The Lonely Dead (6 page)

'Nina,' he says, finally. 'Come in here.'

She knew that meant just her, so she raised a hand to signal the other guys to hold position. She allowed her other arm to drop a little, but wasn't yet ready to let go of the gun.

The bedroom seemed even hotter than the other room. There was a strong odour. The television was a low burble up high to the left, fixed to the wall with a metal bracket. Monroe stood the other side of a queen-size bed.

A woman sat in the bed. She was in her late twenties. She had long brown hair. She didn't move when Nina entered, because she was dead. She was sitting bolt upright in bed, her head flopping slightly forward. She was dressed in well-worn blue cotton night clothes with a floral motif. Her stomach had begun to distend. Her face looked like painted putty. Her eyes were open. So was her mouth. Something had been put inside it.

'Jesus,' Nina said.

She leaned forward. The object in the woman's mouth was about the size of a waitress's notepad, about a quarter of an inch thick, two inches wide, and probably a little over three inches long, though it was difficult to be sure without removing it. It seemed to be made of shiny metal. A very narrow label along the protruding end had a string of numbers and short lines on it.

'What the hell is that?' Monroe said. He was breathing hard, and a line of sweat glinted on one temple.

Nina shook her head. 'I don't know.'

—«»—«»—«»—

Thirty minutes later Nina stepped outside. The first wave of forensic geeks had arrived. With the drapes still drawn and the heat still trapped, it was like milling around in a crowded, hellish cupboard. Nina made sure to take a thorough look around the suite, which was always easier when it had been established you weren't going to be shot at, and then left. Monroe was still inside. It would take the arrival of cameras to flush him out.

There were no other bodies in the room. The swish Nina had heard was the sound of Monroe checking the bathroom. It was devoid of personal possessions. There was no sign of the clothes the woman must have been wearing when she arrived. You can't wander into a motel dressed in pyjamas. Even at a place like The Knights. You would normally think to bring some toiletries, too, a handbag. There would be identification of some kind, somewhere, however accidental. Cops were already canvassing missing persons reports, but something told Nina news wouldn't arrive soon.

She walked out through a sunny courtyard which was full of yet more cops and the quickly moving bodies of civilians who thought they were going to be able to check out of this death block quickly and get back to their anonymous lives, but who were about to spend a large number of hours being asked a small number of questions. That evening they would see, on television, the place they'd spent the night before, as the media repeated its name again and again to make it one of those venues the mention of which would tug at the memory for years and possibly decades to come. Nobody involved was going to forget today in a hurry, least of all the woman Nina saw when she left the courtyard and walked back out into the lot. Patrolman Peterson was still sitting on the bench. Two of his colleagues were trying to restrain this woman, whose name was Monica, who had arrived to find her husband's remains had already been taken to the morgue and who was screaming at his ex-partner because there was nothing else to do.

Only when Nina was clear of the entrance and standing some distance from anyone else did she get out her cell phone. She walked to where she couldn't be overheard, and hit John Zandt's number on speed-dial. He didn't answer after twelve rings, and she was put through to the phone's answering service.

'Hi, it's me,' she said to the machine. 'I know you don't want to talk about this kind of thing any more. But I could do with your help.' She hesitated, not knowing what else to say, then added: 'Hope you're okay.'

Then cut the connection, and stood irresolute. For just a moment she felt odd, fluttery at the back of the neck, as if someone was watching her.

She turned, but there was no one. No one she could see, anyhow.

—«»—«»—«»—

At just after two she sat stirring a coffee while her boss talked on the phone. They were perched outside a scruffy cafe half a block from The Knights. All but one of the squad cars had now moved on to other things, but from where she sat she could see four unmarked vehicles that were part of the investigation. She sipped her coffee and watched as further pieces of Room 11 were hauled out to be analysed in depth. It had been established that the room had been rented five days before, cash in advance. Nina hoped he was being grilled, yet again, and she hoped it was somewhere airless and hot and that they took their time.

Monroe closed his phone. 'It's done,' he said, with evident satisfaction. 'Olbrich is assembling a task force: RHD of course, us, FD&D, the whole Serious Crime Cluster Fuck. This needs to be kept tight. There's a lot of angry officers around.'

'Clipping a cop in broad daylight. Even by wacko standards, that's extreme.'

