The Lonely Dead

About the author:

Michael Marshall is a novelist and screenwriter. Before writing the bestselling The Straw Men he had already established a successful writing career under the name Michael Marshall Smith. His groundbreaking first novel, Only Forward, won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth awards; its critically acclaimed successors, Spares and One of Us, have both been optioned by major Hollywood studios. He lives in North London with his wife.

MICHAEL MARSHALL

THE LONELY DEAD

(The Upright Man)

The second book in the Straw Men series

Version 1.0

British Fantasy Society (nominee)

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Marshall

ISBN 1-84395-665-9

For my father

Yakima

We met in the parking lot of the Yakima mall. Yakima is a small city in central Washington State. It's a city in the sense that it calls itself one; it has a mall in that you can go indoors and shop without views of the outside reminding you where you are. In three hours only two people had entered the mall. Both were teenagers wearing football shirts. Neither looked as if they had the hard cash to turn the place's fortunes around. They came out later, carrying nothing. Huge canvas signs around the third storey advertised retail space at knock-down rates. The big corner spot at street level was vacant, which is never a good sign.

I sat in the car drinking Americanos I fetched from a Seattle's Best across the way. The coffee shop was the only business on the Avenue that appeared to believe in itself: the rest looked like they'd stashed their For Lease sign in a safe place, looking to save a few bucks come the inevitable. I could almost hear the sound of a mayor sitting behind a big shiny desk, drumming his fingers, quietly losing his mind as he felt the town snooze around him. It would survive — even this dead zone needed somewhere to host a Les Schwab and make up the national Burger King quota — but it was unlikely to make anyone rich again. If that was what you had in mind, you'd go up to Seattle, or down to Portland. What you did in Yakima I had no idea.

When John Zandt arrived he was driving a big red GMC, dirty and none too new. The passenger side looked like a bunch of cows had rammed it and nearly won. He pulled around the lot until he was level with my pristine Ford Generic. We wound our windows down. The air was cold.

'Hey, Ward. You ask them for that at the desk?' he said. 'Should've got them to spray 'Not From Around Here' across the hood.'

'You're unbelievably late,' I said. 'So fuck you. My place wasn't running a shit-kicker's special. Evidently you got lucky.'

'Stole it from the airport lot,' he admitted. 'So let's go.'

I got out of my car, leaving the keys in the ignition. I figured Hertz could absorb the loss. They had before. Neither they nor anyone else could trace me from the ID I had used in Spokane. When I climbed in the pickup I saw two handguns lying on the floor. I picked one up, looked it over, put it in a pocket.

'How far is it?'

'About an hour,' Zandt said. 'And then we have to walk.'

He pulled out of the lot and down the Avenue, past the grey new mall which had helped put the curse on the one I'd been watching without looking any too prosperous itself. Took a right to follow 82 down through the sprawl that became Union Gap, then buildings by a road, and then just a road. At Toppenish he took 97's abrupt swerve to the south west. There were no more towns now until an eight-point burg called Goldendale, fifty miles away. Below that, it was another twenty miles to one of the Columbia River's least attractive stretches, upstream of The Dalles dam. I'd spent time with a talkative barman the night before as I sat drinking in Rooney's Lounge, the excuse for a bar offered by Yakima's biggest hotel. I knew we were now in the Yakama Reservation and that there was nothing for eighty miles either side of the truck, the indigenous population having clumped together in a couple of small, battered settlements in the north. I knew that the place called Union Gap had once been called Yakima instead, until the rail company forced the Indians to move their capital a few miles north, reluctance worn down by the offer of free land, bribes dividing the tribe in a way hunger or cold winters never had. I knew also that just upriver from The Dalles was a spot where once had thundered the Celilo Falls, a raging, sacred shelf of water where men had harvested salmon for ten thousand years. It was now silent, buried beneath the bloated waters of the dam. Money had changed hands, some time before, but the Yakama were still waiting for their loss to be recognized in more meaningful ways. It seemed likely they'd be waiting a while longer, possibly until the end of time.

Like most people, I didn't really know what to do with this information. The barman was Native American but had short blond hair spiked like a 1980s pop star, and was wearing quite a lot of make-up. I hadn't known what to make of that either.

Zandt had a map taped to the dashboard. The edges were ragged and there were smears of grease down the front. It looked like it had spent a long time in pockets and grimy hands. A small cross had been marked in the centre of a big empty patch, near a wandering blue line called Dry Creek.

'Where did this come from?'

'A call logged on one of the Rat-On-A-Friend lines. The note was heading straight for the trash — the guy was very drunk and didn't make much sense — but Nina grabbed it out of the slush pile.'

'Why?'

'Because it sounded a long way outside normal and she knows that doesn't mean it's not true.'

'So how'd you find the guy?'

'Those 800 numbers aren't quite as anonymous as the FBI make out. Nina had the call reverse-tracked to a bar in South Dakota. I went there and waited until he showed up again. It was not sudden.'

'And?'

'The informant's name is Joseph. Grew up in Harrah, a bump a few miles west of Yakima. You know this is Reservation land?'

'Too bleak to be anything else. We were so generous to these guys, it's weird they don't love us to bits.'

'This is where they lived. Ward. Not our fault it looks like the moon. Joseph was visiting family and took a walk in the wilds here a week ago. A long walk. He ended up being out a few nights. I should note that his appearance suggests Joseph drinks a great deal on a regular basis. The insides of his arms look bad too. But he was definite about where he'd been.'

'Why didn't he tell the regular law?'

'I don't think he's had a good time with the local police. That's why he was in South Dakota.'

'But he saw your cute new goatee and decided to trust you right there and then?'

Zandt looked away. 'Hoped you hadn't noticed.'

'Man, I noticed. And I haven't even begun ripping the piss out of it.'

'Nina likes it.'

'Probably likes leather purses, too. Doesn't mean you got to wear one on your head. So where is this Joseph guy now?'

'Gone. He has two hundred dollars in his pocket and I don't think he'll be talking to anyone. He was spooked enough already. He thought he'd seen a spirit or something.' Zandt shook his head, as if he found that kind of thing too stupid for words.

I looked away before he could see the expression on my face.

— «» — «» — «»—

Half an hour out of Toppenish we could indeed have been on another planet. Maybe once there had been a reason to come here. There wasn't now. No trees; only sharp hills and shallow canyons and small shrubs and grasses pale amongst the remnants of last week's snow. The rocks were grey and flat brown and looked like an icy watercolour hung in someone else's hallway. The sky had gone a deeper grey and clouds lay on the hills and in valleys like white moss. The only thing that drew the eye was the road.

Zandt kept his eyes on the clock. After another ten miles he started driving more slowly and watching along the side. Eventually he saw what he was looking for and pulled over.

'This is as close as we're going to get.'

He drove straight over the hard shoulder and down onto a track I hadn't even noticed. We bumped along this as it led down the side of a hill until it was beneath the level of the road, and then climbed around the side of an outcrop. It didn't look like anyone had come this way in a very long time. Within half a mile the grade was getting steep in all directions and I was hanging onto my seat with both hands.

Zandt checked we weren't visible from the road and stopped the truck. He got out, and I did too. It was very quiet.

I looked around. 'This is it?'

'No, but we're going to have to walk the rest.'

'Never been much of a hiker.'

'Why am I not surprised?' He pulled something out of his jacket that looked like a personal organizer with a fat slug lying on the top.

'GPS?'

He nodded. 'I want to be able to find our way back.'

He logged the car's position and pointed up the rise. The view was the same as we'd had all afternoon, except now there was no road. 'Let's get going.'

We followed the remainder of the track until it petered out around the back of the hill, and then walked out into nothing. Behind the hill was another, the far slope of which led down into a shallow canyon. We made our way down, mist settling around us, and up out the other side. Then it was pretty flat for quite a while. There were no trees. The ground was hard and rocky and bare except for tufts of the yellowish grass and more of the pale blue-green ground shrubs. Walking made a sound like someone eating Doritos with their mouth shut.

Zandt kicked at a plant. 'What is this stuff?'

'Sagebrush, I'm assuming. Though to be honest I know shit about high plains flora.'

'Fucking pain in the ass to walk through.'

'It surely is.'

We kept on walking, cloud gathering around us until we couldn't see more than thirty yards in any direction. John consulted his satellite positioning gadget every now and then, but this didn't feel like a place that had destinations. It was dry and cold, not bitter, but with the kind of steady chill that makes it hard to remember being any other way. I tried to imagine people living out here once, and couldn't. It must have been long ago. The land felt like it didn't want anyone bothering it any more.

After a good while I looked at my watch. It was after four o'clock, and the light was beginning to turn. A sly wind began to pick up. The sun was a silver coin in the mist, hazy and starting to tarnish.

'I know,' John said, before I'd even spoken. 'The mark on the map is all I have. We're there, or thereabouts.'

'We're not anywhere,' I said. 'I've never seen a place that is so not somewhere in my entire life.'

We kept on walking nonetheless. The mist got thicker, sometimes a grey blanket, every now and then suddenly hollowing out to form a hidden inner channel that caused the sun to make it glow from within like a golden vision. We found ourselves walking along a low crest, the foot of another hill rising like a grey-green sand dune ten yards to the right, the lip of a canyon over on the left.

We didn't seem to be making much progress but I didn't say anything. I didn't have anywhere else to be.

— «» — «» — «»—

Finally it was John who stopped.

'This is bullshit,' he said. He was pissed. I didn't blame him, but he seemed edgy too, restlessly angry beneath the surface. The dark smudges under his eyes suggested he hadn't been sleeping well. I hoped his contact had the sense not to go back to the bar in South Dakota for a while.

'Your gizmo got a backlight?'

'Of course.'

'So we've got some more time.' I started off again.

He stayed put. 'Ward, I don't think it's worth it. Even in a straight line we're forty minutes off the road, maybe more. We've circled around the entire area covered by the mark.'

I turned. 'And where did he make that cross? Where was he?'

'In the bar.' From only a few yards away, Zandt's voice sounded as if it had to fight its way through the mist.

'Right. A week and many hundred miles from when he was here, in other words. How drunk was he at the time?'

'He said he was sure.'

'He's probably sure he can handle his drink too. You take a witness's word for anything back when you were a cop?'

'Of course not,' he snapped. He pulled out his cell phone and glared at it. 'No signal. We're a long way off the map out here, Ward.'

'In every possible way. But…' I stopped talking, as the world seemed to take a side step. 'What the fuck is that?'

He came level with me and we stood shoulder to shoulder for a moment. Then he saw it. 'Holy shit.'

There was a man a little way ahead of us, just far enough that his edges were blurred by the mist. He was dressed in a grey business suit and black office shoes inappropriate for the environment. I could hear the sound of his jacket flapping in the wind. The set of his stride was purposeful. Despite this, he wasn't moving.

I took a step forward, stopped. Reached for my gun, and then left it. Thought again, and got it out anyway.

Separating slightly, we approached the walking man.

He looked to be in his late fifties. He had grey hair that had recently been well cut, but it was now plastered down over his head. His hands and face were an unattractive colour. Once white, now a variable palette of blue and harsh pink, shading in places towards some purple-brown hue that had no name. A jagged cut gouged across his neck as far up as his left ear: the knife had taken off a section, giving him a curiously lopsided appearance. His upper lip was also missing. There was a smell coming off him, but it wasn't unbearable. It had been very cold, and dry.

Now that we were closer, it became a little more prosaic. No longer a ghost. Just a body. Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.

Zandt headed around the back. He held his PDA up towards the man's face and started taking pictures. 'Look,' he said.

I circled, unconsciously keeping well clear, as if I feared the body would start moving, resuming some progress across the plain. A metal pole, about five feet high and maybe two inches thick, had been driven into the ground behind him. He had been tied to it, his body held upright in a way that happened to make him look like he was walking. In time the body would fall and the clothes fade, and the pole would rust away.

'Christ,' I said. Zandt just nodded, apparently fresh out of other points of view. He put his hands in the man's jacket and trouser pockets, and came up empty.

I stood back. If you waited a while, as the mist ebbed and shifted, you could see that the positioning of the body had been carefully chosen. He was sheltered from view by the hill. You wouldn't see him unless you were actually out here, some place there was absolutely no reason to be.

Zandt looked out over what he could see of the plain. 'He said there were two.'

'Excellent. That gives us something to look forward to.'

'He didn't say where.'

I nodded at the walking man. 'I'd guess he was supposed to be going someplace.'

We walked in the direction that the man was pointed. After fifty yards we began to sense, rather than see, the lip of another canyon. Then we saw something else.

She was sitting right on the edge. She was about the same age as the walking man, but with her skin in its current condition it wasn't easy to be precise. Her elbows rested on her knees, and her hands were brought together to cup her face. The pose was natural, presumably achieved before the body stiffened. The only wrong note was her hair. This was wild and stood up in grey clumps. It looked as if crows had discovered her and started to do their work, and then stopped. Perhaps even they had their limits. Now, she just sat and stared with hollow, sunken eyes.

She looked like… I don't know what she looked like. I didn't really have a comparison. I turned away before she could turn and see me. If she did there would be no leaving this place.

Zandt took only two pictures, then logged the position. 'Okay,' he said quietly. 'Let's get out of here.'

I followed him as he walked away from the woman. I didn't know what I was feeling, wasn't sure what you were supposed to make of such a thing.

I stopped and looked back at her. Something about the way she was positioned was niggling at me.

'Ward, let's move out. It's going to get dark soon.'

I ignored him and walked back to her. Squatted down as close as I felt willing, and looked where she was looking. Her head was tilted slightly forward, as if she was gazing down into the canyon.

I wanted to be back in the car as much as Zandt did. Rooney's Lounge seemed like a good place to be at that moment. Even the Yakima mall, at a pinch. But something compelled me.

It wasn't easy getting into the canyon. I started to go down facing forward, but soon turned around and used my hands. I heard Zandt swear from above, and then start after me, thankfully having the sense to pick a line a good few yards to the side. The rocks he dislodged fell well clear.

When I got to the bottom I couldn't see much at first. The same as up above, only rockier, with a little more vegetation and a few stubby trees. The mist was clearing now, drifting off somewhere else as the sky turned a darker blue.

