Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

She came up to the glass and stopped. She looked at the wounds on the arms and torso. It looked as if someone had gone into the flesh with a melon baller.

“What are those?” she said, pointing.

Murdoch understood her vague question.

“Shrapnel wounds,” he said. “The bomb was packed with nails, probably dipped in rat poison.”

Dagmar looked at Murdoch in utter surprise. The bomb wasn’t enough? she thought.

“Rat poison prevents clotting,” Murdoch said.

“Ma’am?” The woman attendant’s voice came through a speaker. “Can you identify the victim?”

Dagmar felt herself sway. She turned to the body again, flesh the color of raw dough except where it had been burned or wounded, and realized that this was the only time she had seen Charlie without his clothes.

It was clearly Charlie. The tall, thin body reeked of Charlieness. But she didn’t know how she knew this.

“I can’t really tell,” she said. “But I’m sure it’s him.”

“We need a definite identification, ma’am,” the male attendant said.

“In that case,” Dagmar said, “I can’t.”

The woman attendant took a step closer to the body. Dagmar noticed that she was wearing surgical gloves.

“The face is badly-there really isn’t a face left,” she said. “But if I remove the cover, maybe you can identify the shape of the face or the-”

“No,” said Dagmar. “No, I won’t look at that.”

She turned and walked out. Her vision seemed to have narrowed; she felt as if she were walking down the length of a telescope.

The intensity of the light in the corridor startled her. She stood blinking on the green and white tile floor. Murdoch stood at her elbow. The fact of his presence was shocking-it was as if he hadn’t walked there but had somehow materialized at that instant.

“Do you think you might want to sit down?” he asked.

“Just get me out of here,” Dagmar said.

Murdoch’s Crown Victoria smelled of leather and gun oil. Hissing voices spoke inscrutable ten-codes from the police radio. Dagmar closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest as he accelerated onto I-5.

“Damn,” he said in his mild voice. She opened her eyes and saw the flashes of taillights, long rows of them.

Rush hour had commenced. They were probably going to spend the next hour trapped on the freeway.

“Don’t worry about the identification,” Murdoch said. “They can do a DNA with hair from his bathroom at home or something. Though that will take a while.”

“Mm,” said Dagmar. She wasn’t paying attention; she was just relieved that she had avoided the Phantom of the Opera moment, the unmasking of Charlie’s mutilated face.

The car crawled at about ten miles an hour toward the San Fernando Valley. Dagmar thought of Charlie’s plaster white flesh and the horrible gouges of the shrapnel.

“Why did they do it?” she found herself saying.

“The Maffya?” Murdoch’s pinched mouth gave a twist. “Money. It’s why they do anything.”

“I mean,” Dagmar began, and realized that she had no idea what she had meant.

“I mean”-starting again-“why a bomb?”

Murdoch considered this. “Because the killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off,” he said. “A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.”

“But you need a lot of technical knowledge to make a bomb.”

“Not for a gunpowder bomb, and this was a gunpowder bomb.” She looked at him. “The smell,” he said. “That was powder.”

Dagmar didn’t remember a gunpowder smell, or any kind of smell at all, but then she supposed she could trust a police officer to know what gunpowder smelled like.

“You can legally buy up to a pound of smokeless powder at a time,” Murdoch said. “You can buy it at any gun store. You can buy it at Wal-Mart. For use in reloading ammunition.”

Dagmar thought idly about getting the players to track gunpowder sales in Greater Los Angeles.

“You can get a fuse from a model rocket kit,” Murdoch said. “You can find the instructions for the whole thing on the Internet.”

“It’s that easy?” Dagmar asked.

Murdoch’s unsurprised eyes gazed out over the hood of the Crown Victoria.

“Just google Anarchist Cookbook,” he said.

The trip to the North Hollywood Station took more than an hour. Dagmar thanked Murdoch for driving and got into her Prius. She didn’t feel like continuing the crawl along the 101, so she took back streets toward her apartment.

She realized she didn’t want to be alone in her rooms and wondered if she should stop somewhere and have dinner. But she didn’t have an appetite, so she stopped at a coffee shop and ordered a chai tea latte and bought a copy of that morning’s New York Times and read every page, even the sports news, which she usually skipped. The fact that none of the news was local was a comfort. She didn’t want to think about L.A. or the bombing or the wounds in Charlie’s bloodless body.

By the time she finished the paper, it was after dark and she felt the stirrings of hunger. She drove to a Chinese place and had twice-cooked pork, half of which she carried away in a white cardboard take-out box.

She went to her apartment and to her room. She took a shower, and when she finished toweling, her phone began its song. She looked at the display and saw that it was Siyed.

After the misery of these past few days, Dagmar found Siyed too pathetic a distraction to think about. She pressed the End button to divert Siyed to voice mail.

A few minutes later the phone chimed to let her know that someone had left a message. She turned the phone off.

Dagmar fell onto the bed and slept. She dreamed. Somewhere in her awareness was a sense of gratitude that she didn’t dream about Charlie, or his body, or what was behind the cloth tented over his face.

She dreamed about a lake, blue under blue skies. The shore was green with birch and poplar. It was a scene from her girlhood in Ohio, and in the dream she was a girl, gliding over a green lawn as she ran from a lakeside cabin to a sagging wooden picnic table. Little gold and brown butterflies flew ahead of her on tangled Brownian bearings.

Dagmar’s experience of the scene was strangely bifurcated. She was Girl Dagmar, running through the butterflies, and a smaller part of her was Grown-up Dagmar, the vigilant puppetmaster, supervising the scene to make certain that untoward, disturbing elements of her more recent past did not intrude.

Her father sat at the picnic table, smoking a cigarette, a glass of amber liquid by his hand. He wore cutoff jeans and a faded Metallica T-shirt. He wasn’t the sad, sly, frustrated man he became later, the man who pawned her computer to buy vodka, but a warm, smiling, benign parent whose breath was scented with tobacco and Irish whiskey.

Girl Dagmar hugged her father, climbed onto his lap. Grown-up Dagmar, watching the scene, felt a shock as she recognized Girl Dagmar’s Sport Girl denim skirt, with its narrow pockets and cartoony appliquéd bird. Girl Dagmar had actually worn that skirt.

Dagmar’s father kissed Girl Dagmar’s cheek, and she felt the bristles on his chin. A motorboat raced over the blue water.

Out of the cabin, with its asphalt-shingled walls, came Dagmar’s mother, carrying a plate in either hand. Grown-up Dagmar felt that her mother’s appearance was anachronistic-with her hair pinned back and her lipstick and an apron over the straight skirt that fell to below her knees, she looked like a late 1940s movie mom, not the Reagan-era parent that she actually was.

Dream Mom put the plates on the table, and Dagmar saw that they held sloppy joes. Grown-up Dagmar hadn’t eaten a sloppy joe since she had left Cleveland.