'Wacko?'

'Come on, Charles.' Nina had lost patience with official nomenclature round about the time she assisted with the extrication of a young black kid from a trash can. The kid had been there a week, in weather as warm as today's. His mother ID'd the body, then killed herself three weeks later by walking off the Palisades. That had been a few years ago. Monroe still went through the motions of using impersonal and uninflected terminology for people whose deeds shredded whole families and histories in their grubby hands. 'What would you call him? Inadequately socialized?'

'This is going to happen fast,' Monroe said, ignoring her. 'A cop-killing in broad daylight. This is not a man who has control of himself any more. We're going to have to hit the ground fast.'

Nina rolled her eyes. Out of control, begging to be caught. And yet nowhere to be seen. The most high-profile investigation she had yet been involved in — officially at least — had been the Delivery Boy murders back in 1999/2000. Again, here in Los Angeles, and also working under Charles Monroe. He'd made similar assumptions then, about a man who'd taken the lives of three bright and worldly young women without leaving a trace. He had killed again, more than once, and then disappeared, and had never been caught. Monroe had floated on to the next job, onwards and upwards. The girls' parents still took the world one day at a time. 'Question is, will there be others?'

'There may be, yes. That's what I'm saying. Unless we…'

'No. I mean
have
there been any before this? If this is the end, as you think, where is the beginning? What got him to here? What's this guy spiralling out from?'

'People are on it. LAPD are cross-checking as we speak.'

'And we still have no idea who she is.'

'No purse, no possessions apart from old pjs, dickhead behind the desk says he never saw her before she was dead. A photo will be prepared once they've cleaned her up a little: people will be on the street with it by the end of the afternoon. You know what that thing in her face was?'

Nina shook her head, a coppery taste in her own mouth. She had seen many dead bodies, some of them in states around which she'd had to build a wall in her head, so she didn't come upon the memory unexpectedly. But there was something about the ones where they did things to the victims' mouths. Sexual mutilation you almost took for granted. The mangling of a public part of the body, like the eyes or mouth or hands, somehow seemed a more social desecration. Sexual was private, a personal assault; public said LOOK, UNIVERSE, AT WHAT I HAVE DONE. It was outward-directed, some statement designed to change the world. Or so it seemed to her.

'A hard disk,' Monroe said. 'A small one, like in a laptop. One of the techs recognized it before it was even out of her head.'

'No prints?'

He shook his head. 'Clean. But someone in a lab is finding what else it can give us. There's a serial number, for a start. It came from somewhere, was bought somewhere. And there may be something left on it, of course. We'll know tonight.'

He caught the expression on Nina's face this time. 'He left it there for a reason, Nina. Let's get back to work.'

He stood up, thumb already dialling another number on his cell. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She wouldn't want to be Charles Monroe's phone, Nina thought. That was a job for a phone with tough abs.

She drained the rest of her coffee, aware of his eyes on her, critical. 'What, Charles?'

'How's your arm holding out?'

'Fine,' she said, irritably. He wasn't asking about her arm. He was reminding her of unfinished business and of why their professional relationship had taken its second turn for the worse. She got the message. 'Good as new.'

He looked like he was going to say something else but then got an answer on his cell, and turned and strode away, already in mid-flow. Someone was learning just what a damn fine SAC Monroe was; how in control, how just
right on top of things.

As she followed him, Nina checked her own phone for something like the twentieth time. She saw there was a text message from Zandt, at last, and quickly called it up.

It said: I'M IN FLORIDA.

'Oh for fuck's sake,' she muttered, stuffed the phone back in her bag, and walked back out into the heat.

5

I checked into the Armada on Powell, in San Francisco downtown not far from Union Square. It was appealingly expensive and had a guy dressed as a Spanish soldier standing on the pavement outside. Passing tourists were taking photographs of each other with him, presumably so that back home they could tell their friends that here they were, with a guy in a costume, outside a hotel they weren't staying in. By the time I was settled it was too late to do the big thing on my agenda, so I went for a walk instead. As I walked I thought about what I knew, which boiled down to this: I had been wrong about just about everything to do with my life. I had believed I'd been born to Don and Beth Hopkins in Northern California, where they had been living well-tempered lives of average tedium. They mowed the yard and kept the car clean and they bought enough material goods to keep the gods of commerce smiling upon them. My father built up a realty business and, after I'd left home, this led to them moving to Dyersburg. He had continued to enjoy some success as a broker of luxury houses until a car crash had taken both of their lives. But on the day after their funeral, when I'd gone to their house to try to understand what I was supposed to do about it, I'd found a message. It had been hidden in such a way as to draw the attention only of someone who knew my father very well.