Then I saw that there was another inlet up ahead, the memory of a smaller stream. I walked up it for a short distance, and was surprised to find it turning into a wider, open area. I was still standing at the entrance to this when Zandt arrived, looking at a bulky shape hidden under an outcrop.

At first it was hard to make out what it was.

Then we saw that it was the corner of a small building, flush up against the side of the canyon.

We got our guns out again.

We approached the building walking a few feet apart. It became clear that it was very old, a functional one-room cabin, pioneer style. It was made from big chunks of wood that had weathered well, still brown in places amongst the grey. Battered planks of more recent vintage had been nailed across the windows from the inside. The door was shut, held by a padlock that didn't look old at all. Someone had gone at the door with an axe or shovel, but not recently. Shapes that looked like letters were visible amongst the scars. I saw something that looked like a big 'R'.

Holding his gun ready, Zandt used his other hand to click a few pictures onto his little machine. The windows. The walls. The door.

Then he pocketed it, and looked at me. I nodded.

I walked straight ahead and kicked the door in and swung the hell back out of the way. Zandt was right behind me, gun held straight out in front of him.

I slipped in and turned full right, getting behind the door. With the windows blocked it was dark but the door gave more than enough light. My scalp tried to crawl backwards off my head.

The cabin was full of dead people.

Three sat in a line on a bench, slumped against the back wall. One was little more than a skeleton, the other two dark and vile. One had no arms; the other's abdomen had burst some time before. Other bodies were gathered in a small deliberate heap on the other side, and at least two more lay along the front wall, heads opposed. The state of these indicated none had died recently. A few had scraps and tangles of skin and jerky-like flesh hanging from scaffolding bones. One skull had the upper half of a plastic doll protruding from a hole in its crown. Dust had turned the doll's hair grey.

As my eyes got used to the gloom, I began to see more and more desiccated body parts: a small, orderly pile against the wall on the left. I moved part of it with my foot, and saw a layer of bones underneath. A thick layer, some of it little more than dust.

We dropped our arms. Nobody here could do us harm.

Zandt cleared his throat. 'Did they do this?'

'The Straw Men? Could be. But some of this has been here a long, long time.'

Zandt wanted to take the cabin apart but one glance told me there was nothing for us to find. If you killed someone in this cabin you could take your time. Plus, I just didn't want to be there. At all. I wanted to be outside. The longer you stood in that place, the more it felt like the cabin was breathing, slowly, a palpable exhalation of rancid air.

I backed out over the threshold. I was less surprised now that some of the wood remained brown. It was as if many, many bad things had been absorbed into the walls, keeping it moist, keeping it alive. Whatever had happened here had taken place over an extended period of time. It had to be the work of more than one person, perhaps even more than one generation. Was it just a place to dump bodies, or was their silent presence, their positioning, supposed to achieve something more nebulous? I thought about the country as a whole, with all its wide, dead spaces. Was this the only one of these?

Zandt came out too, but then he stopped suddenly, and stared at something over my shoulder.

I turned and saw what he was looking at. It was twenty feet away, on the other side of the canyon, positioned where you would see it when you came out of the cabin.

I took a few steps towards it. This body was far more recent. It had not been arranged like the couple up on the plain, but merely thrown on the ground, arms outstretched, legs bent. Something brown had been nailed to his chest, in the centre. It looked like nothing I'd ever seen, but the unnatural emptiness of the man's gaping mouth told me what it was.

When my stomach had stopped retching, I said, 'Is that the guy? Is that Joseph?'

Zandt didn't have to answer.

— «» — «» — «»—

It was a long walk back to the car. We drove in silence, following the Columbia down towards Portland.

At the airport we got flights in different directions. We didn't meet again for another month, by which time everything had changed.

1: Cold Harbours

I do believe

Though I have found them not,

That there may be

Words which are things.

Lord Byron,

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

1

There's never a pull-off when you need one. You're belting along, forest on both sides, making light work of shallow rises and swooping dips, ranks of paper birch framing a series of flicker-lit views so snowy beautiful you can't even see them, and you keep thinking that just around the next bend there must be a place to stop and park but for some reason there isn't. It's a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in mid-January, a fact that has already seemed odd to you, a strange time to be doing what you're doing, and you've got the road to yourself for probably five miles in both directions. You could just dump the car on the side of the road, but that doesn't seem right. Though it's only a rental and you have no attachment to it other than it being the last car you're ever going to drive, you don't want to abandon it. You're not being sentimental. It's not even that you don't want someone to see it, wonder if something untoward is taking place, and come investigating — though you don't. It's just a neatness thing. You want the car to be parked. To be at rest. Right at this moment this seems very important to you, but there's never anywhere to stop. That's the whole problem, you realize, suddenly hot-eyed: that's life in a goddamned nutshell. There's never anywhere to rest, not when you really need it. Sometimes you don't need a vista point. You just want to be able to…

Shit — there's one.

Tom slammed his foot down three seconds late and far too hard. The car skidded thirty feet, back end swinging out gracefully until he came to rest straddling both lanes. He sat for a moment, neck tingling. Through the window came cold air and the sound of a bird cawing with maniacal persistence. Otherwise, silence, thank God. Anyone else on the road and it would have gone badly, which would be ironic as all hell, but again, not something he wanted. He was unpopular enough.

He straightened the car up and then slowly backed past the pull-off. Sarah would have been able to reverse right in, but he didn't feel confident of doing so, so he didn't try. That had always been his way. Hide your faults. Keep your secrets. Never run the risk of looking a fool even if that means you look a fool, and a cowardly one at that.

He pulled forward into the small parking area, crunching over a six-inch line of snow ploughed off the road. The lot evidently belonged to the head of some lesser-known hiking trail, firmly shut for the off-season. Only when the car was stationary again did Tom realize his hands were shaking badly. He reached to the passenger seat for the bottle and took a long swallow. Looking in the rear-view mirror he saw only the pale skin, brown hair, baggy eyes and incipient double chin he expected. Middle-age camouflage.

He opened the door and dropped the keys into the side pocket. No sense making it too obvious. He hauled himself out, slipped immediately on a rock, and fell full length on the ground.

When he pushed himself to his knees he saw there were small wet cuts on one of his palms, and his forehead and right cheek were dripping. His right ankle hurt too. Face pricked with tiny pieces of flint, stunned into a winded moment of sobriety, he knew finally that what he was doing was the right thing.

He got his rucksack out of the trunk and shut it. He made sure the car was locked, then stepped over the low barrier made of logs and set off between the trees, in the opposite direction to the trail.

The bird, or another very like it, was still making its rasping noise. Tom tried shouting at it, first words, and then mere sounds. The bird went silent, then started up again. Tom got the message. In here he was just another noisy animal, not in any position to issue commands.

He let the bird be, and concentrated on not falling down.

— «» — «» — «»—

The going was hard and steep. He soon understood why there'd been no rest areas: this forest wasn't a restful place. It wasn't here for anyone's benefit: there were no roped paths, restrooms or snack stops, none of the traditional mediators between the cooked and the raw. That was okay. His needs were few, and catered for. The rucksack had almost nothing in it except alcohol, and he'd paused to repack the bottles so they didn't clink. He had nothing inside him except alcohol either. He was already doubting vodka as a way of life. It wasn't for the faint of heart, that was for sure. Feeling like shit took a high level of tolerance. His wasn't actually that high, but he was being quite brave about it.

After two hours he estimated he'd only travelled three miles, though he'd climbed enough to leave the birches and fiery dogwood behind and be alone with spruce and cedars. Up here the ground was mainly clear of snow, but it was choked with fallen branches and aggressive bushes that grabbed at his jeans and coat. The trees were tall and quiet and grew wherever the hell they liked. Occasionally he came across a stream. The first one he jumped, but as his ankle began to ache more he made detours to find places where it was easier to cross. Sometimes he muttered to himself. Mainly he kept quiet, saving his breath. The faster he went, the less he had to be aware. When he finished the bottle he dropped it and kept on going. A hundred yards on he realized this had been boorish, and reeled back to find it. He couldn't, which suggested he was doing his job: becoming both profoundly drunk and very lost. He kept walking steadily. Time spent with Green Trails sheets had shown that even logging roads were scarce in the area, but he knew from experience — albeit in cities — that his sense of direction was pretty good. He also knew how weak he was, how impulse could come and take his hand and lead him places he didn't want to go, then suddenly vanish, leaving him with blood on his hands. That's why being lost was crucial. Otherwise he'd change his mind. He'd cop out and procrastinate and fail, and surely there was nothing more pathetic than screwing up your own suicide.

Tom Kozelek had come to the Pacific North West with no plan except a desire to be somewhere other than Los Angeles. He had stood in LAX, a little drunk, and picked Seattle because he'd been there on business recently and knew a good hotel. He stayed there a single night and then drove east, into the Cascade Mountains. It's a strange area. There are peaks and vertiginous valleys, jagged rocks in every shade of grey. There's even a small amount of history, of an 'And then they cut down a bunch more trees' kind. But there aren't many roads, and the mountains pretty much keep themselves to themselves: unless you know where you're going — which Tom didn't — it would be easy to think there wasn't anything much to find. He moved vaguely between small, cold towns for two days, spent evenings sitting in motel rooms with the television off. He phoned what had been his home. The call was answered, which made it worse. The conversation with his wife and children was short and involved no shouting. Worse still. There are times when reasonableness is the worst cut of all, because if everyone's being adult and yet the world is still broken, where do you go from there?

In the end he found a town called Sheffer and dug in. Sheffer was little more than a main drag and five cross-streets that quickly petered out into steep fir-choked foothills; but a pair of snooty mini-hotels and a hippy cafe with good oatmeal cookies and five pristine secondhand copies of The Bridges of Madison County suggested people came there on purpose. There was a small railroad museum (closed) and a stretch of disused track alongside the main drag, home to picturesquely rusting hulks of rolling stock. It was out of season and the town was kicking back, locals moving forward out of the background, combing the moss out of their hair.

Four days before his walk in the woods Tom sat at the counter in Big Frank's, the least anodyne of its three bars, staring at television coverage of a foreign sport whose rules he didn't understand. He felt agitatedly becalmed, way out in Injun territory. He was forty-three years old and a grown-up. He had charge cards. He had a car at his disposal. He was not limited by anybody's expectations or prior knowledge: he could pretend his name was Lance if he had a mind to, claim to be an ex-fighter pilot turned dotcom millionaire; or a cult jazz-fusion choreographer called Bewildergob. Nobody would know otherwise, or care. He could do anything he wanted. But with this came the realization there was nothing he wanted to do. Nothing at all.

Nothing would make a difference now. He had crossed the line.

He drank until his brain was empty and cold. The idea, when it came, arrived in his head as if shot there by a distant archer. He realized there was a way of making things, if not better, then at least manageable. Of making the problems go away. He got another beer and took it to a table in a darker corner to consider the idea more carefully.

He'd thought of suicide before, like most people, but never seriously: an occasional glance to check the idea remained ridiculous. This felt different. This wasn't a gesture. It was entirely rational. His situation wasn't yet irrevocable, after all. His marriage was over, but not all his friendships. He could get a new job, design corporate web for somebody else. Find an apartment. Do his laundry. Buy a microwave oven of his own. A year from now it might all feel different. So what? He'd still be the same Tom, a procrastinating man of indifferent talents, slowly expanded by the metabolic cycle pump of age. The choices he wanted to make existed solely in the past.

So why not just have done with it? Draw the line. Swallow the loss. Hope reincarnation was true and try to make a better job of it next time.

Why not? After all — why not?

He drank until the bar shut, then tried to chat to the two young bartenders as they guided him towards the door. One radiated boredom, the other mild distaste. Tom realized he was probably not much younger than their fathers, most likely square-jawed mountain types who took a nip of bourbon or sour mash or whatever the fuck about once a month. The door was shut firmly behind him. As he staggered back towards his motel it occurred to him that he didn't have to care what they thought about him any more. His new course put him on a higher plane. He got so cross that he turned around and reeled back to the bar, intending to explain to Chip and Dale that while these were great times for boys in their twenties, men in middle age weren't having it quite so smooth; that one day their own abs might sag and they'd forget how to love and have no clue who they were. He felt this would be a valuable insight for them. It was the only one he had, in any event, and he was willing to share it around. By the time he got back to the bar it was locked and dark. He hammered on the door for a while, telling himself they might still be inside but mainly just because he wanted to hammer on something. It wasn't more than five minutes before he was suddenly quite well lit. He turned to see a car from the sheriff's department parked on the street behind him. A youngish guy in a uniform was leaning back on the bonnet, his arms folded.

'Believe it's shut, sir,' he said.

Tom opened his mouth but realized there was too much to say and none of it made any sense. He raised his arms, not in surrender, but in a kind of mute entreaty. Strangely, the deputy seemed to understand. He nodded, got back in his car and drove away. Tom walked home, padding slowly down the middle of the main street through the steady, meditative blink of traffic lights with no cars to direct.

Next morning he thought it through. His options were limited. There was no gun store in town, and he didn't want to drive until he found one. Even assuming they let him have one, guns were scary. Jumping off a cliff, supposing he could find one, was also out. The idea was self-evidently counter-evolutionary. Even if his mind was determined his body could simply over-rule — in which case he'd have a long walk back to the car feeling the world's biggest fool. Yes, I was going to throw myself off, that's right. No, it didn't happen. Sorry. Nice view, though. Mind your step. Besides which, he didn't want to end up as something distended or smashed or half dead, something to be found, photographed, and shipped home. He didn't want to be broken, he wanted to be erased.

On Sunday he was picking at a huge Reuben in Henry's, the town's more friendly diner, when he heard something that put the final piece in place. A local old-timer was taking delight in worrying a pair of Winnebago retirees about the scope and impenetrability of the woods. Tom's attention was drawn by the repetition of a number. Seventy-three. The local said it several times in a row. Seventy-three — how about that?

His audience were looking at each other and nodding as if impressed. Then the male of the pair turned to the local, with the air of a man who had spotted a flaw in another's argument.

