Майкл Смит - The Lonely Dead

'My God,' she said, eventually, still staring. 'So it was true.'

6

When the phone rang Nina was on her so-called deck. Theoretically she was out there thinking; if the truth be told, she was asleep. Back at the field office you couldn't hear yourself think for the sound of men storming up and down, barking into phones, being brisk and professional. One of the big things about being a man, she'd noted, was that being good, doing the work, wasn't enough. It had to be generally acknowledged that here you were, damn well seeing to business. She found her deck much better for head work, better too than the rest of the house. She ought to move, she knew. Especially after things had gone wrong with John, the house felt awkward and tired of her and wanting in almost every regard. It was in the Malibu hills, which was great, but she could only afford to rent it because it was falling apart. The polished concrete of the living room floor was cracked across the middle, wide enough to slip three fingers down. The swimming pool had been melted in a bush fire long before she moved in. One good shake and the deck would end up in the Pacific; two shakes, and the house would follow. For some reason, the prospect had never unduly disquieted her. Some people smoked. Nina sat out on her deck.

She had spent the rest of the day on the streets and in offices, on the phones, sifting through non-information and being briefed on results from a slew of forensic investigations. None had turned up anything useful. The pyjamas had been nailed to Wal-Mart, never a happy thing when you're trying to trace an object's history. The disk out of the woman's mouth was still in analysis; a photo of her face was now being shown around town by detectives and patrol division. It could be forever before they got a match. A woman, once attractive, now dead. Lots of those.

She got back to the house to find a message on the machine. She jabbed the button, thinking it might be Zandt with a more constructive response to her message. Instead it had been Meredith, an old college friend, agreeing that yes, it was time they met up and had dinner and a good long chat. Nina didn't remember the matter being discussed, but she supposed it was time. It had been a year at least since her loose, small group of old friends had gotten together. Merry lived in the Valley and had acquired a husband and three young children, apparently effortlessly, as if by winning a weekly competition. She now cared a great deal about things Nina found either trivial or incomprehensible or simply irrelevant, and her hairstyle was becoming more and more irrevocable. Soon it would be impossible to look at the face beneath it and remember the times Nina had sprawled laughing next to her as she threw up in a variety of toilets in vague parties held in various professors' tiny, book-strewn homes. That girl had gone away somewhere, answering the call of happy hour in some far-away and long-ago bar, and had sent grown-up-mom Meredith Jackson to take her meetings instead. This woman was likely just as baffled by Nina's current incarnation, which kept looking like a woman without seeming to understand what the job entailed. Nina knew she ought to keep the friendship going, but often wondered why either of them bothered. Maybe Meredith liked knowing an FBI agent. Maybe Nina liked to believe she still had some kind of connection to real life, that on the other side of the ring of murderers and desks and men in suits and late nights that surrounded her, there was someone who wanted nothing more from Nina than gossip, affirmation, and a smile.

She hadn't been able to face making the call, and so went to think instead. She wound up wondering how much difference there had been between Merry, or herself, and the young woman who had been found in The Knights that morning; how much alteration in a life it would take to wind up dead in a motel, impregnated with the cigarette smoke of men who had come to document your final moments, your deaf ears party to much rambling discussion of recent sporting events and at least one observation regarding your tits. John Zandt — who had been a homicide cop in the city before the Delivery Boy had taken his daughter — had long ago observed to her how fast a teenager's life can go from A to B in Hollywood; then from B to Z, then the easy flip from Z to a Jane Doe toe tag. They don't know how fast and easy it's going to be. It's not years, it's months. It can be weeks. It can be virtually overnight. You start the evening somebody's much loved and pampered child, nicely lit; you see in the next grimy morning stripped of everything you hadn't yet learned to value about yourself. You think you're the star, but instead you're just cannon fodder waiting in line to have promises broken by friends, lovers and fate.

She went indoors and fetched a glass of wine. Fifteen minutes later she was asleep.

She woke up with a start. When the phone finally made it through to her she lurched out of the chair feeling late: it felt like it had been ringing a long time, at first powerless to haul her out of a dream in which an old man had crept around a dark room after her.

She ricocheted blearily off both the glass door and the kitchen counter on the way in, and was ready to give Zandt a very hard time. But it wasn't John.

It was Monroe. 'You'd better get back over here,' he said. 'We've found something.'

— «» — «» — «»—

She met Monroe in Doug Olbrich's office. Olbrich was a Lieutenant in Special Section 1, the Robbery Homicide division responsible for high-profile and externally liaising murder cases. He was tall and rangy with hair buzz-cut short.

'Hey, Doug.'

'Nina. How's tricks?'

'Same old. I haven't actually spoken to John in a while, but if I had, I'm sure he'd have sent his love.'

'Thanks. I'll smoke it later.'

In front of Olbrich was a small sheaf of paper and something in a clear plastic bag. Three cops were talking over a second desk in the background. Door-side of Olbrich's desk perched a thin black guy in shirtsleeves, whom Nina vaguely recognized.

'Nina, this is Vincent,' Olbrich said. Monroe meanwhile handed her a cup of coffee. She took it gratefully. He was good like that.

'I remember,' she said. 'Lab rat, right?'

Monroe frowned, but the tech grinned happily. 'Vince Walker, technological wunderkind.'

'My favourite kind,' she said, feeling very tired. 'So what do you have for us, Vince?'

'This,' Olbrich said, pushing the bag across the desk to her. 'And what was on it.'

Cleaned of blood and no longer stuck in someone's face, the object looked mundanely technical. Two inches by four and a half, a quarter inch thick. One end a row of gold-coloured connectors, the other flat. The top side was a metal plate with two stickers which had once been white but were now unevenly stained a pale brown. Underside, the spidery green tracks of a printed circuit board. A third of the way from the top was a small circle, presumably the point around which the internal disk spun while in use. A label here said, 'VOID WARRANTY IF SEAL BROKEN'. What if it was found in a dead woman's mouth, Nina wondered: where would you stand then?

'The disk,' she prompted, dutifully. The men were evidently building up to something, each trying to claim it as their own.

'Right,' Vince said. 'It's a Toshiba MK4309 drive. Capacity a little over four gigs, cramped by today's standards, and the serial confirms it was made nearly two years ago.'

'It also enabled us to nail the disk as factory-installed in a machine assembled in Japan and imported into the US in mid 2002,' Monroe interrupted. 'We're running that right now. It may tell us who the woman was, maybe not.'

'People are still on the street with the victim's photo,' Olbrich added. Nina had met him several times before, back when Zandt had been on Homicide, and he had impressed her as one of the least showy detectives she'd ever met. 'We know she didn't eat much the day she died, but she drank a whole lot. As of two hours ago I've got three detectives fanning back out from The Knights and hitting local bars and clubs again. Didn't get anything the first time, but…'