The message had said, simply, that they weren't dead.

This is the news everyone wants to hear — everyone, that is, whose relationship to their parents is marred merely by distance — and it was enough to make me spend the afternoon searching their house. I found the videotape my father had sealed into a VCR in his study, and this ultimately led to my discovering just how wrong I had been about my life. Wrong — or deliberately misled.

I had thought I was an only child. A section in the video showed me with a brother of the same age, a brother deliberately abandoned on a city street, somewhere back in the late 1960s.

I had thought my parents' death had been an accident. They weren't my parents and it wasn't. They had been murdered by the group my natural father had belonged to, thirty-five years earlier. This group was called the Straw Men, and believed themselves the only portion of humanity uninfected by a virus promoting social conscience above the cold-hearted individualism they believed inherent to our species. Whether they genuinely thought this, or it was just a convenient cover for acts of violence and depravity, was not clear. What
was
clear was that the group was wealthy and well connected. It was also evident that their point man, a person who called himself the Upright Man but could more accurately be designated as Paul, my lost brother, was about as dangerous an individual as could be imagined. The night before Bobby Nygard died we watched a government tape together, a compilation of the world's atrocities over the previous two decades. Shootings, explosions, mass killings. We saw the Upright Man in the background of a number of these events, mutely claiming the glory. In addition he had been acting as a procurer for the occupants of The Halls, a group of men — and, for all I knew, women — involved in considered and repeated acts of serial murder.

The first steps had been easy. I did my initial research a hundred miles down the road from Relent, sitting in a wired coffee bar with a laptop. I hated the idea that someone might think I was writing a novel, and kept glaring at people who smiled encouragingly at me, but I needed the net access. What I had to do first was confirm the city in which my sibling had been abandoned. Paul had sent me a message in which he claimed he had been left in San Francisco, but I was not inclined to believe anything he said without evidence. I had nothing else to go on except the short section at the end of the videotape my father had left me, which I had converted to a DVD.

The last section was in three parts. The first showed a train journey. There was no locating information — but I knew my father well enough to be confident he would not have included it just for background colour. So my guess was the first section was to signal a journey had been undertaken — and that it was far enough from our house to make sense by rail, but not far enough to take a plane. This gave me a choice of maybe thirty or forty cities and towns in or around Northern California or Oregon.

The tape cut then to a wide street in a downtown area. The camera followed my mother as she walked down a sidewalk, hands down and out of sight: holding, as the final section would make clear, the hands of two young boys. There was not much else to see except passing examples of the fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated store fronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except…

I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name — Hannington's.

Ten minutes on the web told me there were no department stores by that name still in operation in the US, or at least none who'd made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.

I tracked down a selection of 'San Francisco of Yesteryear' sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city's days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington's. They couldn't afford any of it. They just went to look.

I flipped back to the freeze frame. I had misread the sign. The angle wasn't good, and sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington's still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. Further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and been a big deal in its day. Big enough of a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.

So. San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.

—«»—«»—«»—

Fenwick was ten minutes' walk from the hotel. The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean grey pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn't hard to see I was in the right area.

When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington's, I ground to a halt. People cruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old store front had been split into two, and now held a Gap and a vast make-up emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.

I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn't remember having trodden this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother's hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different from me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.

Time is strange.

'You in a fucking coma, man?'

I turned round to see a shithead in a suit standing behind me, unable or unwilling to do as everyone else had and step around me. I was about to explain how stupid this was but then realized I didn't want to get into another fight, even a verbal one.

I apologized, moved aside. 'Asshole,' he said.

A woman's voice said, 'Oh grow up.'

I turned and saw it was the woman with the stroller, who had stopped to deliver this advice to the other man.

He glared at her, then stormed off up the street. The woman winked at me and went her own way. In the trivial way cities sometimes do to you, I felt I had been taken inside.