'Big ones, or little ones?' he asked. 'The planes? What kind of size were they?'

His wife nodded. No flies on her husband. She'd always said so.

'All sizes,' the old geezer said, somewhat tetchily. 'Big ones, little ones, civilian, military. Planes go down all the time — matter of fact, many more than that have ditched around here. My point is that of all the planes gone down in the Pacific North West since the war, seventy-three have never even been found.'

Is that right? Tom thought.

He pushed his sandwich away, paid his tab, and went to buy as much alcohol as he could carry.

— «» — «» — «»—

He wasn't prepared for how quickly it got dark. He was stumbling more than walking, the muscles in his thighs and calves turned to lead. He'd still only gone maybe eight miles, ten at most, but he was exhausted. It occurred to him that if he'd spent more time in the gym he'd be in better shape to die. This made him laugh until his mouth filled with warm saliva and he had to stop walking and breathe deeply to avoid vomiting.

He was now about as drunk as he'd ever been. As he rested, bent over with hands on knees, watching the floating spots before his eyes, he considered what to do next. He was already very lost. Getting lost could be ticked off the schedule of tasks. The ground had been getting more mountainous all afternoon, steep and slip-slidy and treacherous. When it got properly night, it was going to be very dark indeed, the kind of darkness that would swallow up and deafen a city boy. He took the rucksack off and felt for the flashlight. When he flicked it on he realized it wasn't just the quality of the light that was changing. A mist was gathering. It was also unbelievably cold. For the moment it was just sweat turning to frigid water on his skin, but when it got into his bones it would be hard to bear. Which meant he had to keep moving.

He rotated his ankle to warm it up a little, made a slight turn and kept ploughing onwards. The forest was very quiet now, noisy birds having cawed their fill and gone off home to roost. He wasn't sure about other animals. He'd already spent time not thinking about bears. He didn't think there were any around — or the old timer in the diner would surely have brought them up, he'd most definitely been the type — but you never knew. Tom didn't think he looked like a threat to any large mammal he might chance upon, and he had no food to attract them, but maybe that was all crap. Maybe they lay in wait and attacked people for the fun of it. Anyway, he didn't want to think about that, so he didn't. He kept not thinking about it at regular intervals. The flashlight had two settings, bright and not so bright, and he soon stuck to the latter. As the mist thickened it bounced more of the light back in his face, making his head whirl. Also, the light made the shadows worse. Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent's big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you're nervous in the dark. Night forests say, 'Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you.'

So he kept himself mist-blind and smacked his brain with vodka and kept moving. All of the crunches and rustlings he could hear were of his own making, he was sure. There were no shapes in the mist, only the movement of the moisture itself — that was also certain. You could take all of it to the bank, leave it there, and keep on walking in utter safety and only moderate discomfort: walking until it was totally dark and time itself seemed to flatten out, until each thought became hard to distinguish from the next, until fear twisted back on itself and swelled and he started moving faster and faster to escape from something he carried within himself.

— «» — «» — «»—

He had no warning of the fall. He'd been shoving aggressively through a long trench of mid-level bushes, yielding to a third bout of head-snapping hiccups, when all at once his leading foot had nothing to come down upon. His body was tilted forward, the better to shove branches aside, there was no way back.

He was suddenly skidding down a sharp incline, legs apart, arms thrashing. Acceleration was halted by a full-body collision with a smallish tree, at which point he lost the flashlight and his bottle and was twisted and spun onto his side to slide the rest of the way via every rock in the ground. It was over quickly, and ended with him landing hard on his face with a crunch that knocked every last breath out of him.

He groaned, a low and desperate sound. At last, he shrugged off the rucksack and rolled over onto his back. The pain in his chest was so intense he let out an involuntary whistle. His right side felt as if someone had poked a spear in it and was encouraging a child to swing off the end. His balls ached too, pain rising to a hot little hollow in his lower abdomen.

After a little longer, he sat up. He ran a tentative hand down his side, not looking, just in case, but didn't find anything sticking out. He saw the flashlight was lying ten feet away, glowing dimly in undergrowth, and crawled through cold mud to retrieve it. His vision was slightly doubled, but this had been the case for the last couple of hours so he wasn't unduly worried.

Retrieving his light source felt like a step in the right direction. It seemed he'd fallen into a wide rocky gully, designed to hold a decent spring-thaw stream but now home to a thin trickle which he could hear from ten feet away. Otherwise it was quiet. Very quiet, and very cold.

He decided he'd gone far enough. Tonight would do. There didn't have to be a tomorrow after all. School was out a little early, that was all.

He pushed himself backwards until his back was against rock. Then pulled the rucksack up between his knees and opened it. One of the remaining bottles had smashed — the bottom of the bag was soaking and sharp and the smell smoked up around his face. Shining the light, he saw there was no way he could just shove his hand in so he upended most of the bag out onto the ground instead. It took a while, but he found the packs of sleeping pills.

As he laboriously pushed each pill out of its individual foil pimple, laying them in a pile on a useful nearby leaf, he swam through an internal checklist.

Lost, check. Drunk, check. Christ yes. Great big check, in red.

He'd paid his motel bill, mentioning in passing that he was heading back up to Seattle. Check.

Anyone out hiking when it was this cold would have to be out of their fucking mind, and it was mid-week, out of season, and he'd headed away from known trails. Check.

Push, another pill. Push, another pill. He peered at the pile. Was that enough? Better make sure. He kept pushing. An overdose wasn't weak if done the way he was doing it. It was manly. And being way out in the middle of nowhere meant he would never be found, even if it went wrong. He was the man in control.

Oh yeah.

The car would be spotted tomorrow, perhaps, and in a day or two someone would investigate. Not on foot but from the air, most likely, a desultory grid pass at best. On his last day in Sheffer Tom had bought clothes and back-pack in autumnal colours, to make it even less likely that some passing plane or helicopter would be able to spot him. If he'd shelled out for some proper hiking boots too then his ankle wouldn't hurt so much, but it hadn't seemed worth it. Just went to show. Always get the proper equipment.

Anyway, a check in general. Checkety check.

As the pile of pills grew, he was surprised to find that he didn't feel afraid. He'd thought he might, that the proximity of the act itself might make him panic, that he would fight death as she had. He found he merely felt very, very tired. Somewhere in the journey from the car to this random gully he'd lost any remaining sense of his life as a process. It had become simply an event; this event, in this place, now. It was dark, and getting late. It was for the best. It was okay.

He was already very cold, his fingers thin and unmanageable. He started taking the pills, a couple at a time, washed down with more alcohol. He fumbled a few, but there were plenty. He took a lot, muttering in the dark. Bye bye Sarah, go find someone else. Bye bye William, bye bye Lucy. You'll hate me for this, I know, but you would have come to hate me soon enough.

At some point he seemed to accept he was into the realms of fatal dose, after which it all became more relaxed. Everything seemed easy, in fact. The forest got a little warmer too, though it was possible he just wasn't feeling his extremities any more. Everything went fuzzy and liquid as he sat and swayed in perfect darkness. He was cold and not cold, bone weary and awake. Fear circled in the bushes but stayed just out of reach, until he was barely aware of anything and didn't bother to keep putting things in his mouth. He sobbed briefly, then couldn't remember what he'd been thinking about. Trying to follow thoughts was like walking alone down a deserted street where the stores were closing one by one.

When his eyelids began to flutter he tried to keep them open, not with any sense of desperation, but as a child might push away the sleep he knew could not be fought. When they finally closed it seemed lighter in his head for a moment, and then began to fade into slate grey and beyond. He expected, in so far as he had any expectations left, that this process would continue until everything became black and silent. A brief dreaming moment, as if tilting slowly backwards, and then not even that. Goodbye.

He wasn't expecting to wake up in the middle of the night, still drunk, racked with whole-body shivers. He wasn't expecting to be alive, and in thirty kinds of pain. He certainly wasn't expecting to see something standing over him, something big, something that smelled like the scent of rotted meat carried on a cold, cold wind.

2

The restaurant was a big room split up into different areas, a section of tables in the centre and booths around three sides. Small lanterns hung at the entrance to each booth, but they didn't work. The walls had been done out in big retro-style murals, lots of powder blue and pale pink and scratchy black lines. The scalloped double-height windows at the entrance showed a parking lot blown drab with old leaves, and I watched as a cold wind played with them a while. I was in my usual spot, one of the booths in the back of the room. I liked it there. The bench wasn't too close in to the table, so you didn't feel hemmed in. The menu was riddled with cunning puns and full of stuff like burgers, burritos, big old chef salads and chilli (Cincinnati- or Texas-style, 'Hot, Hotter or W-W-Watch Out!'), which is very much my kind of thing.

All in all it was a perfect place for dinner, aside from one thing. The service sucked. I'd been waiting a long time now and no one had bid me welcome, reassured me I was in the system, or given me ice water I wouldn't drink. And actually, it wasn't just the waiting staff who were slacking. When I first arrived I saw someone had knocked over most of the chairs in the central portion of the room, which looked messy. I'd put them back up, tucking them neatly under the tables, but that wasn't really my job. It wasn't my job to replace the light bulbs either. I considered going back into the kitchen, but I knew it would be pointless. It was even quieter back there, and darker, with nothing but spatulas for company.

I leaned forward on the table, wondering what the hell I was doing there. Three days is too long to wait for a bowl of chilli, no matter how damned good it is.

— «» — «» — «»—

I sat for another couple of hours, until it was dark outside. A little after seven a pair of headlights swept into the lot, paused, then floated back out again. Cops, presumably. They evidently didn't feel their job extended to getting out of the car and checking the building's back doors and access hatches, otherwise they might have found evidence of how I'd forced the back way into the kitchen. The fact the place wasn't on fire was good enough. I could understand why they weren't too worried. The restaurant seemed to have a force field around it. None of the windows were broken. The chairs and tables remained in situ, along with pans and spatulas in the kitchen and maybe a hundred menus strewn over tables and the floor. Neither exterior nor interior walls had been tagged, and the smell of stale urine was notably absent. An empty USA Today dispenser stood outside the main doors, surely a clarion call for the moronic to explore what sounds it might make if hurled through the plate glass beside it. That call had gone unheeded. It was eerie. Vandalism evidently wasn't a huge problem in Relent, Idaho. It wasn't clear whether this said the town's youth were too refined or too apathetic for nihilistic self-expression, but brief acquaintance with the settlement suggested the latter. Evidence for refinement was scarce. Doubtless somewhere in town there were people living valuable and important lives, but from the outside it looked like a kid's trike left outside to rust.

I knew a lot about towns like Relent because that's where I'd spent most of my time in recent months, wandering directionless across many miles of backwoods and prairie in the country's least glamorous states. Initially I'd stayed in motels, then one afternoon I'd gone to an ATM and found there was no more money. It's amazing the difference a little brightly coloured rectangle makes to your well-being, to your sense of identity and belonging. You only really understand the card's importance when the machine coughs it back out again and tells you 'No,' and that word means not now, not later, not ever; when you are suddenly reminded the card was never some magical gold-producing chalice but just a piece of plastic you didn't even legally own. I stood in a parking lot in New Jersey turning mine over in my hands until a woman with an SUV and three fat kids told me to get the hell out of the way. She had her own card ready and every confidence it would perform its function. I envied her for that. Though not for her kids, who were ugly as sin.

I walked back to my car and climbed in. Sat and looked out through the windshield for a while. I had eighteen dollars and change, plus less than half a tank of gas. Nothing else. At all.

'So, Bobby, what are we going to do now?'

Bobby didn't answer, because he was dead. He'd been my best friend, one of the few people whose long-term fate I'd cared about. He'd died up at a place called The Halls, as we tried to catch a psychopath who called himself the Upright Man. The Halls had been blown to kingdom come, vaporizing Bobby's body along with it. He'd become an unpredictable conversationalist since. Sometimes he said what I needed him to, telling me: yes, Ward, this is a good town to stay the night, or yes, you do need another beer — and yes, we did our best to find the people who murdered your parents and it would be stupid of you to feel guilty about everything that went wrong, up to and including the fact that I am dead.

Then he'd go silent for a long while. I don't know where he went during these periods, what change took place in my mind that meant I didn't hear him. And it was only in my own head that I heard him. I knew that. Really, I did.

In the end I drove out of the bank parking lot and found myself a job washing dishes and cutting potatoes three towns away. The Ecuadorian fry cook let me sleep on his floor for two days, after which I had enough cash to get a room of my own provided I didn't mind sharing it with bugs and dust and noise, and that I didn't eat. Working in kitchens is good for people in that position, though you become heartily sick of the cheaper food groups. Relations between the Ecuadorian and myself broke down a week later when I tried to get him to share the small coke-dealing business he had going amongst the other staff and a few young and not-so-young locals who'd turn up round the back some nights. I wound up driving the hell out of town in the small hours, bleeding profusely and feeling a fool.

The next morning I was taking a rest outside a Burger King in West Virginia, still bleeding, though less steadily, when a voice finally spoke and answered a question from nine days before. I cleaned myself up in the BK's wash-rooms, treated myself to a globalized breakfast of food-like materials and drove straight down to Arizona. Once there I located a residence in Flagstaff, which took a while because I'd been there only once, somewhat drunk, and had since lost the address. I watched the place carefully for twenty-four hours before getting out my otherwise useless rectangle of plastic, which I used to break in.

And so for five days I lived in Bobby Nygard's house.

— «» — «» — «»—

First thing I did, once I'd had a look around and established that if anyone had robbed the place they'd done so very tidily and without being tempted by tens of thousands of dollars of computers and surveillance equipment, was get online. I hadn't done this in a while. I was semi-convinced that any attempt to trace personal information would be noticed somewhere and have people coming after me. Among the things Bobby had been expert in was the obfuscation of internet trails. I knew that if I used his home system I'd be safe, at least for a little while.

Bank accounts were my first stop. I soon established that my primary account had been closed, its contents AWOL. Not closed, but empty, was another account with a different bank. This was where the money from my parents' estate had been transferred. Someone had cleared it out, leaving credit of a single cent.

