Michael Prescott - Last Breath

“How come this four-hour angle hasn’t made the papers?” Chang asked. “They’re covering the Hourglass Killer like crazy.”

“We kept a lid on it,” Walsh said. “It almost got into the LA Times. They were set to run with it, but we prevailed upon the Metro editor to kill the story. It never ran in print, but somehow it turned up as a rumor on the Internet. Probably some copy editor at the Times blabbed in a, uh, what are those things called?”

“Chat room,” Cellini suggested.

Walsh shook his head. “God, I hate this Internet stuff.”

“But maybe now it can help us,” Cellini said. “We may be able to trace the e-mail if it’s been saved on her computer.”

“Worth a shot,” Walsh agreed. “Unless it’s like the video feed-sent through a proxy. Can you do that with e-mail?”

“Sure. And probably that’s exactly how it was sent. Whatever else you can say about this guy, he’s not stupid.”

Tanner had been listening to all this with a blank expression. Now he said simply, “Four hours?”

Walsh nodded.

“When I talked to her on the phone, she sounded funny.”

“Speaking under duress?”

“Could have been.”

“What time was this?”

Tanner looked at Chang, who checked his watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”

“So,” Tanner said, “if your theory is right…”

“She has three hours and fifteen minutes left,” Walsh said.

The room was silent after that.

It was hard to talk with the throttle in place, but not impossible. She struggled to force out each word.

“Please, Adam. You don’t… want to… do this.”

“If that’s what you think,” he answered, “then you really don’t know me at all.”

“ Adam,” she moaned, the gag blurring the word.

No response.

She had to think of something to do. There must be a course of action she could follow, a miraculous way out. She was the good guy in the story, and the good guy didn’t die like this, trussed and humiliated and cut off from help.

She had always believed that life, for all its apparent senselessness, had a purpose behind it. But where was the purpose in dying like this? Was everything just a sick joke, and would Adam get the last laugh?

“Why?” she mumbled.

He withdrew a little-she could feel the movement of the air displaced by his body-and she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? I’m not sure I can explain the why. It requires a logical justification that may be lacking in this case.”

She waited, knowing he would say more if he chose to.

“Why,” he said again, as if testing the word. “That’s what journalists are taught to ask. Who, what, why, where, when? But they leave out the most important one. How? That’s the real question. If you know how a thing happened, you don’t need to know the why. Prove exactly how a man killed his wife-just as an example-and his motivation can be filled in by the jury. They’ve all seen enough episodes of Murder, She Wrote. They’ll give you the why. You have to give them the how.”

So tell me how, she thought. Tell me anything, Adam, talk to me.

“Of course I’m just a corporate lawyer. Not an expert in this sordid criminal stuff. I may be getting it all wrong. Still it seems to me that if you knew how, then the why would present itself to you. Do you want to know the how of it, C.J.? Would that please you, satisfy your restless curiosity?”

She made no response, not even a nod of her head. She knew he would tell her what he wanted her to hear. He enjoyed toying with her. And hearing himself talk had always been one of his chief pleasures.

“Okay, picture this. You dump me, right? You walk out of my life. You say, ‘Fuck you,’ and you go. Now I’m sure you felt you were justified. I had, after all, been balling Ashley behind your back, but you know what? It wasn’t anything you didn’t deserve. You’re the one who broke our vows, not me. You swore to be there for me, to have and to hold, all that crap. And were you? Were you there for me, C.J.? Were you there for me at night? No, you were riding around in a cop car, cuffing bad guys. Were you there for me on the weekends? No, you had to work extra shifts. Were you ever there? To have and to hold-shit, I would’ve settled for a little quickie squeezed into your busy schedule. But you didn’t have time for that. You were into your own thing. You walked out on me a long time before Ashley came into the picture.”

There were so many answers she could give, and none of them would help her. She was almost glad he had gagged her, glad the conversation had to be one-sided. An argument would be worse than pointless now.

“So you catch me with Ashley, and you get all aggrieved, like I’m the one who’s done something wrong. Okay, you’re gone, and I’m alone. I move into that shit-hole apartment in Venice. You were there. You saw it. Living the high life, right? Ashley leaves me-I think you scared her off when you confronted her on campus. You even had to take that away from me. Nice, C.J. Hell hath no fury, and all that jazz. Well, you got what you wanted. I was alone. Every night. Stuck in that two-by-four apartment with no air conditioning and next-door neighbors who played Eminem at top volume all night long. It was like being in jail, except in jail I would’ve had more company.”

She realized he expected her to feel sorry for him.

“So I do what a lot of lonely guys do. I start spending too much time on my computer. I surf the Web. I look for women online. I try chat rooms, but it’s just a lot of garbage. Nobody knows how to have a conversation in those forums. Have you ever tried one? PrettyGirl says, ‘What’s the weather like where you are?’ And Man-at-Work says, ‘Overcast, might rain.’ And Lilypad says, ‘I like the rain.’ Blah blah blah. And the dirty ones are worse. Maybe some guys can get their rocks off, looking at a bunch of sexual fantasies typed on a computer screen, but it doesn’t do squat for me. So that’s out. I start looking for other kinds of relief online. Porno, the raunchier the better. I download some of these pictures, and let me tell you, C.J., I imagined your face on every body. If I’d had one of those picture-editing programs, maybe I would have actually put your face in there. Picture it. C.J. in chains, tickled by a cat-o’-nine-tails…”

She swallowed, hearing not only his words but the growly ugliness of his voice.

“Yeah, I got into the S-and-M stuff before long. There’s a lot of it on the Web. You can find anything if you look hard enough and if you’ve got time. I had plenty of time. You know there are sites where they take celebrities’ faces and paste them into bondage shots? A lot of supermodels are going under the knife, and not for a breast implant. They’ve even got fucking cartoon characters in bondage. You want to see Wonder Woman all tied up with nowhere to go? She’s on there somewhere. It’s a whole subculture, every fetish you can think of. And message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging to go along with all of it. It’s a substitute life for people who don’t have any real life. I guess you’d picture virgins in dorm rooms doing most of this stuff, and here I was, a divorced guy, thirty years old, going for a law degree, and I was one of them. Do you know how humiliating it was for me to be reduced to that level? I’d never been lonely and desperate in college, not even in high school, but now I was. You did that to me, C.J. I couldn’t get over you, couldn’t get past what had happened to my life when you kissed me off. So if you’re wondering whose fault it is that you’re here tonight, well, it’s your goddamned fault. Think about that. Your fault, C.J., not mine. Keep that in mind while I’m killing you.”