Майкл Смит - The Lonely Dead

'And still nothing on the killer from the room?'

He shrugged. 'No prints, no fibres, nothing on the victim. This guy barely moved the air, by the look of it.'

'So what's with the disk?'

'It was blank,' Olbrich said. 'Except for two things.'

'Two things,' the tech repeated, determined not to lose his moment. 'The largest is a seven-meg. MP3 file, a piece of music'

'The Agnus Dei from Faur?'s Requiem,' Monroe said. 'Quite a well-known piece, apparently. There are people trying to work out what particular recording it is, and of course we'll try to track recent CD purchases but I don't have much hope in that direction. It could have been downloaded off the internet, for all we know.'

'And?' she said, bored with prompting.

'You asked me earlier where he'd come from,' Monroe said. 'Said there might be something he was spiralling out from. It's looking like you might be right.'

He pushed the sheaf of papers towards her. 'Read this.'

She read:

'Sleep is lovely. Death is better still. Not to have been born is of course the miracle.'

His mother wouldn't let his grandmother smoke in the house. So there would be days when the old lady's temper was not good, and there would be other days when she would insist on being put out on the porch. She would be left there, no matter if it was too cold or if it rained down hard. His mother would not help her in: she would also forbid him from doing so. God help him if he went against her on that or anything else. Grandma stayed outside until her daughter was good and ready to take her back in. She did so none too gently.

On one of these days, an afternoon so cold that icicles hung from the roof, he asked her what it was it about this thing that made it worth being out there on the porch when it was warm and comfortable inside.

She looked out ahead for a while, until he was beginning to wonder if she'd heard.

'You know that joke,' she said, eventually. 'Why did the chicken cross the road?'

He said yes he did. To get to the other side.

'Well, that's what the cigarettes are like.'

'I don't get it.'

She thought again, for a moment. 'You end up living on the wrong side of the road. Best I can put it. Every night you have to walk across this road, in the dark, to get home. You can't tell if any cars are coming, but that's okay because it's not a very busy road. But the longer you cross back and forth, in the pitch dark, the more likely that sooner or later one of them cars is going to hit you. The cars are called cancer, and they're big and hard and they drive very fast, and if they get you, you die.'

'But… so why keep crossing the road?'

A dry smile. To get to the other side.' She shrugged. 'It's too late, you see. You made your bed, you got to lie in it. The only thing you can do is try to make sure you don't end up living on the wrong side of the road.'

She coughed for a while, then lit another cigarette. She took a long pull, held it to look at the glowing tip. 'Don't you ever start up with this crap, you hear?'

'I won't,' he said.

He did everything he could to take her advice. He was careful with alcohol, never used drugs, and he didn't let food or exercise or reassurance or pornography or collecting china dolls ever take his hand and pretend it was his friend.

And yet still, on a night only seven years later, he stood with blood on his hands and realized he'd found his own smoking road.

'Christ,' Nina said, eventually.

'He's killed before,' Monroe said.

'Or he wants us to think he has.'

Monroe smiled tightly. 'He's sure as hell capable of doing it again. Can we agree on that?'

'Yes,' she said. 'I'm with you there.' Her eyes felt dry. 'Who's the quote from?'

'We don't know yet.'

'You okay, Nina?' This was Olbrich.

She nodded, still staring at the note. 'I'm pissed off, that's all. A look-at-me note and a requiem, for God's sake. It's like a lunatic's serving suggestion.'

'This talking about himself in the third person,' Olbrich said. 'Isn't that strange?'

'Not especially,' Nina said. 'It's been observed in interrogation many times. Ted Bundy, for example. It can be a way of getting them to open out. The theory is that it makes it easier for them to describe crimes from which other parts of their mind wish to dissociate. In Bundy's case it also enabled him to describe hypotheticals — 'I imagine a killer would do such and such in this situation' — without technically admitting responsibility. Can we get anything from the nature of the text file itself?'

'Afraid not,' Vince said. 'The disk's standard PC format but the file has no OS signature: could have been written on anything from a Supercomputer to a Palm V. Somebody downstairs is trawling through the directory structure but we don't have a whole lot of optimism on that either. The disk was securely wiped before these files were put on. This is someone who knows about computers.'

'Which could be useful information in itself,' Monroe said.

'Absolutely,' Nina said. 'It says he's under fifty and lives somewhere in the Western world.'

Monroe cocked his head and looked at her. Nina decided it would probably be a good idea if she went home again soon.

'A copy of this is with Profiling in Quantico now,' Monroe said. 'They should have some ideas soon.' His voice was a little louder than usual. He sounded serious, studious, professional, but there was a note of excitement too. That was to be expected: if you didn't get a big buzz out of going after bad guys, you wouldn't be in law enforcement. But ever since Nina had first worked with him, catching a killer called Gary Johnson who had murdered six seniors, all women, in Louisiana in the mid 1990s, Nina had been in no doubt that Monroe had other agendas. The crimes and their solutions were means to an end. She didn't understand quite what the end might be — politics? having the biggest corner office in the Continental USA? — but she knew it motivated him more than any need to look the relatives of victims in the eye and say, 'We got the guy, and he's going down for ever and a day.' Perhaps there was something not too stupid about this. On the few occasions Nina had been able to do something along those lines, the dull expressions on the faces of her audience had not seemed to change a great deal. Six mothers and grandmothers died before their time and in sordid ways: the guy responsible is put in a concrete box for the rest of his life. As a medium of exchange, it didn't really seem to work. Nina didn't believe most of the killers felt the full force of incarceration, because they just didn't understand things the way the rest of us did. They ate, slept, took a dump. They watched television, read comic books. They took courses and meandered through endless appeals which wasted everybody's time and burned enough public money to build half a school. This was, of course, their right. What they didn't have to do was lie, by themselves, in a hole in the ground, with nothing but the slow sound of settling earth to keep them company. They didn't sleep, arms tight by their sides, in a box their children couldn't afford and which they can feel beginning to get damp, starting to rot.

So yes, maybe Monroe had it laid out sensibly. Fight the good fight. Climb the ladder. Then go home to the wife, grab a healthy supper in front of the late news. Who knows — you might even be on it, saving the world. Bottom line was the FBI weren't even directly mandated to investigate serial murder. Monroe got involved for reasons of career development. So what? What was her excuse?

'Go home again, Nina,' Monroe said. 'Get some sleep. I need you functioning early tomorrow morning.'

Nina looked up, surprised by his voice, and realized she'd just zoned out. Vince was looking at her a little curiously; Monroe without much affection. Only Olbrich had the grace to be looking elsewhere.