I logged out and sat back, light-headed. I wasn't surprised, but it still qualified as very bad news, and the leaving of the penny made me want to find someone and hurt them. I went through to the kitchen and found a saucer to use as an ashtray and stood looking out on the street. I heard Bobby talking then all right. He'd always been on at me to quit smoking, and in my head had evidently retained the opinion. I finished the cigarette anyway. It was nice to hear someone's voice, even if it was bugging me, and even if it was my own.

I stayed in the house. It seemed safe there, and I was tired of moving. I lived on the cans in the cupboards so I didn't have to go out. I spent a lot of time reading Bobby's notes and manuals, and I searched the house from top to bottom as respectfully as I could. I found a cache of false identities and took them, knowing Bobby would have bought them from someone he trusted. I also came across a little under six thousand dollars in cash, hidden in a computer box in the basement. I sat and looked at it for a while, feeling bad for finding it and even worse for what I was going to do. Bobby had a mother. I'd tracked her down a month before to pass on the news that he was dead. She had been drunk, and had thrown things at me, though it was not clear whether this was in response to the news — they had been far from close — or just a general policy. Probably the money should go to her, but that wasn't going to happen. It was highly likely it was dirty and I believed in my heart that Bobby would approve of me taking it.

A few days later I left the house wearing some clothes of his that more or less fit, and carrying a small bag with the money. I also had one of his laptops, having pawned my own some time before. Halfway across the street I turned and looked back at the property, wondering how long a house could go on, empty, unvisited. Weeks, certainly. So long as the bills got paid direct, and something didn't pop or burn itself out and start a fire, probably far longer. It made me wonder how many rooms and houses across the country were like that; their people disappeared, the machines in them still ticking and sighing with no one left to tend them.

— «» — «» — «»—

After that it was places of that nature I tended to hang my hat. Occasionally I dipped into Bobby's stash to stay somewhere that reminded me I'd once had a life, some big city downtown chain where you had to ring reception in the morning to be reminded which state you were in. Otherwise I took what I could find. Boarded-up motels just outside the limits; commercial zone office blocks where the glass had gone grey; anywhere forgotten and overlooked that had a sign saying KEEP OUT, because usually those two words were the only deterrent in place bar the fear of running into someone who might try to use violence to defend their temporary home. Luckily I was one of those people myself, so the prospect didn't overly bother me. There were a few confrontations, but people who have nothing are easily cowed, providing you keep your nerve and maintain the pretence you're somehow different. It's surprising just how much abandoned space there is; these places we once wanted, now home merely to emptiness and mattresses folded in odd ways and smelling of unnameable things.

I thought that maybe after I'd been to Bobby's house he wouldn't be with me any more, that he'd wanted to be taken home and would stay there when I left. But it wasn't like that. He followed me north to Montana, coming to Dyersburg when I decided to take the risk and visit the remains of my parents' house. By then it was a month after their death and the explosion up in the mountains, and I hoped life had moved on or at least that no one realized I was stupid enough to do such a thing. I passed the Best Western, where I'd stayed in the days before and after my parents' funeral and first watched a videotape which entirely dismantled what I thought I'd known about my childhood. Finally I doubled back and drove up to the mountainside residential streets where their house had been. I parked a hundred yards down the street and walked the rest of the way. On the first pass I walked right by, doing nothing but noting little had been done to protect the interior from the damage that a pipe bomb had done. On the way back I pushed the gate open and walked confidently up to the house. I was ready to be a loss adjuster, cop, or extremely optimistic Jehovah's Witness, whichever seemed most likely to make someone back off. None proved necessary. I looked around the house for a little while, picking up a few small items that reminded me of them, and then left. It was not their real house. That was in Hunter's Rock, the town where I grew up and thought I had been born. Walking around this shell brought little but out-of-kilter sadness, as if I had missed a train which wasn't even the one I'd planned on taking.

John Zandt called me one night and we went out to Yakima. Our friend Nina pulled the original tip out of the slush pile and re-forwarded it to the Yakima bureau, but it seemed to die the moment it left her desk. That was when we knew we were alone in the wilds, that the conspiracy we had uncovered had longer fingers than we'd realized. Not only did they kill people, both individually and en masse, they evidently did so with little fear of retribution.

After that I ran out of steam. My progress, such as it was, grew slower and slower until I washed up in Relent. I had a cell phone registered in a false name. I had a dead man's laptop and a dwindling supply of bad money. My ribs still hurt from where I'd been knifed by a drug dealer.

My parents would have been so proud.

— «» — «» — «»—

In the end I left the abandoned restaurant and walked into what passed for Relent's main drag. The menu's promises had made me hungry, and all I had in my pockets were some geriatric Teriyaki beef sticks I didn't even remember buying. I found a bar called The Cambridge, run by a middle-aged couple called Bob and Sue, him bearded and affable, her whip-thin and scarily efficient. They were nice but their menu was less enticing than the one in the dead restaurant, and I wound up concentrating on scotch and some local brew that looked like it had been squeezed out of the walls of old buildings but tasted okay after the first three or four. I kept meaning to leave but it started raining outside, a concerted downpour that gusted against the bar's glass frontage like someone throwing handfuls of gravel. So I stayed put, slumped over a seat at the bar and eating snack olives at a slow but consistent rate until I began to feel bilious and my fingers had turned faintly green.

By nine o'clock I was pretty drunk. An hour later nothing had improved. The room was sparsely occupied by knots of locals drinking with steady dedication. An intense young woman with frizzy hair sat on a small stage singing songs whose meaning I could no longer follow. I sensed the world had done her wrong and I sympathized up to a point but her voice was making my head ache. It was time to go somewhere else but there was nowhere in particular to go and it was still raining outside. Every now and then someone would come into the bar looking as if they'd just stepped fully clothed out of the ocean.

After a while one of these people caught my eye. He was tall and thin and went to sit by himself at a table in the back. I found I was keeping an eye on the table's reflection in the glass behind the bar. The Cambridge's lighting was subdued to the point of murky and I couldn't see the guy's face clearly, but a tickling in my scalp told me he was looking my way more often than randomly. I got up and took an unnecessary trip to the john but when I passed near that end of the room his head was turned away, ostensibly to look out into the night.

In the john I ran water until it was cold and splashed it over my face. I knew something was wrong about the man, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. Could be he was just noticing a stranger. But I thought it was more than that. There was a window high up on one side but nothing to stand on except a sink that didn't look like it would take the weight, and little chance my shoulders would make it through.

I decided I was just going to have to confront him. If it was going to happen, then a public place would be best.

When I went back out the table was empty.

Cursing myself for paranoia, I returned to the bar and took a swallow from a beer that was getting warm. The singing woman had been joined by a friend whose hair was even worse. Their combined voices made the veins in my legs vibrate. I signalled at the barman and the owner brought me a bill that didn't seem anywhere near big enough. I chatted with him for another few minutes, and tipped high. My father brought me up well.

It was even colder than I expected when I stepped outside. I was tempted to turn straight around again, see if they'd maybe adopt me or let me sleep at the bar, but once a door is shut behind me it never feels like I can go back. I headed along the street, staying close to the store fronts, trying to keep out of the rain. The street was deserted. I could have driven back with my eyes shut and endangered no one other than myself.

It took a minute or two before I realized a tightness across my back was trying to tell me something.

I stopped. Turned. It wasn't easy to see back down the street, but I could see someone was standing in a doorway about halfway back to the bar. I still couldn't see his face, and he wasn't moving, but no one was out in a night like this for the view.

'Can I help you?'

There was no answer. I put my hand inside my coat. I had left my gun in the car, of course. Who's going to need a gun in Relent, Idaho?'

'Who sent you?'

The guy stepped out. Stood on the pavement. He said something but the rain took it away.

I was tired and drunk and scared. Everything told me to turn around and take off. But I didn't. If they'd caught me here they could catch me anywhere. This was what my life was now. This was going to happen, somewhere or other, sooner or later. Suddenly everything I didn't have and didn't know was in front of me, and I felt light-headed and cold inside.

I started running towards him.

He took a couple of hurried steps backwards but not fast or directed enough. I was on top of him before he knew what was happening and I just started hitting him. I knew I ought to stop, that he might know things that I should know, but I didn't care. I used both hands and my head and we fell together out onto the street. I pushed him away to stand and kick and then bent back down to grab his head, hauling it up ready to hammer it down and up and down until this was over. I was dimly aware of noise in the background but didn't connect with it until I was being pulled back and I realized how stupid I'd been to assume they'd send someone on their own, that there wouldn't be a bunch of them and the only thing I had left to be surprised about was that one of them didn't just shoot and get it over with.

Someone grabbed me. I was held back, locked around each arm. Someone was knelt down next to the guy I'd been hitting, trying to keep his head off the wet street. His face was covered with blood but I saw he was a lot younger than I'd thought, mid-twenties at the most. I realized the person with him was a woman. She looked up at me, and I saw it was Sue, the woman from The Cambridge.

'You asshole,' she said.

'Big man, are you?' This voice came from behind my right ear, and I wrenched my neck around to see it was her husband.

'What the fuck?' I saw a couple people from the bar were standing around me. 'He was watching me in the bar,' I said. 'He was standing out here waiting for me.'

The woman straightened up. 'Ricky's gay,' she said.

I was panting, my face burning hot. 'What?'

Her husband let go my arm. 'You think you'd teach him a lesson? You got a problem with people like Rick?' He stepped away from me as if I was contagious.

'Listen,' I said, but they weren't going to. The frizzy-haired singers had helped the boy to his feet and were leading him back to the bar. The woman shot me one more look, started to say something and then just shook her head instead. No one I hadn't slept with had ever made me feel so small. She went back to the bar with the others, one hand protectively on the boy's back, and I realized way too late that Ricky was her son.

Then I was alone with her husband.

'I didn't know,' I said.

'Could have asked him.'

'You have no idea what my life is like.'

'No.' He shook his head. 'I don't. Don't want to know. Don't know where you're staying, either. But you should move on. You're not welcome here.'

He walked back to the bar. As he opened the door, he turned. 'I'd be surprised if you're welcome anywhere.'

The sound of the door shutting behind him left just the rain.

— «» — «» — «»—

Nietzsche said that men and women of character have typical experiences, patterns of events they seem destined to undergo time and again: things of which you have to say, 'Yes, I'm like that.' I think it was him, anyway: it could have been Homer Simpson. Whichever, they probably had something more positive in mind than fights in places no one had ever heard of, taking paranoia out on people who didn't deserve it. I'd done the same thing the night of my parents' funeral, unbelievably, pulling a gun in a hotel bar and scaring a bunch of corporate types and also myself.

Relent finally showed me this was no way to live. As a girl had told me three months before — a girl who had first-hand experience of what the Upright Man was capable of — there was only one person for the job I had to do. I had to stop running. I had to turn around, and chase.

By four o'clock the next day I was in San Francisco, and by the end of the evening I finally had a trail.

3

Dawn found Tom crouched at the bottom of a tree, wild-eyed and frozen solid. It found him and tried to put him back, but he was awake and couldn't be returned. He wasn't going to be denied a morning now, even if this was a day he hadn't expected to see.

When he'd woken in the night everything happened fast. His back brain found the flight pedal and stamped with all its weight. It didn't allow for rampant malfunction in all other quarters, and Tom was sprawling before he was even on his feet. With awareness came a terrible understanding of how badly messed up he was, but then the smell cut through again and the naming part of his mind woke up like a siren — BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! — and he was moving.

At first he was on hands and knees more than his feet, but claw-fear got him upright fast. He ricocheted off the sides of the gully until it came up to reach the forest floor, and then scrambled up over the muddy lip and was good to go. He went.

Not looking back was easy. He didn't want to see. Reports came in from distant outposts — head messed up, ankle screaming, don't have the flashlight — but he over-rode them and went twisting into the darkness. All pains and disappointments were as nothing to what it would be like to be caught by the BEAR, and he ran in a way that short-circuited everything his species had learned since the ice age before last. He ran like an animal, driven by pure body magic. He ran like a fit. He ran like diarrhoea. He pinballed through bushes and over logs, tripping and running, eventually bursting out into an area where the trees were more widely spread.

As he scrabbled towards higher ground he noticed it had snowed again, long after the information had filtered to him through the loud crunching of his feet. This combined with the whacks of thin branches and the wailing in his lungs to make such a cacophony of panic that it took him a while to realize these were the only sounds he could hear. He slipped, crashed down on hands and one knee. Struggled up but slipped again, momentum lost. He stopped, turned around. He was near the top of a small rise in the forest floor. Ready to run again, or die, whichever came first.

No BEAR.

He quick-panned his eyes back and forth across the low hill. Thin moonlight, blue-white reflections, no depth of field. He couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything, either, even when he held his breath to stop the panting. His chest hurt like fire.

He backed up a little, into the proximity of a large tree. He knew trying to climb it wouldn't help. The BEAR would be far more adept than he, not least because it probably wouldn't be so close to passing out. But being near the tree felt better.

He waited. It stayed quiet.

Then he thought he heard something.

Something down at the bottom of the rise, deep in the inky darkness and frosty shadows. A cracking of twigs.

His body went frigid with dismay, but he couldn't move. He'd run out of panic and had only terror left. Terror didn't know how to work his limbs.

He just stood, absolutely still, and didn't hear the noise again.

Finally he turned, making a full circle, staring and listening. Nothing. All he could see was snow and shadows. All he heard were dripping sounds, a soft nearby whoosh as a handful of snow sloughed off a branch. He didn't know what to do.

So he stayed where he was.

— «» — «» — «»—

By six a.m. he felt appalling. He could have balled up all the other hangovers in his life and dropped them into this without touching the sides. A bump on his right temple — presumably a result of the second fall — added its own whirling note. Parts of his body ached shrilly whenever he shifted his weight: the ribs on his right side were mouth-open painful whether he moved or not. The cold squared the whole effect up into the unquantifiable. He realized he'd never been truly cold before. He would have liked it to have stayed that way. At one point in the night he had gotten to the point where it felt like every inch of his skin was covered with bugs, and he'd spent much of the next few hours trying to keep moving, shifting silently and in what he hoped was a very small and invisible way. He wriggled his toes, or tried to. The response was increasingly hard to gauge. He kept his hands wedged into his armpits, occasionally removing them to rub meagre warmth over his face and ears. He drowsed off a few times, but never for long. He was in far too much scared discomfort to realize that at some point he'd stopped trying to die.

