Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

Kim seemed a little taken aback by this, but Murdoch, without surprise, replied in his bland professional way.

“All right,” he said. “When did you hear from him next?”

“Just after Austin was killed,” Dagmar said. “Siyed sent me emails saying he was coming to Los Angeles to do a commercial and he wanted to meet me. I told him I wouldn’t be available.”

There was a flicker of interest behind Murdoch’s blue eyes.

“Do these emails still exist?” he asked.

“I think so. I’ll provide copies if so.”

She didn’t think there was anything in the emails that would send her to the gas chamber.

She said that more emails had followed, and phone calls. And a lot of flowers. She said she hadn’t responded to it, or had told Siyed to leave.

“I called his wife,” she said. “I told her that Siyed had gone crazy and that she should call him and get him to come home.” She shrugged. “I guess it didn’t work.”

Kim looked interested.

“Did you tell her that her husband was involved with you?”

“Had been involved,” Dagmar corrected. “And no, I didn’t.” She felt immediately that she’d given the wrong answer. The wronged woman might always make a good suspect.

“It’s possible that she knew anyway,” she said. “Siyed was acting pretty strange.”

Murdoch considered this.

“You didn’t at any time see Siyed in person?” he asked.

Dagmar took a breath. She’d been hoping this question wouldn’t come up.

“Yes,” she said. “A few days ago. He turned up at my apartment and tried to talk to me when I came home from work. I told him to go home, and the next day I called his wife.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me he loved me. He told me he had told his wife about us, but I later learned he’d lied about that.”

“How did that make you feel?” Kim asked.

Again with the feelings, as if they alone would justify a charge of murder.

Act on our feelings, she thought, and who would ’scape hanging?

Dagmar looked at Kim.

“It made me feel terrified,” she said.

“And angry?”

“And terrified,” said Dagmar. “I’d never told him where I lived. He’d tracked me down and ambushed me in my own parking lot.”

There were a few more questions, but they were just variations on the questions the detectives had already asked. She figured they weren’t after clarification; they were just hoping her answers would start contradicting one another, and then they could start picking her story to bits. She stood up.

“I really have to go to work,” she said. “Call for an appointment, and I’ll try to get you those emails.”

The two detectives looked at each other.

“Siyed’s wife is named Manjari,” Dagmar said. “I don’t know exactly how to spell it, but I know they’re in the London phone directory.”

“We’ll terminate the interview, then,” Murdoch said. He looked at his watch and gave the time and then turned off the dictation machine. Dagmar took off her lapel mic.

“How was Siyed killed?” she asked.

“We won’t know till the autopsy,” Murdoch said, “but it looks as if he was beaten to death.”

Dagmar’s reaction, for which she hoped she would later feel ashamed, was relief. She looked down at her hands, her knuckles-no bruises, no cuts. She held the hands up for the others to see.

“Well,” she said, “doesn’t look like I’ve been in a fistfight, does it?”

“The killer,” said Kim, “might have used a club or a pipe or something.”

“Or something,” Dagmar repeated pointlessly. Relief blew through her like a warm desert wind. She walked around the table to the door, then stopped.

“My God,” she said. “Siyed left voice mail last night. I’d forgot.”

She got out her phone, thumbed buttons, brought up voice mail.

“Not yet,” said Murdoch. He reached for the transcription machine. “Can you put the phone on speaker?”

Dagmar could. She waited for Murdoch to engage the transcription device, punched up the volume, and called up voice mail.

“Dagmar, my darling.” Siyed’s voice was distorted and tinny, a reminder that he was speaking from the afterlife.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stay away,” he said. “I just wanted to see you. I watched you go through the gate. I know that’s naughty. I promise I won’t approach you again.”

Words advanced on the screen, then paused. Dagmar’s eyes, tracking the screen, focused on the word naughty.

“There’s another man here,” he said. “A man watching. I wanted to call you about it, but your phone won’t answer. He is very interested in you. After you went inside, he got out and walked around your car and then looked under it. Now he’s watching again…”

The voice trailed away. The transcription machine waited patiently. Dagmar’s heart filled the silence with sudden thunder.

Siyed’s voice turned impatient. “I’m going to talk to him,” Siyed said. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at your machine.”

Just before the phone call ended came the sound of a car door opening, Siyed marching to his death.

He was such a little man, Dagmar remembered. Five foot three or something. Even the average American couch potato could have given him a thrashing without breaking a sweat.

Damn actors and their egos, Dagmar thought. Siyed had thought he was a superhero and had walked right up to the man who killed him.

With adrenaline-clumsy fingers, Dagmar punched buttons on her phone and saved the voice mail. Kim turned off the transcription machine.

All the tension seemed to have drained out of the room.

“You’ll forward that to us?” Murdoch asked.

“If I can find out how to do that,” Dagmar said.

“Who’s your carrier?” Kim asked.

Dagmar told him. He wrote it down.

Murdoch’s blue eyes seemed to look at her from a hundred miles away.

“Do you have any idea,” he asked, “who this other watcher might be?”

She shook her head.

The man who was waiting to kill me, she thought. Fire licked along her nerves.

“I’ve got to leave,” she said suddenly.

But where, she thought, would she go?

She didn’t want to think about the killer who was tracking her. She decided to deal with another problem, one that Special Agent Landreth had declined to help her with.

Richard the Assassin sat quietly in his fifth-floor office, his white-noise generator hissing quietly from the window. A series of screens curved around him like a heads-up display the size of the room. The ninja action figures posed in a long glass case on top of his bookshelf.

“Yes,” he said. “I can get you Charlie’s emails, at least providing he was using his AvN Soft email address. Our email clients use IMAP protocol, not POP3. All emails are stored on the server unless they’re specifically deleted.” He glanced up. “It makes it easier for people who use different computers in different locations to get their email.”

“Charlie was in touch with people at brokerage houses,” Dagmar said. “He’d discovered that someone was using illegal copies of Rialto, and he wanted to send a patch to those copies to shut them down.”

Richard looked at her.

“That’s kind of interesting,” he said. “I heard that from one of the Great Big Idea people, and when I told some folks on the AvN Soft side, they said they hadn’t heard anything about it.”

“You’re hearing about it now,” said Dagmar.

Richard drew a finger down the side of his jaw.

“Okayyy,” he said slowly.

Dagmar reached into her jeans pocket and took out the memory stick.

“Here’s the final version of Charlie’s patch,” she said, “along with all the IP addresses that have been harvested so far. There will be more on Monday, when Tapping the Source goes into play.”