking on the phone. She waved distractedly without looking at me.

I dropped my bag and hovered for a minute in the main living space. The space, anyway. It didn't look like much living had taken place there recently. It wasn't dusty, particularly, or markedly untidy, but that was because the room held virtually no personal possessions bar the racks of books and files on the long cases over on the other side. I walked into the kitchen area and opened the fridge: inside were two bottles of wine, a carton of orange juice and another of milk. Nothing else, and nothing in the cupboards either. Nina evidently subsisted on liquid fuel alone.

When I turned back to face the main area it somehow looked even quieter and more still. I had read once how in first millennium Britain the locals would use the long-abandoned remains of Roman villas and ruined churches for shelter on journeys across a land that was otherwise largely uninhabited. They called these places 'cold harbours', because while a night's protection from the elements could be found there, they harboured no other life or warmth. Nina's house felt like that, and I thought this as a man who had stayed nights in motels and factories with boarded-up windows and big demolition notices nailed to the walls.

'Hey, Ward.'

I looked over to see Nina was off the phone and standing in the doorway. Her hair was a little longer than it had been, and it seemed like she'd lost a few pounds from a frame that had always been slim. Something about her put me in mind of something, or someone, but I couldn't immediately work out what it was.

'Should call the cops,' I said. 'Someone's stolen all your food.'

'You didn't look hard enough. It's all stacked right where I need it. In the supermarket.'

'You have any coffee on site, at least? Or is Starbucks looking after that for you?'

It turned out she had lots.

—«»—«»—«»—

'I've run most of the software I can,' I said, handing the disk back to her. 'And come up blank. There's a couple more pattern-searching things I can try, but they can leave traces, so I'll do them on the copy, if you've still got it. Bottom line is that whoever erased the disk did it well. It's very, very blank. I'm sorry. Sometimes there just isn't anything there.'

'Don't worry,' she said. She was leaning on the rail of her deck looking out across a hazy sea. 'I knew it was a long shot.'

'Are you any closer to finding the guy?' I had my chair as far back on the deck as I could, so as to marginally increase my chances of surviving when it all suddenly gave way.

'No. There are cops talking to the main users of her site. There aren't many, and none of them look good for it. We talked to the number one fan but I don't think there's anything there either. We have a very generic description of the guy she was seen with the night she died, we know now she waited tables sometimes and cops have talked to people where she worked, and that's it.'

'Who was she, anyway?'

Nina shook her head. 'Down from the Bay Area. LAPD are still trying to trace family in Monterey. They have an address they believe is current but the parents seem to be on vacation. Her few known associates in LA seem to know nothing about her prior to meeting. You know what these people are like: yesterday was likely a bad day — so why not just have a beer and forget it? You should have met this Jean friend of Jessica's. They were big buddies, apparently — had the same first initial and everything, hung in the bar a lot, you know, like, super-best friends, rilly. Now she's dead, and with Jean it's like 'Bummer. Where's the next party?''

'Nice.'

'What do you expect? Jessica was a woman who lived in an apartment and got sad sometimes and drank too much and then died. That may be all we ever know.'

Her voice had died during the last few sentences, until it was barely more than a mumble.

'Nina, are you okay?'

She turned to me. Her eyes were green and bright. 'Sure I'm okay,' she said, more strongly. 'I just don't know the answer to your question. Who was she? You tell me. She had a name and a guitar. She lived, she died. Come Judgment Day, that's all that can be said of anyone.'

'A depressing world view, but anyway not what I meant. Was that John on the phone? You can drop the 'he's out buying groceries' line, by the way. I've already gathered you aren't an item any more.'

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

I prompted. 'So where is he now?'

'I don't know,' she muttered. 'It took a day and a half of messages to get him to call me back, for which I get five minutes of evasion and then a dial tone. It's not like I'm fucking stalking him. We're over, and that's fine and dandy by me. I'm just worried. He's acting strange. Stranger than usual.'

'What happened with you guys?'

'You ask him the same question?'

'I did.'

'And he said?'

'Nothing intelligible.'

'Figures.' She looked resigned. 'It just didn't work out, Ward. Like the man said, maybe you can never go back, and it's not like we had so much to revisit. We had one thing in common — two, I guess: time spent together before Karen was murdered, and the fact neither of us are going to make the starting line-up for any All Star Relationship Squad.'

'Plus you're both kind of scary.'

She smiled properly for the first time since I'd turned up. 'Scary?'

'In a nice way.'

'Coming from a guy with scabs on his knuckles and a gun in his jacket, I'll take that as a compliment.'

I slipped my hands under the table. 'You're very observant. You should be in law enforcement or something.'

'Want to tell me about the fight?'

I didn't. Admitting to Nina what I'd done, or that I'd been nervous enough to do it, was not something I wanted to get into right then. 'Guy kept asking me if I wanted fries. I just snapped. You know how it is.'

She shrugged. 'John was here for a few weeks. It kind of worked. We hung out, we took walks, we talked about my work — because, of course, he didn't have any. That's part of the problem. Maybe
the
problem. John was a very, very good detective. He has this insatiable urge to
find out.
But he couldn't go back to LAPD and he couldn't see anywhere else to go. Quite soon I started coming back from work and he wasn't here. He'd turn up after midnight. Wouldn't say what he'd been doing. Usually he'd been drinking, but that wasn't it. He just started shifting to the side. His head was somewhere else. Then suddenly he wasn't around for five days.'