He felt nauseous too, dry-retching through the night, and was visited by half-memories that failed pill suicides left you with some key part of your innards badly screwed up. Was it the liver? Kidneys? He couldn't recall. Neither sounded a good state of affairs. Quite early into his vigil he'd worked out the reason he was still alive. It was stuck to the front of his coat, an icy substance with pill-shaped deposits. He'd thrown up in his sleep. He'd been too drunk, after all that. His body had jettisoned some of what was ailing it, and a lot of the drugs had come up before having a chance for effect. His upright position had prevented him from choking in the process. Perhaps the sickness had stopped the pills from having enough time to mess him up. Perhaps.

As the air around him gradually seemed to deepen, to allow shades of colour back into the monochrome flatness of night, Tom began slowly to accept that he was going to survive into another day. He didn't know what came after that. He was scared, pissed at himself, pissed at life, and most of all, he was monumentally pissed at the old fool in Henry's. If you were trying to scare people, and bears were likely, surely you mentioned them? What kind of rancid old scaremonger didn't tell about the bears? Impenetrable woods are one thing. The same woods plus huge carnivores famous for intractability are something else entirely. You owe it to your audience, especially the suicidal ones, to bring up the fucking bears.

As he lurched out from behind the tree Tom realized something. The idea of going back and slapping the old codger was the first he'd been excited by in a long while.

— «» — «» — «»—

The snow wasn't thick, but it was easy to retrace his progress down the hill. At the bottom he was confronted with tangled and frosty bushes. He turned, favouring his swollen ankle, and looked up the rise. He dimly remembered swerving right to bank up it. So he now needed to turn left. This would take him through the thickest section of the undergrowth. No thanks. Instead he took a detour up around higher ground, stepping over rocks and clambering unsteadily over nursery logs, until he could rejoin the right direction.

He didn't have any clear idea of how far he'd run. In the cold, beautiful light of A Good Day To Die + 1, he wasn't even sure why he was going back. Walking was warmer than standing, and if he was going to walk, it felt better to have a destination: a real one for the moment, not the dark, vague place he'd been stumbling towards the day before. That place was still out there, and there was probably enough left in his backpack to bring it closer still. He was no longer sure what he felt about the prospect, but finding the pack was something to do.

He walked for twenty minutes. The cold helped meld his myriad aches into one giant super-pain, a humanoid discomfort trudging between the trees. He spent some of the time muttering to himself about how cold it was, which was pointless but oddly comforting. He stopped frequently, turning his head in hope of recognizing something and to reassure himself that his environment remained BEAR-free. He'd just about given up when he heard something that sounded like running water.

He abandoned the path of least resistance and pushed his way through the undergrowth, very carefully. One more fall and he would not be walking anywhere any more.

On the other side of the bushes was a clearer area, and then a gully. The gully, he hoped, though it didn't look at all as he remembered it. He'd only been there in darkness, of course, and had no time to observe its appearance before finding himself at the bottom. His glimpses with the flashlight had shown it to be fairly wide, however, and about fifteen feet deep at the point where he'd holed up. What was in front of him could only be about twelve feet across, but was a lot deeper. The sides were extremely steep — far too steep and rocky for him to consider climbing down.

He must have overshot his position of the night before.

He glanced right, the direction he'd have to go. Tough-looking trees and bushes grew right up to the side of the drop. He could go back around the long way, but it was a long way. Hence the name. Left looked more clear, but was going in the wrong direction. And it was steep.

Christ, he thought, wearily. His stomach was full of razor blades. His head felt like an avalanche of glass. Did he even need the bag? Maybe it was the smell of alcohol which attracted the bear. Maybe it was still there, waiting. And drunk. He stood irresolute.

Get the fucking bag, he thought. What else are you going to do?

He trudged up along the edge of the gully. It began to narrow, but not enough that jumping it was a possibility. Then he hit a bank of trees and had to dodge left for a little while before skirting back around to the gully.

He stopped. A tree lay across the gap. It had fallen there from the other side, chance bringing it down neatly so there was plenty of trunk either side of the void it spanned.

Tom limped up to it. The trunk was fairly large, perhaps two feet in diameter. The wood looked to be in good shape. He gave an experimental tug on a branch, and it rebounded crisply back, suggesting the tree hadn't been down for long. So it wouldn't be rotten. Maybe. It went from the side where he was to the side where he wanted to be. He could walk nine, ten feet, instead of many hundred.

Right — but nine feet during which there'd be nothing underneath him but empty space, and beneath that a lot of sharp rocks. Nine feet across a trunk that wasn't superwide, might be slippery, and which certainly had snow on it: nine feet which would be hard even if he didn't have a bad ankle.

Tom looked away, knowing he'd be taking the long way around.

Don't be a wanker all your life.

The voice which popped into Tom's head surprised him. Partly because it deployed a term (WANKER: orig. 'one who masturbates'; now vernacular for 'a weak and useless individual' [vulg.]) which he had only ever heard in the grim British indie movies Sarah liked to rent and which he thought should come with subtitles and a Valium and something to read while they were on. But mainly it surprised him because the voice sounded so impatient, as if he was making a big deal out of something very simple.

'My ankle's hurt,' he said, petulantly.

The response was instantaneous. It's hurt whichever way you go. This is shorter.

'It's dangerous.'

Five paces? Six? You can't take five steps in a straight line?

'If I fall on level ground, I won't break my back or pelvis or skull.'

So don't fall.

Tom's head swirled for a moment, as if some hidden deposit of alcohol had tardily arrived in his brain. When the world stopped moving, he stepped up to the log and put his good foot on it. The trunk didn't seem to move. It was big and solid. It would take his weight. His mind was the only thing which would make it harder to cross than a stretch of icy pavement.

He slid his foot a little further along, accidentally brushing some snow off in the process. Interesting, he thought, immediately seeing the possibilities: don't walk it — slide it. That way you don't have to lift your feet (less scary), and clearing the snow will make the next step less slippery too. He poised his weight and lifted the other foot up onto the trunk, so that he was standing sideways on it.

He stood there a moment, testing his balance, looking like the world's loneliest and coldest surfer.

Then he started out along the trunk.

He slid his left foot out, tested, put his weight on it. Then the right. Left foot right on the edge now. He slid it out about nine inches.

The more steps it takes, the more likely you'll fall.

Aloud, Tom said, 'Who made you the boss of me?' Nonetheless, he pushed his left foot out six inches, pulled the right along to match. He was now officially standing in mid-air, though a dive would take him back to solid ground. He wasn't sure where to look. Not down, obviously. Not up. So straight ahead, presumably. Out over the gully. Yi — no, not out there. Shit no.

To the left. To where you're going.

He turned his head. Good move — the other side really wasn't that far away. He slid his left foot again. Then his right. Left, then right. He was now nearly in the middle of the trunk.

He slid out again. His foot hit a knot in the trunk, jarring up his leg. He thought he was okay but then realized he wasn't. His left leg was fine, but the rest of him was suddenly unsure. His torso felt three feet deep and heavily weighted towards the back. He sensed the mass of the planet beneath, willing him to join it.

Left. Look left. He felt weightless for a moment, but he wasn't falling. He found himself again, and was still. He stared at the end of the trunk, half hidden in the white-topped bushes, and made it the centre of everything that was flat. He kept going.

Slid and pulled once more. He was over halfway. He slid again, feeling a strange kind of exhilaration. A lot of the time he felt like a character in a video game controlled by someone's mother, allowed a turn for comedy value on Christmas Day. But just for once…

He slid and pulled. He slid and pulled, and he didn't fall.

He shuffled sideways a final time, and then he was standing on the trunk still, but over land. He paused, suddenly incapable of falling. He looked out over the gully, feeling as if he was hanging in the air, then he stepped off onto the ground.

For a moment the earth too felt insubstantial, as if it could sway and tip and fade. He took another step away from the gully, and it settled. He'd made it.

Looking back and forth along the other side confirmed what he'd suspected: hard going in both directions. Whereas on this side it was going to be a relative stroll.

Nine feet, instead of hundreds.

'Thank you,' he said, into the silence.

The voice said nothing. Up above, the sky was turning grey.

— «» — «» — «»—

He walked for ten minutes, straying recklessly close to the edge. For the moment, in his own small world out here in the trees, things were good. It seemed to be getting colder, unbelievably, but he could take it. He could do stuff, it turned out. He could walk on air. He wasn't surprised when he spotted his backpack below, even though it was largely covered in snow and would have been easy to miss. His luck had rebooted, that's all. The world was looking after him, for once. He held onto a small tree, leaned forward and beamed down at it. It was surrounded by disturbances in the snow, no doubt caused by his feet and hands as he tried to take flight.

But no BEAR.

He moved on, keeping to the lip of the gully until he came to a place where he could scramble down. He noticed some broken branches and, using his newly acquired bush sense, guessed that was probably where he'd fallen the night before. The second descent went much better, with only a slightly hectic slide at the end. He at least reached the bottom on his feet. Feeling as if he was completing some kind of circle, he limped over towards the bag.

It lay open, glass glinting inside. Next to it was a bottle, empty. There were a few scattered packets and a handful of the pills themselves, unnaturally blue. All in a little nest, a clear patch with the wall behind, the stream a way in front, bushes on either side. Tom stared down at it all, feeling like a ghost.

All at once his mouth filled with water, and his stomach lurched.

He took a hurried step backwards, not wanting to be too close to the backpack for fear of it pulling him back into the night, and then suddenly he was sitting down, the impact juddering up through his spine, the bushes flickering and wavering in front of his eyes.

After a few minutes' deep breathing the pain abated a little. Could be hangover. Could be the sight of the pills eliciting a DON'T DO THAT AGAIN response from the brain in his guts. It could actually just be violent hunger. It was hard to tell. His body had turned into a tower of Babel. Everything below his throat felt as if it had been replaced by the operational but incompatible gastrointestinal tract of an alien species: it was saying things, and saying them loud, but he didn't know what they were.

Oh, he felt bad.

He hunched forward involuntarily. He was shivering now, too. Shivering hard. With a twist of real fear he realized he felt broken, damaged somewhere deep inside the core. He looked up at the sky and saw it was now darker still, a speckled and leaden grey. It looked like it was going to snow again, this time seriously.

What was he going to do?

Even if there were enough pills left, he didn't believe he'd be able to take them. He didn't think he'd be able to do anything, ever. There was no way forward. Nothing to do except sit, but how could he sit when he felt this bad? Vodka would at least make his insides feel warm. The prospect was not in the least appealing — in the light of relative sobriety he was prepared to admit that he preferred his vodka with tonic water and a slice of lime, in moderate quantities, and drunk somewhere warm — but it was all he had.

He pushed himself forward onto his knees, and reached out to the backpack with a hand that was shaking badly. Just the shivers. Just the plain old been-out-all-night shivers. Nothing worse. Please. Not a sign that his whole system was fizzing and sparking like a cut electric cable.

He touched the lip of the bag, and then stopped.

He pulled his hand back. There was something that didn't look right. Spots of something on the broken glass at the opening to the bag. It had a once-bright but now dull quality that he recognized. There were quite a few instances of it on the back of his hand.

Blood?

He pulled himself closer, wincing. It certainly looked like dried blood. A couple of splashes. He turned his hand palm up: no new cuts. He'd have felt it, even this cold. He was pretty sure he hadn't done it the night before either. He'd had no need to put his hand near the broken glass.

He carefully lifted the lip of the bag between two fingers, and peered in. Inside he saw broken glass iced together. A whole pack of pills he hadn't gotten to. Bits of plant, presumably accumulated by the previous day's stumblings. Aha — a last half-bottle, unbroken.

And a couple more red-brown spots on a piece of glass.

Tom carefully picked up the shard. It was blood, and he was certain it wasn't his. He'd upended the bag the night before to get what he needed. He hadn't stuck his hand in there.

But the BEAR evidently had.

It couldn't have smelt food — there wasn't any in the bag, never had been — but the scent of alcohol must have been overpowering. Maybe it knew the odour already, from rootling through bins round the back of small towns. And that's why, presumably, it hadn't chased him. Too busy trying to get a drink.

Tom hurriedly put the piece of glass back down. The reality of what had happened in the night had previously been sealed behind hangover and darkness and a few molten snatches of sleep. This wasn't. This was right here in front of him.

He'd very, very nearly been attacked by a bear.

Christ.

He levered himself to his feet. This wasn't a good place to be. He didn't want to be here when something big got the scent again and decided to come back for a second look. He grabbed the unbroken half-bottle out of the mess, put it in the backpack. As he prepared to go he noticed something stuck in the bush to his right.

It took a moment for him to work out that it was hair. Quite long hair, dark brown. A few thick strands, caught in the sharp upper twigs of the bush.

He tried to picture a bear. He knew they didn't have short fur, like a cat or something, a pelt, but these hairs were a good six to nine inches long. Could that be right? Were bears that shaggy?

Tom suddenly had a very strong desire to be somewhere else, regardless of how hard it was getting there. His body would just have to make the best of it.

He limped quickly out of his nest of the night before, and looked around for the flashlight. Then he saw the footprints in the snow and realized it hadn't been a bear after all.

