Michael Prescott: Last Breath

“Pacific time zone. She’s three thousand miles away.” Brand smirked. “Think she’s a California girl?”

“I couldn’t say,” Rawls answered tonelessly.

The woman stretched her arms over her head, her back still turned to the camera. Rawls could see the faint shadows of her trapezius muscles and latissimi dorsi. She was fit, strong.

“How old you think she is?” Brand asked a little too eagerly.

“Above the age of consent, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m serious.”

“Mid-twenties, I’d guess.”

“Mid-twenties. That’s a good age.” Brand himself was pushing forty, and Rawls had hit the half-century mark, a fact advertised by the whorls of gray in his hair. “You figure she’s flexing for us? For her audience, I mean?”

“No. If she knew the camera was there, don’t you think she’d turn around to give us a better show?”

“Maybe she will. This could be part of the tease.”

“I don’t think this woman has the slightest idea she’s being watched.”

“We may find out. If she turns around and flashes a big come-hither smile, then we know she’s aware of the Webcam and it’s consensual, and we can both go home.”

Rawls shook his head. “She’s not going to smile at us. And we’re not going home.”

A moment later the woman, without turning, walked into the bathroom, where she could be seen turning on the shower.

“Guess you’re right,” Brand conceded.

She stepped inside the shower stall, pulling the curtain shut, and then she was only a smeared silhouette against the translucent plastic.

Rawls stood up. “Well, let’s pay Mr. Gader a visit.”

“You sure you don’t want to, uh, monitor the site a little longer? I mean, at least until she comes out of the shower?”

“Come on, Ned.” Rawls punctuated the request by switching off his computer.

“You never let me have any fun,” Brand groused.

Rawls ignored him. He pulled on his winter coat and headed out of the office, on his way to see the man whose Web site was a locked door that opened with Bluebeard’s key.

C.J. stood in the shower, her head thrown back, eyes shut, letting the cone of rushing water wash away the gritty feel of the streets. Letting it wash away, as well, the memory of the white van, of the sense of being hunted-and of the boogeyman, her old nemesis.

Stupid to be thinking of him. Irrational.

Whoever that man had been, he was long gone in the California night. A wandering psychopath, a drifter. Probably he had moved on to another part of the country years ago. By now, he was in prison or he was dead.

She shut off the shower and dried her hair with a towel, left the bathroom and wrapped herself in a robe. She wandered through the bungalow.

People who knew her only from work would have been surprised by her home. It reflected a different side of her, one she kept hidden from casual acquaintances-and most of her fellow cops fell into that category. She was a collector of items that could be described either as art objects or as knickknacks. In truth, C.J. didn’t much care how they were described. She knew what she liked.

Small things mostly. Handmade, always. The older the better. She liked the feel of living among other people’s histories. She liked to run her hands over a carving board and imagine the family gatherings in which it had served as a centerpiece, or operate an antique sewing machine and think of the elegant dresses it had produced for debutante balls. She liked to hold a locket carrying the cameo of a woman she had never met, a woman long dead, and to study the frozen image of that woman’s face and live for a minute in her long-ago world.

LA was a city of mass production and relentless improvement and noisy, roaring progress, but she had made her home a sanctuary from all that.

Most of these items were inexpensive, a necessity imposed by her limited budget. She had started off haunting flea markets and swap meets, but when auction sites began appearing on the Internet, she switched to that mode of buying. She could browse through the cast-off treasures of the whole continent, and via the miracle of e-mail, she could dicker with a lady in Vancouver over a hand mirror in an ivory frame, or haggle with a gentleman in Louisiana over a set of steak knives with hand-carved teakwood handles. She had been ripped off a few times, but most of her online transactions had gone smoothly, and in the past year she had filled her home with charming oddities that pleased her.

The past year. Yes, only that long. She had pursued her hobby in earnest only after her divorce.

She stopped circling the room long enough to peek through the front curtains for a look at the dimming sky. A breeze shivered the leaves of the eucalyptus tree in her yard, and from the branches came the pleasant noise of birds. The sun was nearly gone, the western horizon purple like a bruise.

People said there were no seasons in California, but they were wrong. The winters, though not harsh, had other qualities of winters elsewhere-the shortened days, the early dusk, the settled sense of bleakness.

Or maybe it was just her mood.

She moved away from the curtains and took another look at the collectibles around her. She knew that filling her home with the bric-a-brac of strangers was, in part, an attempt to fill the emptiness of her own life.

Her marriage had been far from perfect. But when it ended, there had been nothing else for her, except her job. And the job alone wasn’t enough.

Was it enough for Adam?

Seems like a nice guy, Delano had said.

As long as you don’t trust him too much, she’d answered.

She had met Adam Nolan in a bar on Ventura Boulevard a month after her arrival in LA. At the time she’d had no intention of becoming a cop. Having spent four years at UC Riverside with nothing to show for it but a degree in educational psychology, she had come to the city with the vague hope of landing a teaching job at a private school.

It hadn’t taken long for her to learn that such jobs were hard to come by, and most of the teachers filling those positions had master’s degrees in their subjects. Her savings were running out, she’d made no friends in the city, she felt lost and directionless, and she didn’t know what to do.

Then she and Adam made eye contact at Happy Hour in the Studio Tavern. He bought her a margarita and said he was starting law school at UCLA.

Law school didn’t impress her, though clearly it was meant to. What impressed her was that he was polite and he didn’t push. He seemed content to just have a conversation-an actual dialogue-and when she talked, he listened attentively. Even after only a month in LA, she already knew how rare it was for anyone to listen.

They dated for two months before she slept with him. She remembered it vividly-better than he did, it seemed. They were in his Culver City apartment, and an Emmylou Harris CD was playing on his boombox, and as he took her into his bed, the song that came over the cheap speakers was “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

She had always thought of it as their special song, but Adam, evidently, had forgotten. She wondered why it hurt her to acknowledge that.

He was only the second man she’d been with, the first having been a college boyfriend who drifted away in their senior year. Adam wasn’t much more experienced, as he cheerfully admitted while fumbling with her bra strap. Their first time together went quickly-the song was hardly over before Adam was finished too. But, she had to admit, he had improved with practice.

Shortly after he began law school, she was accepted to the LAPD Academy. The idea, which horrified her parents and baffled Adam, had come to her one night as she lay awake. Why had she studied psychology? To understand fear-her own fear, the fear that had haunted her since that awful night in her childhood.