Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“Hey, hey, just teasing, V.I., just teasing.” He brushed my wet eyes with a callused fingertip. “I’m a bass player, nothing grosses me out. Except blood. Can’t explain that one. We have one last rehearsal tonight, and I’m just on my way to buy food for the group. Are you free tomorrow, four-ish? They’re not picking me up until six.”

He pulled me to him and kissed me, and I tried to translate the pain in my abdomen into passion on my lips. As he held me, I heard the dog walker arrive, the dogs’ yelps of pleasure, and then my neighbor start up the stairs with Tim, Staff Sergeant Jepson, and Petra.

Jake murmured that he’d leave me to cope with my circus on my own and went on his way.

Inside my apartment, Tim opened up Karen’s computer. He showed me what happened when he logged on to her site. We got the message that the site was down. Then he typed commands onto the screen itself. Lines of equations began to scroll downward.

“Here’s the command to block content from the site,” he froze the screen and pointed to a line of text. I could see the words “respect,” “for,” “the,” and “dead” separated by strings of code.

“Now, watch this.” He typed another set of commands. Green text scrolled down the screen once more. He typed another command line, and suddenly the Body Artist’s website was on the computer in front of us.

I forgot my sore belly. “How’d you do that?”

“It’s a clone.” Tim tried not to grin, tried to be casual-Aramis Ramírez quickly doffing his hat after back-to-back homers. “That way, whoever is blocking the original site doesn’t know we can access it.”

“But who is blocking it?”

He shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. The server is in Olathe, Kansas. When I talked to one of their techies this afternoon, the best he could tell me is that the commands weren’t coming from this machine. They’re coming from Baghdad. But whether they start there or just are being bounced through there, whoever is doing it is pretty sophisticated.”

“Your old buddies?” Jepson asked.

“USAC-NOEW?” Radke grimaced. “They could, but why would they? I didn’t see anything pertaining to military ops in here.”

“USAC-NOEW?” I said. “Sounds like a cat in pain.”

Tim laughed.

“U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare,” he translated. “You know the Army. It’s all alphabet soup.”

“Of course, they’re not the only big outfit in Baghdad,” I said. “There’s also Tintrey.”

“Them and a hundred other jackals.” Marty Jepson was suddenly angry. “I’m so sick of those damned contractors, those private armies! I lost two good buddies who had to go out shotgun to protect one of their farking CEOs.”

“Yeah, man, they’re total scum,” Radke agreed. “But why would they care about this stripper’s website?”

“She’s not a stripper.” Petra started to protest, then looked doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t be sticking up for her if she really is, like, a drug dealer or something.”

I scrolled carefully through the images looking for Nadia’s paintings. “We know what the codes that Rodney was using mean, but what was Nadia trying to tell us about Alexandra?”

Petra and the other two men crowded around my shoulders as Tim enlarged various parts of Nadia’s drawings. The last one she’d painted had shown her sister with flames sprouting out of her head.

“She was killed by an IED,” I said. “I suppose the fire symbolizes that.”

“Could well be, ma’am,” Jepson said, his voice very dry. “Where was this incident?”

“On the way to the Baghdad airport, her boss told me. Tim, are there any other files in here that we can look at?”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” I flung my hands open in frustration. “Where the Artist might have gone to earth. What she knew about Olympia and Rodney’s business. What she thought of Alexandra Guaman-the two had a brief affair the summer before Alexandra deployed.”

Tim did some more keyboard work and brought up a list of all Karen’s folders. She had virtually no documents except drafts of scripts for the commentary she made during her shows and outlines for possible future shows. Any financial records, or letters, or even e-mails, didn’t reside on this machine. We should all be so careful about our privacy, I suppose, but it felt eerily like walking through an empty house-like walking through Karen Buckley’s, or Frannie Pindero’s, empty apartment. She might carry a vast burden of emotional baggage, but physically she traveled light across the landscape.

“Her videos, then?” I said. “What’s in those folders that you didn’t see on her DVDs?”

That folder bulged, of course. Movies are very byte hungry, and something only five minutes long might use a megabyte of memory.

Tim got up so that I could sit at the controls. At first, he and the others watched as I browsed through Karen’s junk footage, early shots of herself painting her own body, done with mirrors, in what I assumed was the darkened front room Petra and I had found yesterday afternoon.

After a bit, though, the two vets wandered off to join Mr. Contreras and Petra in my kitchen. The dog walker rang my bell. I sent Petra downstairs, with Staff Sergeant Jepson as protection. I kept watching videos as they came back up with the animals.

I saw footage of Leander Marvelle and Kevin Piuma dancing without their burkas. They moved beautifully-a marvel, a feather; they’d named themselves well-in a bare space that I guessed was the Columbia College rehearsal room.

Karen had taped herself with Vesta. They were in bed together. Vesta murmured something, low-voiced, out of mike range, and then sprang to her feet and ordered Karen to leave.

“Take your camera with you, Karen. And your clothes, your toothbrush-all those things. I don’t want you back here.”

And Karen hadn’t argued. She sat up in bed, her face as impassive a mask as when it was covered with paint. I saw her naked torso, her hand stretched out. She wasn’t beseeching Vesta but holding a small remote control and turning off the camera.

I looked for footage during the weeks Nadia had been visiting Club Gouge. I found a scene in Rivka’s bedroom with Rivka demanding to know what Nadia meant to Karen.

A chance to explore the world of art. She’s a tormented soul, little Rivulet. Don’t torment your own soul over her. And certainly not over me.

I moved on to other files. And came upon a crucifix with a doll’s head, black plastic hair tied around Jesus’ hands. That was the cross Nadia had kept over her bed.

Karen said, You’ve never done this before, have you? Her voice held cool amusement, no tenderness.

Wherever she’d placed her camera, it wasn’t quite close enough for good focus. I could tell Nadia was naked, but not what her face was registering. Her response to Karen was so soft that the mike didn’t pick it up.

Why did you hustle me so hard after the show, then? Karen said. Just out of curiosity .

A long tick of silence, except for the rustling of the bedclothes, and then Nadia said, You knew my sister. Alexandra.

I meet a lot of people, Nadia.

In Michigan, at a music festival. Maybe she told you to call her Allie; that’s her pet name at home.

Oh, yes. Beautiful girl, totally ashamed of herself. Are you the go-between? Is she ready to come out? Or did she tell you to use me for your own sexual experiments? If so, try this.

It wasn’t clear what Karen did next, but it hurt. Nadia gave a sharp yelp and sat up, wrapping a sheet around her shoulders.

Alexandra is dead . She was killed in Iraq.