4

At just after eight a.m. in North Hollywood, Officer Steve Ryan was sitting in the patrol vehicle waiting for Chris Peterson to come back across the street with coffee. Officer Peterson was taking a while because he'd been grabbing a quick bite to eat while he was at the stand, which he thought Ryan didn't know about but after two years you understood an awful lot about the person you shared a car with. Chris had done this sneak-eat thing pretty much every morning for six weeks because his wife was into some complex health magic which meant that there had to be effectively no edible food in the house at all. He was being stand-up over it and more or less sticking to it with her — can eat this, can't eat that, can't eat much in fact and none of it at the same time — even though being a cop on a diet made you feel an ass (and was an invitation for other cops to rip the piss out of you). So if he was sneaking some jump-start carbs by wolfing a pastry before his shift — and he was, because he always came back looking down the street and wiping sticky fingers on the back of his pants, plus he volunteered to get the coffees every morning now whereas in the past he had to be kicked out the car with both feet — then Ryan wasn't going to make a big deal of it. He knew how it was with wives. As he sat there waiting, eyes squinting against the slanting light coming in through the windshield, he was secretly grateful for an extra five minutes to get his head in gear. He felt tired and his eyes were dry and his shoulders ached. He had been up talking with Monica until three. It had been the usual subject, discussed in the usual way, reaching the usual lack of conclusion. It wasn't that he didn't want kids: he absolutely did. It's just they had been trying for over two years (month in, month out, in, out, no pun intended) and the process was beginning to pall. Don't matter how much you love your wife, or how attractive you found her still, being required to perform at very specific times — then and only then, the urgency of the need retreating to about nil for the rest of the month — it soon stopped being something you thought of as recreation. It became a job, and he already had one of those. True, hadn't been much upward progress there either, but at least he had hopes, wasn't debarred from success by brute biology. He was getting pally with some of the detectives. Not pushy. Just listening, trying to understand what they did. Just because it never worked out for his old man didn't mean it was going to be the same for him. Right place at the right time, a pair of hands in a trophy arrest, could be you're seconded onto a team. Suddenly you're not just a stiff in a car out checking windows and breaking up domestic disputes (Ryan knew about wives, of all kinds, and he'd learned a great deal about husbands too) and chasing crackheads down alleys while their friends hooted and jeered and threw bottles at you. It was all a matter of hard work and luck, and Ryan didn't mind either of those. No, the stuff that wore you down was where no amount of work seemed to make a difference, where the luck simply wasn't there and you couldn't seem to explain that to someone who had their heart set on the world being the way it was supposed to be, instead of the way it was. Monica got very upset when they talked about it and he didn't blame her. It made him sad too, sad and tired and depressed. He wanted to be a father. Always had. Man, he'd even consider that shit with the test tubes, assuming they could afford it. He'd said so last night, that they should look into it, and that helped a little though then they went into a discussion of how they couldn't possibly afford it and so the whole thing was still a swirling vortex of despair. He said maybe they could afford it, if they saved, didn't take a vacation for a couple years, if he made the squad. She said no, they couldn't. He said yes, maybe. She said no, and started crying… and so it went, until he didn't know what was left for him to say and it was three a.m. and nobody had been made any happier and he really had to go to bed. She'd been a little quiet when he left that morning. Probably just wiped out. He'd give her a call in a little while, check she was okay. Assuming he ever moved from this spot: what the fuck was taking Chris so long? In the time he'd been gone, he could have gone to a Denny's and sneaked a whole breakfast complete with home fries and French toast. Ryan leaned across the passenger seat, caught a glimpse of his partner up at the counter, shoving something in his mouth. He smiled, sat back. Whatever. Let the man eat. The radio was quiet, for the moment. It wasn't like the city would run out of crime and they'd be sent home without pay. That didn't seem likely at all.

'Good morning,' said a voice.

Ryan turned to see a guy standing on the pavement by the car. He was wearing worn green combat pants and a dusty grey vest. The sun was behind his head. He was tan and his hair was cropped short and he wore small round glasses. He looked the kind of guy you might see busking on a street corner, or running a Pilates course down on Venice beach. He didn't look the kind of guy to do what he did next, which was pull out a big handgun from behind his back and shoot Steve Ryan twice in the head.

— «» — «» — «»—

By the time Nina got there the road was cordoned and a decent crowd had already gathered. A lot of civilians but a lot of cops too. They were standing in clumps, looking angry and impotent, largely staying away from the bench where a tall red-headed cop was sitting staring down at the pavement. Other officers, one male, one female, stood on either side of this man. The woman had a hand on his shoulder. The male was saying something. It seemed unlikely that either of these well-meant gestures would be making Patrolman Peterson feel any better about the fact his partner had been shot dead while he was across the street feeding his face.

She parked up and walked quickly across the road, seeing Monroe was already present, getting harangued. A couple of cops put their hands up as she approached, but she had her card ready.

'Nina Baynam,' she said. 'Feds.'

Sometimes she said Feds or Feebs rather than FBI, and sometimes it made a difference, heartily using a more casual term or one they might employ themselves. Not this morning, evidently, and those three letters had not been a passport to respect even before Waco and allied screw-ups had given everybody new angles from which to bust their balls. On every body-language wavelength the cops broadcast a single question: what the fuck are you doing here?

Nina was wondering the same thing. She walked over to Monroe, who turned away from two other cops and started talking hard and fast without preamble.

'Two witnesses. One saw it from a third-storey room in there — ' he pointed across the street at a battered-looking building with bleached-out signs offering weekly lets at suspiciously low rates ' — and the other was at the coffee stand. Ryan and Peterson arrived about seven thirty, Peterson goes across the street leaving Ryan in the car. Ryan has his eyes shut some of the time. He doesn't see a short-haired white male in glasses, trim build, dressed in either green and brown or brown and grey, coming down from there and approaching the vehicle with a hand behind his back.'

Her boss pointed again, this time up the shallow rise of parking lot which led to the entrance to The Knights, a two-storey courtyard motel. 'Guy walks straight down here and stands next to the patrol car. He says something and then takes his shots. Bam, bam. Then he's gone.'

'Gone how?' Nina said, turning to look around. 'The guy's partner is like thirty feet away.'

Monroe nodded towards an alley a little further along the street. 'At the speed of sound. Found the gun up there. By the time Peterson's heard the shots, checked Ryan, started running, it's too late. The shooter's vanished.'

He started walking towards the motel. Nina kept pace.

'Nobody knows anything about Ryan except he's a decent cop. Not the brightest, uniform for life, but doing a good job. No one has anything about him being on the pad or dirty in any way. So it looked like they just have a random psycho cop-killing until someone talks to the manager up here.'

The entrance to The Knights was wide enough to drive a car through. There would be no reason to do this, however, because the inside held only a small and scrubby courtyard with the long-dead remains of a small concrete fountain. A few plants were trying to prove life could triumph anywhere. They looked dispirited. On the right was a grey cinder block addition holding ice and coke machines. Cops were milling all around the other side, stepping back reluctantly as Monroe led Nina into the glass-fronted office. They had the air of people who'd been stopped from doing a job they thought was theirs. There were four more cops inside the office, along with a fat guy in baggy jeans and a clean white tee shirt.

'Tell us what you told them,' Monroe said. Tall, hair cropped around a receding line and with the shoulders of a long-ago college boxer, people tended to speak up when he asked a question.

'I don't know anything,' the guy whined, for nothing like the first time. 'Just what the chick in twelve told me when she checked out. Said there'd been noise from next door, this was a couple days ago. I only mentioned it to the officer because they said the guy who shot the cop had short hair and glasses and I thought, you know, that's kind of what the guy in room eleven looked like, in fact.'

Nina nodded. Her eyes were on a magazine half hidden under the counter. The manager saw her looking, and seemed to find it kind of a thrill. 'I just adore that stuff,' she said, looking back up at him. 'Makes me want to fuck every guy on the planet. You want to get on it right here, right now?'

The guy looked away. 'As I thought,' Nina said. 'So meantime give us the keys to rooms ten, eleven, twelve.'

Monroe took the keys and pointed at three of the cops. They followed the agents as they left the office and stepped into the courtyard. Room eleven was four doors down on the right-hand side. The drapes were still drawn. Two of the policemen were given the keys to the doors either side.

They drew their weapons, opened the doors quietly. Pulled them wide and then slipped inside the rooms.

A minute later both came out. One shook his head. The other said, 'I could hear something. Could be someone talking.'

'Three areas,' the other cop observed, quietly. 'Sitting room, bedroom in back, bathroom.'

'Okay,' Monroe said. For just a second Nina thought she saw him thinking about handing the remaining key to one of the cops, then realizing how it would look. That kind of thing — plus just turning away from people like they didn't matter, the way he had when she'd arrived — was precisely why the street cops didn't love them like brothers. She got her own gun out, holding it with both hands and clear of her body. She was careful not to let anyone see a small wince. Three months now, and her right arm still gave her trouble. Two doctors and three physiotherapists had told her there was nothing wrong with it any more. Nina thought maybe it was the small round scar on the upper right side of her chest talking, saying it knew all about guns now and wanted nothing to do with them. Tough, in that case. FBI agents are constrained to have their weapon with them at all times. She slept with hers under the bed.

Monroe squared up to the door, Nina just behind. He told the cops to be ready to follow, but to give them time. They nodded. They looked more up for this than she felt, but that was part of being a guy, she knew. Any one of them looked wobbly in front of a colleague, no one would want them at their back again.

Monroe slipped the key in the lock. Turned it. Waited a second, then pushed it. The door opened to a dark room. The drapes on the other side were drawn too. It was warm.

'This is the FBI,' Monroe said. His voice was steady. 'Put down any weapons and come out with your hands up. This will be your only warning.'

They waited. No one said anything. No one appeared. The old conundrum, polarizing options for the near future: either there was no one in the room and everything was cool and after-the-fact, or there was a very bad man inside and he had in mind shooting him some cop.

Nina was in position. She stepped into the room.

Leathery dark. Heavy air. Really, really warm, like someone turned the aircon off twenty-four hours before. Room a square, holding battered sofa, two chairs, desk, big old prehistoric television. No personal effects evident. Flicker-light from doorway in corner on courtyard side. Door partially ajar.

Also a low sound. Very likely television.

Who's watching it?

Nina side-stepped across into the body of the room, making space for Monroe. He came in silently, hand held back to signal the cops to stay where they were. Once he was positioned on the door to the other room she turned, moved silently to the cupboard. Held her gun short arm while she eased it open.

Empty but for the smell of dust. Left it open. Turned on her right foot to face back to the room, nodded to Monroe. The cops at the doorway stood quiet and ready. Monroe moved towards the door to the second room. Nina came up, a yard and a half behind. Stopped.

Everything flattens out into now.

Monroe pushes the door gently with his left hand. It swings. Reveals more of the side wall of the bedroom, a grey-blue shifting light, and a little more sound. The sound has that rustling, high-pitched note above the low rumble. It's television for sure. Sometimes people leave them on. It's company. They forget when they leave. They figure who cares, it's not my electric buck.

Monroe takes another step. This puts him on the threshold. A beat. He takes one more and turns quickly, gun pointed past the door into an area Nina cannot yet see.

But she sees Monroe's upper back do a kind of thud, as if his leading foot found itself two inches lower than he expected.

Another long beat. 'Ma'am?'

Nina's stomach goes cold. She hears Monroe swallow with his mouth open, a dry click. He is staring. He is wired. He is ready to shoot. He takes another half pace forward, seemed to bend down and look upwards. Then he side-steps out of sight. There is silence for a moment, then a quiet swishing sound. Silence again.

'Nina,' he says, finally. 'Come in here.'

She knew that meant just her, so she raised a hand to signal the other guys to hold position. She allowed her other arm to drop a little, but wasn't yet ready to let go of the gun.

The bedroom seemed even hotter than the other room. There was a strong odour. The television was a low burble up high to the left, fixed to the wall with a metal bracket. Monroe stood the other side of a queen-size bed.

A woman sat in the bed. She was in her late twenties. She had long brown hair. She didn't move when Nina entered, because she was dead. She was sitting bolt upright in bed, her head flopping slightly forward. She was dressed in well-worn blue cotton night clothes with a floral motif. Her stomach had begun to distend. Her face looked like painted putty. Her eyes were open. So was her mouth. Something had been put inside it.

'Jesus,' Nina said.

She leaned forward. The object in the woman's mouth was about the size of a waitress's notepad, about a quarter of an inch thick, two inches wide, and probably a little over three inches long, though it was difficult to be sure without removing it. It seemed to be made of shiny metal. A very narrow label along the protruding end had a string of numbers and short lines on it.

'What the hell is that?' Monroe said. He was breathing hard, and a line of sweat glinted on one temple.

Nina shook her head. 'I don't know.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Thirty minutes later Nina stepped outside. The first wave of forensic geeks had arrived. With the drapes still drawn and the heat still trapped, it was like milling around in a crowded, hellish cupboard. Nina made sure to take a thorough look around the suite, which was always easier when it had been established you weren't going to be shot at, and then left. Monroe was still inside. It would take the arrival of cameras to flush him out.

There were no other bodies in the room. The swish Nina had heard was the sound of Monroe checking the bathroom. It was devoid of personal possessions. There was no sign of the clothes the woman must have been wearing when she arrived. You can't wander into a motel dressed in pyjamas. Even at a place like The Knights. You would normally think to bring some toiletries, too, a handbag. There would be identification of some kind, somewhere, however accidental. Cops were already canvassing missing persons reports, but something told Nina news wouldn't arrive soon.

She walked out through a sunny courtyard which was full of yet more cops and the quickly moving bodies of civilians who thought they were going to be able to check out of this death block quickly and get back to their anonymous lives, but who were about to spend a large number of hours being asked a small number of questions. That evening they would see, on television, the place they'd spent the night before, as the media repeated its name again and again to make it one of those venues the mention of which would tug at the memory for years and possibly decades to come. Nobody involved was going to forget today in a hurry, least of all the woman Nina saw when she left the courtyard and walked back out into the lot. Patrolman Peterson was still sitting on the bench. Two of his colleagues were trying to restrain this woman, whose name was Monica, who had arrived to find her husband's remains had already been taken to the morgue and who was screaming at his ex-partner because there was nothing else to do.

Only when Nina was clear of the entrance and standing some distance from anyone else did she get out her cell phone. She walked to where she couldn't be overheard, and hit John Zandt's number on speed-dial. He didn't answer after twelve rings, and she was put through to the phone's answering service.

'Hi, it's me,' she said to the machine. 'I know you don't want to talk about this kind of thing any more. But I could do with your help.' She hesitated, not knowing what else to say, then added: 'Hope you're okay.'

Then cut the connection, and stood irresolute. For just a moment she felt odd, fluttery at the back of the neck, as if someone was watching her.