I glanced across once more at the corpse of Harrington's, then set off up around the other side of the square and headed west. I had a print-out of several frames from the final part of this section of the video, which showed the area where the child had been abandoned. I didn't have much hope of finding the actual spot, or even the street. But Chinatown lay in that direction, and somewhere in there was a big bowl of food with my name on it.

Sometimes you have to keep your goals to a manageable size.

—«»—«»—«»—

Next morning I was on the phone at five after nine. By ten thirty all I had established was that you didn't get information out of social services in a hurry. After a while I had spent so long pushing buttons in menu systems that I began to be afraid I might eventually be put back through to myself, which I knew would freak me out. So I got onto the street and walked over there instead.

Within five minutes I wished I'd stuck with the phone. There's nothing like the waiting room of any office of the government or its allies to remind you how lucky you are. You enter a non-place, non-time. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favourite colour. You stare at signs that have no bearing on you, non-specific communiqu�s from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millennia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become that problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we'll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbour dead so we can move up one place in the line.

Or maybe that's just me.

I spent a long time waiting before I could even delineate my basic needs to someone. It then took us a while to get around the fact I didn't have a proper address, and for him to accept the Armada's details instead. I explained I had a brother who I thought had been taken into care in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s, probably around 1967; that I believed his first name to be Paul, that I was trying to trace him, and that I had no other information whatsoever except that he might have been found wearing a sweater with his name stitched into it. The man wrote down what I said but the looks he gave me suggested it was going to be a long day. Finally he handed me a number, and I was released back into the milling, coughing herd of problems, psychoses and whines.

Two hundred thousand years later, my number came up. I was invited down a long corridor and into a room in the far back of the floor, where a middle-aged black woman was sitting behind a desk covered in paper. A sign said she was called Mrs Muriel Dupree. The wall behind her was covered with posters in which one word in three was underlined and confidentiality was usually guaranteed.

'I can't help you,' she said, before I'd even sat down.

I sat down anyway. 'Why?'

'It's too long ago, that's why.' She referred to a piece of paper in front of her. 'Says here it's about a brother, and you think it was around 1967. That's before my time. It was also before a lot of other big things happened. Those, for a start.' She nodded towards a computer so old I wouldn't trust it to hold my laptop's coat. 'Only about twenty years ago all this stuff started going on computer, and then we had a bad fire in 1982 that took out the tapes and files in the basement, so we lost most of the information prior to that date anyhow. Even if something was written down about it the old-fashioned way, and it wasn't burned, it wouldn't have been a whole lot and you'd have a better chance of finding God than finding it now. I don't mean that personally. You may know Him already, in which case, good for you.'

She read the disappointment in my face, and shrugged. 'Things were different then. Today no one gets 'put up for adoption': the mother makes an adoption plan, there's legally binding contact arrangements and everybody gets that a blank canvas isn't the best thing for the child, that she or he needs to own the information about their own past, da da da. But back then it was 'Okay, you been fostered or adopted or whatever. Welcome to your new life. Don't look back, because there ain't nothing happy there to be found.' People would change the kids' names, birthdays, whatever. You know how they say the expression 'Put up for adoption' came about?'

I shook my head. I didn't know. I didn't care, either, but Mrs Dupree was evidently viewing me as a welcome five-minute break from people who would shout at her.

'Way, way back they would take the orphaned children out of the cities on the coasts, put them on trains. They'd take them out into the country and stop at the itty-bitty stations and the kids would literally be 'put up' onto the platforms in the hope that some farmer with a bit of room — and a need for some more labour — would take one or two in. Here's the kid. Feed it. That's that. Everything prior is dead and gone. Things weren't quite like that in the sixties, but in some ways they kind of were. Half the time the kids wouldn't get told they were adopted ever. Most of the rest, the parents would wait until they thought the children were old enough, which meant probably they'd been voting for a few years and were spaced out to all hell to find out mom and dad could have been hundreds of miles away at the moment they were born. It was not a good system and we know that now, but at the time it was thought to be for the best — and a whole lot of those children grew up to have happy and productive lives. Honey, you okay?'

'Yeah,' I said, looking back up at her from my hands, which I had been inspecting while wondering if I would ever have a happy and productive life myself. 'I didn't expect to get so stopped, so soon. And… this is very important.'