'Where'd he go?'

'Florida. Where his ex-wife lives.'

I knew Zandt's marriage had broken up after the disappearance of their daughter. I also knew that he'd paid a visit to his wife after we'd found Karen's remains, eighteen months later; and I remembered him telling me the night before that killers weren't the only important things in life. 'He was there two days ago also.'

'I know. He sent me a text message.'

'You think he wants to get back with her?'

'I don't know. I don't think he does either. There's only one light in his head right now and that's finding the Upright Man. On everything else his wheels are spinning.'

'Funny. He told me exactly the opposite.'

'John lies.' She said this with a matter-of-fact bitterness, and thought better of it. 'Sometimes. He tells the truth sometimes too.'

'Well, his investigative skills are getting rusty, I'm afraid. All he has to show for his time since Yakima is some bizarre piece of non-information about the Roanoke colony in the late fifteen hundreds.'

'What?'

I filled her in on what I could remember of John's history lesson. She looked bleak by the time I was done, and we sat in silence for a while.

Eventually she stood. 'I have to get to work. You in a hurry to be elsewhere?'

I shrugged. 'I have nowhere in particular to go.'

'Good. I was going to ask you another favour.'

—«»—«»—«»—

After she'd gone I made more coffee. It felt good to be in a house, even one as unhouselike as Nina's. In a house you don't have to be spending money or on your best behaviour the whole time. You can just sit around. It's not like that, out there in the world. But I found that having the opportunity to simply hang, unobserved and unbugged by other humans, made me feel a little weird. So I got onto Nina's request.

Before she left I'd copied all the files from the disk she'd been given by Greg McCain. The disk itself was now being taken into the care of the cops, along with the one from Jessica's head. How she was going to explain the former's dog-legged journey I didn't know, and I didn't like the risks she was taking. She was the only one of us still latched into anything real world, and I got the sense she was drifting, like a plug slowly being drawn from a socket. I knew from experience that once this happens the shapes can subtly change, and you may find you don't fit back again. The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs.

First thing I did was watch the movies. They weren't proper, full-motion video, but long sequences of stop frames blipping forward at intervals. There were six. Three showed Jessica having desultory, drunken sex with three different guys: twice on the couch that dominated her tiny living room, once on the bed. The frames were grainy and badly lit and in one case in almost total darkness. There was no attempt to play to the camera, the position of which remained static. It was like watching a Ken and a Barbie being banged together by a child who had no idea what the action was supposed to signify. Time-stamping on all three suggested they captured the very end of evenings spent in bars. One of the other videos showed a four-hour period in which the woman watched television, did some spring-cleaning, played the guitar briefly, and made a half-hearted attempt to put together a not very complicated shelving unit. For most of this period she was wearing a pair of orange shorts, and nothing else. Another showed her sitting doing nothing, apparently in the aftermath of crying. The final video was stop motioned at much longer intervals, about five/ten minutes or so, and showed Jessica asleep on her couch, under a blanket, flicker-lit by the television out of frame. At the end she woke and sat watching it for a while with a cup of coffee. Nina had told me Jessica was in her late twenties. In the awake portion of this video, she looked about forty-five.

Then I worked through the stills. There were an awful lot of them. McCain had thrown them all into one big folder. I dropped this onto a graphics viewer and clicked through some examples at random. The images showed Jessica doing the same kind of things as the videos, but without the sex. Being naked or partially naked. Reading a magazine. Eating food. Sitting at a computer. Drinking coffee or Jack Daniel's. Sleeping. Smoking. Staring into space. The cumulative effect was strange, and I began to get a sense of Jessica's appeal to McCain. I was familiar with webcams myself, having spent some slow hours watching street corners in New Orleans, or the shore of Lake McDonald, or views out of computer stores on the main streets of nondescript towns in the Midwest. It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didn't watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of presented subject matter, made the view itself seem more real. If you watch something in particular, all you see is that thing happening. You see the moment, the event, and you are distracted from the long, slow tide of eventlessness which it overlies. If you watch nothing, then you see everything. You see the thing as it is.

These myriad accidental views of Jessica achieved the same effect. Not a single image was composed. In many she was partly out of frame, or out of focus. The effect was to show nothing in particular, and thus to reveal everything. Your view of her life became similar to her own, an endless series of uninflected, unintended and ultimately quite tedious moments. McCain's Jessica collection brought home the reality of the woman more clearly than anything else I could imagine, capturing and celebritizing her in pixels. This was her fifteen megabytes of fame.

Having glimpsed her life before the event, only then did I look at the Polaroids Nina had left me. These showed Jessica's apartment on the day when the LAPD had found it. They too were flat, blank views, but they were not uninflected. Every square millimetre said something quite direct: their very existence announced that the girl who had lived in this place was dead, which is why I had wanted to see the others first.

I looked at them closely for a while. Then I went back to the beginning of the files on the hard disk, set the system to order them chronologically, and looked at them again.

It took a long time before I noticed something.

—«»—«»—«»—

'See?'

Nina nodded. 'There's no picture that shows it better?'

'That's as good as it gets. I've blown it up but…' I switched to a window I'd hidden behind the first. 'We don't live in a movie, and so the blow-up looks like shit.'

Nina leaned forward and stared at the picture on the screen. She was looking at a grainy and blocky picture that showed Jessica lying on her bed, from the chest up. A man's face was over hers.