She turned, but there was no one. No one she could see, anyhow.

— «» — «» — «»—

At just after two she sat stirring a coffee while her boss talked on the phone. They were perched outside a scruffy cafe half a block from The Knights. All but one of the squad cars had now moved on to other things, but from where she sat she could see four unmarked vehicles that were part of the investigation. She sipped her coffee and watched as further pieces of Room 11 were hauled out to be analysed in depth. It had been established that the room had been rented five days before, cash in advance. Nina hoped he was being grilled, yet again, and she hoped it was somewhere airless and hot and that they took their time.

Monroe closed his phone. 'It's done,' he said, with evident satisfaction. 'Olbrich is assembling a task force: RHD of course, us, FD&D, the whole Serious Crime Cluster Fuck. This needs to be kept tight. There's a lot of angry officers around.'

'Clipping a cop in broad daylight. Even by wacko standards, that's extreme.'

'Wacko?'

'Come on, Charles.' Nina had lost patience with official nomenclature round about the time she assisted with the extrication of a young black kid from a trash can. The kid had been there a week, in weather as warm as today's. His mother ID'd the body, then killed herself three weeks later by walking off the Palisades. That had been a few years ago. Monroe still went through the motions of using impersonal and uninflected terminology for people whose deeds shredded whole families and histories in their grubby hands. 'What would you call him? Inadequately socialized?'

'This is going to happen fast,' Monroe said, ignoring her. 'A cop-killing in broad daylight. This is not a man who has control of himself any more. We're going to have to hit the ground fast.'

Nina rolled her eyes. Out of control, begging to be caught. And yet nowhere to be seen. The most high-profile investigation she had yet been involved in — officially at least — had been the Delivery Boy murders back in 1999/2000. Again, here in Los Angeles, and also working under Charles Monroe. He'd made similar assumptions then, about a man who'd taken the lives of three bright and worldly young women without leaving a trace. He had killed again, more than once, and then disappeared, and had never been caught. Monroe had floated on to the next job, onwards and upwards. The girls' parents still took the world one day at a time. 'Question is, will there be others?'

'There may be, yes. That's what I'm saying. Unless we…'

'No. I mean have there been any before this? If this is the end, as you think, where is the beginning? What got him to here? What's this guy spiralling out from?'

'People are on it. LAPD are cross-checking as we speak.'

'And we still have no idea who she is.'

'No purse, no possessions apart from old pjs, dickhead behind the desk says he never saw her before she was dead. A photo will be prepared once they've cleaned her up a little: people will be on the street with it by the end of the afternoon. You know what that thing in her face was?'

Nina shook her head, a coppery taste in her own mouth. She had seen many dead bodies, some of them in states around which she'd had to build a wall in her head, so she didn't come upon the memory unexpectedly. But there was something about the ones where they did things to the victims' mouths. Sexual mutilation you almost took for granted. The mangling of a public part of the body, like the eyes or mouth or hands, somehow seemed a more social desecration. Sexual was private, a personal assault; public said LOOK, UNIVERSE, AT WHAT I HAVE DONE. It was outward-directed, some statement designed to change the world. Or so it seemed to her.

'A hard disk,' Monroe said. 'A small one, like in a laptop. One of the techs recognized it before it was even out of her head.'

'No prints?'

He shook his head. 'Clean. But someone in a lab is finding what else it can give us. There's a serial number, for a start. It came from somewhere, was bought somewhere. And there may be something left on it, of course. We'll know tonight.'

He caught the expression on Nina's face this time. 'He left it there for a reason, Nina. Let's get back to work.'

He stood up, thumb already dialling another number on his cell. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She wouldn't want to be Charles Monroe's phone, Nina thought. That was a job for a phone with tough abs.

She drained the rest of her coffee, aware of his eyes on her, critical. 'What, Charles?'

'How's your arm holding out?'

'Fine,' she said, irritably. He wasn't asking about her arm. He was reminding her of unfinished business and of why their professional relationship had taken its second turn for the worse. She got the message. 'Good as new.'

He looked like he was going to say something else but then got an answer on his cell, and turned and strode away, already in mid-flow. Someone was learning just what a damn fine SAC Monroe was; how in control, how just right on top of things.

As she followed him, Nina checked her own phone for something like the twentieth time. She saw there was a text message from Zandt, at last, and quickly called it up.

It said: I'M IN FLORIDA.

'Oh for fuck's sake,' she muttered, stuffed the phone back in her bag, and walked back out into the heat.

5

I checked into the Armada on Powell, in San Francisco downtown not far from Union Square. It was appealingly expensive and had a guy dressed as a Spanish soldier standing on the pavement outside. Passing tourists were taking photographs of each other with him, presumably so that back home they could tell their friends that here they were, with a guy in a costume, outside a hotel they weren't staying in. By the time I was settled it was too late to do the big thing on my agenda, so I went for a walk instead. As I walked I thought about what I knew, which boiled down to this: I had been wrong about just about everything to do with my life. I had believed I'd been born to Don and Beth Hopkins in Northern California, where they had been living well-tempered lives of average tedium. They mowed the yard and kept the car clean and they bought enough material goods to keep the gods of commerce smiling upon them. My father built up a realty business and, after I'd left home, this led to them moving to Dyersburg. He had continued to enjoy some success as a broker of luxury houses until a car crash had taken both of their lives. But on the day after their funeral, when I'd gone to their house to try to understand what I was supposed to do about it, I'd found a message. It had been hidden in such a way as to draw the attention only of someone who knew my father very well.

The message had said, simply, that they weren't dead.

This is the news everyone wants to hear — everyone, that is, whose relationship to their parents is marred merely by distance — and it was enough to make me spend the afternoon searching their house. I found the videotape my father had sealed into a VCR in his study, and this ultimately led to my discovering just how wrong I had been about my life. Wrong — or deliberately misled.

I had thought I was an only child. A section in the video showed me with a brother of the same age, a brother deliberately abandoned on a city street, somewhere back in the late 1960s.

I had thought my parents' death had been an accident. They weren't my parents and it wasn't. They had been murdered by the group my natural father had belonged to, thirty-five years earlier. This group was called the Straw Men, and believed themselves the only portion of humanity uninfected by a virus promoting social conscience above the cold-hearted individualism they believed inherent to our species. Whether they genuinely thought this, or it was just a convenient cover for acts of violence and depravity, was not clear. What was clear was that the group was wealthy and well connected. It was also evident that their point man, a person who called himself the Upright Man but could more accurately be designated as Paul, my lost brother, was about as dangerous an individual as could be imagined. The night before Bobby Nygard died we watched a government tape together, a compilation of the world's atrocities over the previous two decades. Shootings, explosions, mass killings. We saw the Upright Man in the background of a number of these events, mutely claiming the glory. In addition he had been acting as a procurer for the occupants of The Halls, a group of men — and, for all I knew, women — involved in considered and repeated acts of serial murder.

The first steps had been easy. I did my initial research a hundred miles down the road from Relent, sitting in a wired coffee bar with a laptop. I hated the idea that someone might think I was writing a novel, and kept glaring at people who smiled encouragingly at me, but I needed the net access. What I had to do first was confirm the city in which my sibling had been abandoned. Paul had sent me a message in which he claimed he had been left in San Francisco, but I was not inclined to believe anything he said without evidence. I had nothing else to go on except the short section at the end of the videotape my father had left me, which I had converted to a DVD.

The last section was in three parts. The first showed a train journey. There was no locating information — but I knew my father well enough to be confident he would not have included it just for background colour. So my guess was the first section was to signal a journey had been undertaken — and that it was far enough from our house to make sense by rail, but not far enough to take a plane. This gave me a choice of maybe thirty or forty cities and towns in or around Northern California or Oregon.

The tape cut then to a wide street in a downtown area. The camera followed my mother as she walked down a sidewalk, hands down and out of sight: holding, as the final section would make clear, the hands of two young boys. There was not much else to see except passing examples of the fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated store fronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except…

I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name — Hannington's.

Ten minutes on the web told me there were no department stores by that name still in operation in the US, or at least none who'd made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.

I tracked down a selection of 'San Francisco of Yesteryear' sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city's days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington's. They couldn't afford any of it. They just went to look.

I flipped back to the freeze frame. I had misread the sign. The angle wasn't good, and sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington's still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. Further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and been a big deal in its day. Big enough of a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.

So. San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.

— «» — «» — «»—

Fenwick was ten minutes' walk from the hotel. The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean grey pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn't hard to see I was in the right area.

When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington's, I ground to a halt. People cruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old store front had been split into two, and now held a Gap and a vast make-up emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.

I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn't remember having trodden this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother's hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different from me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.

Time is strange.

'You in a fucking coma, man?'

I turned round to see a shithead in a suit standing behind me, unable or unwilling to do as everyone else had and step around me. I was about to explain how stupid this was but then realized I didn't want to get into another fight, even a verbal one.

I apologized, moved aside. 'Asshole,' he said.

A woman's voice said, 'Oh grow up.'

I turned and saw it was the woman with the stroller, who had stopped to deliver this advice to the other man.

He glared at her, then stormed off up the street. The woman winked at me and went her own way. In the trivial way cities sometimes do to you, I felt I had been taken inside.

I glanced across once more at the corpse of Harrington's, then set off up around the other side of the square and headed west. I had a print-out of several frames from the final part of this section of the video, which showed the area where the child had been abandoned. I didn't have much hope of finding the actual spot, or even the street. But Chinatown lay in that direction, and somewhere in there was a big bowl of food with my name on it.

Sometimes you have to keep your goals to a manageable size.

— «» — «» — «»—

Next morning I was on the phone at five after nine. By ten thirty all I had established was that you didn't get information out of social services in a hurry. After a while I had spent so long pushing buttons in menu systems that I began to be afraid I might eventually be put back through to myself, which I knew would freak me out. So I got onto the street and walked over there instead.

Within five minutes I wished I'd stuck with the phone. There's nothing like the waiting room of any office of the government or its allies to remind you how lucky you are. You enter a non-place, non-time. You sit on battered chairs in murky blues and greens that nobody ever names as their favourite colour. You stare at signs that have no bearing on you, non-specific communiqu?s from the land that punctuation forgot. You wait until the waiting loses all sense of direction or purpose, until you become like a stone deposited in a field millennia ago by a careless glacier. You are here. This is all you have ever known. In the meantime you are stripped of any sense of individuality, of the idea that you might be different from anyone else in the room except by virtue of your particular problem; and so you become that problem, defensively, accepting it as identity, until it swells and suppurates and becomes all you are. As a species we'll tolerate being close to others, but not so close, and not in those circumstances and when we feel so small: we become rows of dry, fretting eyes, hating everyone around us and sincerely wishing our neighbour dead so we can move up one place in the line.

Or maybe that's just me.

I spent a long time waiting before I could even delineate my basic needs to someone. It then took us a while to get around the fact I didn't have a proper address, and for him to accept the Armada's details instead. I explained I had a brother who I thought had been taken into care in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s, probably around 1967; that I believed his first name to be Paul, that I was trying to trace him, and that I had no other information whatsoever except that he might have been found wearing a sweater with his name stitched into it. The man wrote down what I said but the looks he gave me suggested it was going to be a long day. Finally he handed me a number, and I was released back into the milling, coughing herd of problems, psychoses and whines.

Two hundred thousand years later, my number came up. I was invited down a long corridor and into a room in the far back of the floor, where a middle-aged black woman was sitting behind a desk covered in paper. A sign said she was called Mrs Muriel Dupree. The wall behind her was covered with posters in which one word in three was underlined and confidentiality was usually guaranteed.

'I can't help you,' she said, before I'd even sat down.

I sat down anyway. 'Why?'

'It's too long ago, that's why.' She referred to a piece of paper in front of her. 'Says here it's about a brother, and you think it was around 1967. That's before my time. It was also before a lot of other big things happened. Those, for a start.' She nodded towards a computer so old I wouldn't trust it to hold my laptop's coat. 'Only about twenty years ago all this stuff started going on computer, and then we had a bad fire in 1982 that took out the tapes and files in the basement, so we lost most of the information prior to that date anyhow. Even if something was written down about it the old-fashioned way, and it wasn't burned, it wouldn't have been a whole lot and you'd have a better chance of finding God than finding it now. I don't mean that personally. You may know Him already, in which case, good for you.'

She read the disappointment in my face, and shrugged. 'Things were different then. Today no one gets 'put up for adoption': the mother makes an adoption plan, there's legally binding contact arrangements and everybody gets that a blank canvas isn't the best thing for the child, that she or he needs to own the information about their own past, da da da. But back then it was 'Okay, you been fostered or adopted or whatever. Welcome to your new life. Don't look back, because there ain't nothing happy there to be found.' People would change the kids' names, birthdays, whatever. You know how they say the expression 'Put up for adoption' came about?'

I shook my head. I didn't know. I didn't care, either, but Mrs Dupree was evidently viewing me as a welcome five-minute break from people who would shout at her.

'Way, way back they would take the orphaned children out of the cities on the coasts, put them on trains. They'd take them out into the country and stop at the itty-bitty stations and the kids would literally be 'put up' onto the platforms in the hope that some farmer with a bit of room — and a need for some more labour — would take one or two in. Here's the kid. Feed it. That's that. Everything prior is dead and gone. Things weren't quite like that in the sixties, but in some ways they kind of were. Half the time the kids wouldn't get told they were adopted ever. Most of the rest, the parents would wait until they thought the children were old enough, which meant probably they'd been voting for a few years and were spaced out to all hell to find out mom and dad could have been hundreds of miles away at the moment they were born. It was not a good system and we know that now, but at the time it was thought to be for the best — and a whole lot of those children grew up to have happy and productive lives. Honey, you okay?'

'Yeah,' I said, looking back up at her from my hands, which I had been inspecting while wondering if I would ever have a happy and productive life myself. 'I didn't expect to get so stopped, so soon. And… this is very important.'

'I know it is. I understand.'

I shook my head, wanting to be somewhere else. 'You don't, I'm afraid, but thank you for your time.'

