Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

He sounded disappointed that Dagmar wasn’t driving to Santa Monica to take down the Russian herself, with his help.

“I’ll call you right back,” Dagmar said.

Dagmar called the North Hollywood Station and asked for Lieutenant Murdoch. The receptionist said that he was away from the station, and asked if she wanted his voice mail.

Dagmar’s body shivered with anxiety. This was taking too long.

“Tell Murdoch,” Dagmar said, “that I’ve located Litvinov, the murderer of Austin Katanyan. Litvinov is in the Oceanside Motel in Santa Monica, room one one seven. But he might not be there long, so the police need to respond quickly.”

“And your name, ma’am?”

“Dagmar Shaw. He knows who I am.”

“Stay on the line,” the receptionist said quickly. “I’ll contact the officer.”

“Good idea,” said Dagmar.

Dagmar couldn’t sit still any longer and got up to march back into the kitchen. She looked down at her cold bowl of oatmeal and then turned and marched back to her desk again.

Her heart throbbed like a racing turbine in her chest. She felt charged with energy and wondered why her knees felt weak.

Charlie hadn’t been killed by Litvinov. Joe Clever had just provided him an alibi.

And he hadn’t been killed by anyone else in the Maffya, either. Probably there were plenty of Russian gangsters in Los Angeles who were willing to kill people, but bombing the hotel room was too awkward a plan, not when they could have gunned him down on his way to dinner or simply kicked down the door and shot him in his bed.

There was some reason it was a bomb, and some other person who had planted it.

Dagmar was absolutely certain that, when it came time to fill out Charlie’s death certificate, the cause of death should be listed as Patch 2.0.

Litvinov submitted quietly to arrest when the Santa Monica police used their battering ram to knock his motel room door off its hinges. Dagmar was sorry to hear it: she had hoped he’d resist and be shot full of holes.

Unless the Russian pleaded guilty, there would be a trial, and Dagmar would testify. And so she was asked to come to the police station and give a statement.

Murdoch was interviewing someone else, so Dagmar was given a ten-ounce foam cup of coffee and a white and red plastic stir stick and then asked to wait on a chair of shiny tube steel and gray plastic. She did so.

The North Hollywood Station was quiet on a Wednesday morning. Doubtless the drunks and other flotsam of the previous night were sleeping it off or being processed somewhere else.

Find out who knew Charlie was staying at the Fig, Dagmar thought, and you find the bomber.

Phones rang. Detectives answered. Fingers tapped keyboards.

She called AvN Soft and asked for Karin, Charlie’s secretary.

“Hi,” she said. “This is Dagmar.”

“Hi, Dagmar,” Karin said. “Charlie still isn’t in.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she added, “I’m not sure if I can tell you without his permission.”

Apparently she hadn’t heard the news that morning. Dagmar lacked the energy to tell her.

“That’s all right,” Dagmar said. “I was wondering if anyone besides you knows where he’s at.”

She could hear the uncertainty in Karin’s voice.

“I haven’t heard that he’s told anyone else,” she said.

“You haven’t told anyone?”

“No. The only reason I know myself is that I have to drive down every few days to bring him paperwork he needs to sign.”

“Okay, I just wondered. Thanks.”

After she ended the conversation, she considered Karin. She’d been Charlie’s secretary since the early days of the company and, like Dagmar, was in her early thirties. She seemed to be deeply competent, and Charlie had always praised her.

Karin had just returned from maternity leave. She had bleached-blond hair, a rectangular butt that jutted out like a Lego block beneath her jackets, and wore a nursing bra. She just didn’t seem bomb-thrower material.

Well, she thought. That leaves me as the only remaining suspect.

She didn’t seem to be prospering as a detective.

A door opened and Murdoch came out with Joe Clever and a woman in a gray pantsuit. Joe Clever seemed a little more wild-eyed than usual.

“If you can wait for a few minutes,” Murdoch said, “we’ll have your statement printed for you, and you can check it.” He looked up at Dagmar. “Miss Shaw? Can you speak to us now?”

Joe Clever grinned. “Hi, Dagmar.” He gave a thumbs-up. “We make a good team, don’t we?”

“We sure do, Andy,” Dagmar said. Joe Clever’s expression clouded.

Finding out Joe Clever’s real name had been an unanticipated bonus of this adventure. She could find out where he lived.

Let him misbehave again, and she’d send Richard the Assassin to throw bricks through his windows.

Dagmar went with the detectives into the interview room. It had functional furniture and an official poster telling suspects of their rights. The metal desk was bolted to the floor and had shiny steel loops for handcuffs. There was an antiseptic smell.

Murdoch introduced the woman, who was a detective from the Santa Monica PD. Dagmar, Murdoch, and the woman were given lapel mics, and as they spoke, a computer turned the words into letters and projected them on a monitor.

Dagmar simply answered questions. She still wasn’t processing very well and felt that her answers, while factual, lacked the concrete specificity that she preferred in her prose.

She reported that she’d seen Austin killed, and that she’d turned to the players-“programmed” them, in Murdoch’s words-to hunt for Litvinov.

The woman detective, who didn’t talk much, seemed surprised at all this.

Dagmar went on to state that Andy Claremont-which was Joe Clever’s real name-had located Litvinov the previous night and called her that morning, and that she’d called Murdoch right away.

She said that she had no reason to believe that Austin Katanyan had anything to do with the Russian Maffya.

The interview didn’t take very long. At the end, a printer in the squad room printed out the interview, after which Dagmar corrected the occasional spelling error and signed it.

“We got to him just in time,” Murdoch volunteered. “The accomplice who visited this morning seems to have dropped off Litvinov’s new ID. With that, Litvinov could have walked across the border into Tijuana and then flown from there to…” He shrugged. “To somewhere else. There are biometric scanners at the border that might have ID’d him, or they might not-and even if they did, he might have been in Mexico before the border patrol could react.”

“Do you know who the courier was?” Dagmar asked.

“We’re forwarding Mr. Claremont’s video to the Organized Crime Task Force, along with the sound recordings. We’ll get Litvinov’s cell phone records, so that might help us as well.” He paused, and then added, “We found a motorcycle in the parking lot that we think was stolen, probably by Litvinov. It wasn’t the same motorcycle that was used in the murder-but that one was probably stolen, too, then abandoned.”

Dagmar jumped again as her phone rang. She chided herself for being too nervous and glanced at Murdoch to see if he’d noticed.

His face retained the same bland professionalism it always wore. To give her privacy, he turned and ambled toward the coffee machine.

Dagmar looked at the display and saw that it was Karin.

“This is Dagmar,” she answered.

“Dagmar,” Karin said, “they say Charlie’s been in a bombing.”

She looked up at Murdoch’s bland back. “Who says?”