Jon Evans - Dark Places

I woke sometime around dawn, visions of Morgan Jackson's torture chamber dancing in my head. I felt far more tired than I had when I had gone to bed ten hours earlier. My whole body was encrusted with stale sweat, and I had a headache. A jet-lag hangover. One thing that didn't get better with experience.

I looked out the window to a San Francisco streetscape so foggy it mighty have been part of a dream. I considered making myself coffee but decided shock treatment was necessary so I swigged a triple Glenfiddich. It ran down my throat like molten lava and, after I successfully fought a powerful wave of nausea, I started to feel better almost immediately. Kill or cure, that's my motto.

I didn't want to stay in. Nor did I want to go out. There wasn't much open at this hour anyways. For all its Sin City Extraordinaire reputation the city had a shocking dearth of 24-hour establishments. The reputation wasn't totally unwarranted, there were probably drug-fuelled S amp;M avocado raves going on all over as I slouched on my couch, but as for a decent breakfast at an indecent hour, forget it. There was a diner down at Market and Castro, but that was some distance away, and I didn't relish the thought of the steep walk back up to Cole Valley.

I wished I had a computer. Nothing like a dose of the Net to make an hour or two vanish away. But my damn company had taken my laptop away. At least they had done me the courtesy of laying me off while they were at it. I wondered how Rob McNeil was doing. I should give him a call. Though I expected he was as pleased as me by the development.

Then I realized, I did have a computer. An old 250 MHz Pentium with 96 meg of RAM. Big box, not a laptop, tower configuration. Seemed like a screaming monster when I had bought it three and a half years ago, before I became such a hotshot coder that my employers supplied me with a new laptop twice yearly. Now it was so obsolete I had forgotten that I had it. Stored in the back of my closet.

I unearthed it, reconstructed it on my desk, turned it on, watched the Windows 95 startup screen with something like fond nostalgia, logged in. Beautiful. Now all I had to do was connect to the Net. Unfortunately, I realized, I couldn't do that. I had long ago cut the phone company out of my life, as befitted a dinosaur monopoly of the previous century, and now had only a cable modem and a cell phone. Unfortunately I didn't have the drivers that would allow the computer to talk to the modem. I could get the drivers off the Internet… a nice Catch-22. Maybe I should just go buy a real computer today. But no, when income is zero, expenditures must be minimized.

The phone rang. I looked up with genuine shock. It was just past seven A.M. Nobody calls anybody at that hour, not even telemarketers will stoop that low, not yet. I picked it up and said "Hello?" Dire thoughts of Morgan Jackson outside, of the first scene of Scream.

"Balthazar Wood?" a female voice asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"This is Special Agent Turner. I'm a federal agent currently seconded to Interpol's NCB for the United States."

"Oh." I shook my head to clear it and regretted my first response. Way to go, Paul, act in a suspicious manner when the FBI agent calls. "Yes. I received your e-mail."

"I hope I didn't wake you up?"

"No, I was up. What is it, ten o'clock on the east coast?"

"I'm presently located in San Francisco," she said. Her voice ought to have been taped so that future generations would have a perfect definition of no-nonsense.

So that's who calls at seven in the morning. Federal agents. "I see," I lied.

"You said you'd be available for an interview at my convenience. Would that include oh-nine-hundred hours today?"

I blinked, my mind briefly boggling at the thought that I was talking to a woman who actually used oh-nine-hundred in a non-ironic way, and then I said, "Sure."

"Excellent. I'll be waiting in a room in City Hall." She gave a number and added, "You should probably get there early. The building can be hard to navigate."

"I'll see what I can do," I said. "See you there."

"Excellent," she said again, and hung up.

I hurriedly showered and shaved and dressed in my job-interview suit, and caught the downtown-bound N-Judah at just the right time to be crushed by approximately nine hundred similarly dressed men and women who had managed to pack themselves into a streetcar that on paper fit sixty. When we stopped at Civic Center I realized at the last moment that this was my stop, I no longer went to my job at Montgomery. I made a few enemies getting out.

City Hall was a labyrinth and I had forgotten my ball of twine. By the time I found the room it was ten past nine and I was sweating with frustration. I wished I had gotten my folder of evidence back from Talena to show this Turner woman. I was also very nervous. Contact with authority figures of any kind — the real authority figures, not bosses or tour guides, but the kind who carry guns — always makes me nervous. Even when I'm innocent or even, as in this case, when it's my complaint that brought them.

Anita Turner was not the Scully-esque babe I had secretly been hoping for in the most juvenile corner of my mind. Fortysomething, fit but weathered, her face as wrinkled as crumpled newspaper. She sat on one side of a metal desk, facing the door. Two folding chairs faced her. One of them was occupied by Talena. I was surprised but pleased. I was extra pleased by the familiar-looking folder of papers that adorned the desk. There were two other things on the desk. One was one of those matte black speakerphones which look like some kind of cross between a marine subspecies and the facehugger from Alien. The other was an expensive digital audio recorder.

"Mr. Wood," Agent Turner said. "Better late than never."

"Sorry," I said, taking a seat as she leaned over and pressed RECORD. My nervousness doubled. It hadn't occurred to me that every stammer would be recorded for posterity.

"My name is Anita Turner, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, presently seconded to the Interpol liaison office," she said, and motioned to us.

"Talena Radovich," Talena said without hesitation. "Web editor and roving reporter for Lonely Planet Publications."

"Balthazar Wood," I said. I barely but successfully fought the urge to crack a joke such as "No-good bum with no fixed address," and instead added nothing at all.

"In a little while I'm going to conference in Renier de Vries of the Cape Town Police Force," Agent Turner said. "Who I believe you have already met, Miss Radovich." Talena nodded. "But first I just want to establish the bare bones of the case. First of all, before we begin, would either of you like a beverage?"

We shook our heads, although I rather wanted to ask for one. I'd already had a gargantuan coffee but liked the idea of Special Agent Anita Turner asking me whether I took milk or sugar while a recorder caught it all.

"Excellent. We will be pleased to serve you lunch in a few hours."

I thought: a few hours? Talena looked equally taken aback.

"Now," Special Agent Turner began, "let us establish the background material… "

And the inquisition began.

When the inquisition ended four hours later it left me with a profound new respect for the FBI. I understood for the first time why interrogation was classified by many as a science. She had systematically drained me of every scrap of information I had, including many I had forgotten. She had methodically classified everything I said as corroborated fact, eyewitness evidence, extrapolation, or speculation (or, presumably, lies, although I hadn't told any of those, at least not knowingly.) She took names and contact details when available of everyone I knew even remotely connected with the case, and everywhere I had stayed in Nepal and Indonesia. She zeroed in on the slightest hesitation, the merest chink of guesswork or assumption, in anything Talena or I had said, and attacked until all it concealed was revealed to her searchlight mind. Even Renier de Vries had sounded impressed over the phone. For the most part he too had just answered Special Agent Turner's questions.