I got up and headed towards the door. My hand was on the handle when she asked: 'You sick?'

I looked back at her, confused and caught unawares. For a moment I thought she was suggesting something in particular.

'What do you mean?'

She raised an eyebrow. 'I mean is this about you having discovered that you have a medical condition which someone else needs to know about, because they might have it too?'

I looked her in the eyes and considered lying.

'No,' I said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. But there's something very wrong with him.'

I left her sitting behind her desk, and walked the long corridor back towards the outside world, where I could smoke, and breathe first-hand air, and where my problems were only part of what I was.

— «» — «» — «»—

'So what now, Bobby?'

Silence. He was AWOL again. Off somewhere in the spirit world with a beer and a grin, freaking out the other ghosts.

It was late afternoon and I had a beer of my own and was sitting at a table outside L'Espresso, a cafe-bar just on the corner up from the hotel. My feet felt aggrieved and full of bones. San Francisco is a pleasant enough place but frankly, it has too many hills.

In the face of the complete bust of the morning, I'd done the only other thing I could think of. Maybe, I thought, just maybe Paul hadn't even gotten into the system. Perhaps he'd been picked up by someone off the street, taken in by some kindly storekeeper's wife. I knew this was a fantasy born of Mrs Dupree's tale of baby trains in the Midwest, but I really didn't see any other avenue open to me and I had to do something to find him. I had drifted for too long. This was my job. No one else's.

In the absence of any useful visual reference, I tried another approach. I knew my parents weren't the people to just throw a child to the wolves. It was likely that they would have left the child somewhere they believed not to be openly dangerous, and where there would have been a decent flow of pedestrians. They were on foot. There is a limit to how far you want to walk with two-year-olds. Thus it was likely, or at least possible, that I was looking for a busy area within very easy walking distance of Union Square. Worst case, it would be somewhere that also matched that description, but on a tram line.

So I bought a map, and I walked areas like that, trying to find somewhere that matched my pictures. I found nothing, which meant I had nowhere else to go. I had tried, a couple of months back, responding to an email Paul had sent. The message was bounced back to me within the hour, his address unknown, unheard of, impossible to find. His messages were statements to me, not attempts at communication. There was no trail there either.

I finished my beer and walked the few yards back to the hotel. As I headed through the reception I heard someone call my name. I turned, slowly.

The fresh-faced young guy at the desk was holding up a piece of paper. 'There's a message for you.'

That sounded unlikely. Nobody knew where I was. The few people whose contact I might have welcomed would have called me on the cell phone. I walked over to the desk, feeling as if I had a target on my back.

I took the piece of paper, thanked him, and turned away. When I opened it I saw the following message:

'This lady might be able to help you. If she wants to.'

There was a phone number for this unnamed woman, and the name of the person who'd left me the message. Muriel Dupree.

— «» — «» — «»—

A phone call, a visit to the web and a fast shower and then I went back downstairs and hailed a cab from outside the hotel. It took a while to find someone who was prepared to take me as far as I needed to go, which was over the Bay and then some, and then, it turned out, a good way more. The one I wound up with was intent on exacting a bonus through my providing an audience for a long series of diatribes. Luckily he was too wrapped up in his own dialectic for me to have to play a speaking role. I grunted and said 'Right,' and watched out of the window as city and then suburbs passed me by.

The phone call I'd made had been to social services, hoping to speak to Mrs Dupree. This turned out to be as vain a hope as it sounds. I'd have been better off trying to go back in time. The web had told me the telephone number belonged to a Mrs Campbell, and also where she lived. It's one of the things I know how to do. I didn't know who this person was, or what Muriel thought she might have to say to me, but experience told me you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming. I do know what I'm talking about. Bobby and I met while working for the CIA.

Eventually the guy in front stopped talking and started glancing at a map. We pulled further and further from through routes and eventually hit some straggled blocks of residential streets. The neighbourhood was white semi rundown, no realtor's dream. We went back and forth through it for a little bit before I took hold of the map and guided us in. We stopped halfway up a street of small wooden houses each on their own very little plot.

I got out and paid. There was no one around.

'If you're looking to party, you've come to the wrong place,' the driver said, and then took off up the street.

I waited until he was out of sight, and then walked fifty yards back the way we'd come, having deliberately told him not quite the right address. Two turnings away was the road I actually wanted, and three minutes along it was the house I had come to visit.

I walked up a short path and two steps onto a porch area. It had been well painted in white, a few years before. It would soon need doing again. I looked for a bell and found none, so rapped on the door instead. I had no real doubt that the woman would be home.

After a few minutes I heard a sound behind the door, and then it was opened. In the shadows beyond was a small figure.

'Mrs Campbell?' I asked.

She said nothing, but slowly reached to the screen door and pushed it slightly ajar. Through the gap I saw a woman in her seventies, with hair that was still looked after, but a face that was grey and pouched; and also seemed to be in shock. She looked me in the eyes, then up and down, and then in the eyes again.

'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…'

'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.

Monroe stood and started talking to Olbrich in a way that firmly suggested Nina's further input was not required. She waited until they wandered over to the cops in the back of the room. Then she turned to the self-proclaimed wunderkind and spoke in her quietest, most friendly and appealing voice.

'Vince,' she said. 'This is where I ask you a favour.'

Twenty minutes later she left the building with something in her bag. She stepped out onto the street and into an evening that was still very warm, and wondered if she was deliberately trying to screw up her career.

She needed to talk to someone, but John wasn't answering the phone and the truth was he was more screwed up than her. There was one other option. She thought about it. Then she drove home sedately. By the time she pulled into her drive she'd made her decision. In the kitchen she picked up the phone and dialled. It rang and rang, but he didn't answer.

She left a message, feeling like just another voice on just another machine.

7

The back of Mrs Campbell's house looked out over a small patch of yard that said everything the front of her house tried not to. I stood in her kitchen, waiting as patiently as I could while she clattered about. I remembered my mother once telling me that the day you refused a hot beverage from an old person was the day they learned their company was not worth the wait. I know shit about plants, however, and the view was not interesting me in the slightest. It took everything I had not to go through and grab the old lady by the throat.

'Muriel was adopted herself,' she said, when she eventually led me through into the sitting room. 'Did she tell you that?'

'No,' I said, stepping quickly forward to take the tray from her. I don't know what the protocol on that is, but the way I saw it, I had about ten seconds before it wound up on the floor and I just wasn't waiting for her to make a new batch. 'She told me she couldn't help me, and that was pretty much that.'

'She can be that way. I knew her when she first started working there. She had some bad years at the start. First husband left her, cleaned out the house when he went. Beat up on her some, too. But come what may, she turned up on time and she did what she was supposed to do and she helped a lot of people out. Lot of the public go into a place like that big old department on Adams and forget the staff are human too, folk who got their own lives.'

'I understand it can be a difficult job,' I said. 'People can be hard to deal with.'

'Damn straight. Course, some of the folks work there are assholes, too.'

I laughed. She nodded approvingly. 'You should smile more,' she said. 'People look better that way. You especially. You don't smile, your face looks like you mean people harm.'

'I don't,' I said.

'So you say.'

'Mrs Campbell, I got the sense that…'

'Okay, I'm coming to it. You're looking for a brother, that's right? Muriel said you thought it would have been 1967. That would be correct. In fact, as I remember it was October. Though truth be told my memory really isn't what it was. I'm okay on things. Just not so good on pure facts.'

I nodded. My chest felt tight.

'A Chinese storekeeper found him on the street. A toddler. Don't know how long he'd been there, but he'd been crying a good while.'

'My parents had their reasons,' I said, feeling an absurd need to defend a decision which had not been my own, and which I barely understood. 'The background was complicated.'

'I'm sure. And they didn't dump him in the Tenderloin or the Mission District, which is something. Anyway, we knew he was called Paul because he had his name stitched right there on his sweater. Course a lot of times back then families would choose a new name anyhow, but Paul's name stuck. We did the usual checks but we had no way of tracing where he might have come from, and so he went into care here in the city. Stayed a few years, too. Usually finding a home for one that's little and cute isn't so hard. But with this one, it seemed like they wouldn't take.'

I wanted to know what she meant, but didn't want to interrupt her flow.

'I lost track of him for a while. There are a lot of kids. Next time I heard about him was when he was becoming a problem.'

'What kind of problem?'

'He'd be with a foster family for a few months, and then he'd be back, well ahead of schedule. At first I didn't pay much attention. It happens. But it started to become a thing. Hey, Paul's back. The temporary family couldn't… well, I was going to say 'couldn't cope', but it never seemed to be that. Not exactly. It was just, here he is, back again. And you need to bear in mind these were families who'd looked after a lot of kids, who were good at taking children in and making them feel all right. We'd have him placed and mentally wave him goodbye, then five weeks later I'd go into the home and there he'd be, sitting on a windowsill, looking out. I'd ask him what had happened and Paul would say the same thing the families did: it just didn't work out.'

She paused and took a sip of her coffee, as if considering long-ago mistakes. 'Anyway, finally it's decided that we need to step up the search for an adoptive family, some longer-term solution. So I talked to Paul, and told him that's what we were going to try to do. He nodded — he's about six, seven years old at this stage, bear in mind — and something tells me he's not agreeing with the idea, just recognizing it was what was going to happen and his role is just to let it roll on. So I asked him, didn't he want to find a permanent family? And he looked me right in the eyes and said, 'I had one. It's gone. When everything is in place, I'll get it back.''

I felt cold across the back of my neck. 'He remembered us?'

'Not necessarily. But he knew that once there'd been something else. You don't have to be the brightest firework in the box to realize his position wasn't natural, and he was a very smart kid. You could tell. That's all it was. Kids often get this feeling they've been abandoned, taken away from where they ought to be. Even the ones who haven't been adopted get it. The 'I should be a fairy princess' syndrome, or 'I am rightfully a king and when I cry the earth cries with me'. That's what I thought it was.'

I'd watched the abandonment part of the video many times without really confronting what it must have been like for the child who was left behind. In the last three months I hadn't really cared what he'd felt. I tried hard to do so now.

'Look,' I said, 'do you mind if I have a cigarette?'

'Go ahead,' she smiled. 'My husband used to smoke. I like the smell. You do know it will kill you, though?'

'Not going to happen,' I reassured her. 'Just a rumour put around by the gym addicts and health nuts.'

She nodded, no longer smiling. 'Yes, that's what he thought too.'

Something about the way she said it meant that though I smoked the cigarette down, I didn't enjoy it very much. 'So what happened when you looked for a permanent family?'

'I'll tell you.' She was quiet for a moment, before continuing. 'You know, I did that kind of thing for a long time, and I thought about it a lot. Most of me believes that where we're born seeps up into us like water from the soil, that we have leaves like trees do; and where the seed that becomes us first lands, that's who we are and that will determine the colour of our leaves — even if some bird picks us up that same afternoon and moves us fifty, a hundred miles away. Another bit of me thinks well, we're all God's children, aren't we? We're all just human. Isn't that what the Bible says? Two hundred years ago there was barely anything on this spot but birds and some animals and every now and then one of the native people, out hunting in a land so big they called it the world. Now we've taken it and call it our home and go fight wars over it in places half of us can't even spell. So what does it matter if a child is brought up by someone who isn't its kin, or in some other part of the country? Give them a good home and it could be nothing ever happened. I've seen it work hundreds of times. It isn't always easy, but it works, and it's one of the things makes me think we humans aren't such a bad lot after all.'

She shook her head. 'Finding an adopter for Paul just wasn't that simple. He was placed with three families after that. First lasted a year, another foster arrangement. They had an older daughter of their own already. I was dealing with my own things at that time, my husband got sick. I got into work one Monday morning with stuff on my mind and I was told that Paul was in a room on another floor. When people had turned up that day, he was sitting on the step outside. He hadn't run away. His family had put him there. After that, he was back and forth for a few months, then we found him someone else. That one lasted two whole years, by which time he was coming up to nine. Then one day there's a knock on my office door, and the mother was standing there. She told me, politely, that they'd had enough. That it wasn't Paul, not at all, but she had a little baby girl of her own now and they'd just decided fostering wasn't for them any more. I was mad at her, I can tell you. I nearly chewed her head off. That's not the way it works. But… you can't leave a child with people who don't want them any more.'

She picked up her cup, found it was cold, and put it back down. 'Do you…'

'I'm fine,' I said. 'Please go on.'

'I saw Paul again at the home, soon after that. I was feeling sorry for the kid. I told him I thought he'd had a raw deal. He just shrugged. 'I already have a family,' he said, again. I was concerned to hear that he was still thinking that way, and I tried to point out that wasn't the case, not really, and he had to help us in finding him a new set of people to be with. He'd once had a birth mother and father, and that would always be true. But now he had to be with someone new. 'Not them,' he said. 'They weren't real. But I had a brother. He was real. He was just like me.' He put a big stress on the 'just': just like me, was what he said.'

She smiled, faintly. 'I didn't believe him, of course. Thought he was just conjuring; there was something about him by then that was a little … I don't know. But when you turned up at the door tonight, I saw he was right after all. He did have a brother, just like him.'

I nodded, because I had to, but I was thinking that she was wrong and he was wrong too. I resembled him physically, that was all. The idea that the similarity went any deeper made me feel sick inside. I was surprised she could see the resemblance, too, if Paul had been a child when she last saw him.

'Then finally we found one that took. We got him placed with a family here in the city, and he was there a year before they moved out of state and he went with them. Whatever had been wrong, it got right. This time it worked. That's it.'

I looked at her.

'What?' she said.

I just kept looking at her.

She looked down at her hands. Her voice was quiet. 'What has he done?'

'Mrs Campbell,' I said. 'Tell me what you haven't yet said. I really have to know.'

She looked back up at me and when she spoke, she spoke fast and her eyes were flat. 'Few years later I ran into the husband from the couple who had been responsible for leaving him on the steps of the building. Hadn't seen anything of them since that day — you treat a child like that, you're off our books and going to court. Matter of fact, they nearly were, but the wife got sick, and so… it was let slide. I saw this guy across the street and deliberately looked away, but next thing I knew he was running towards me through the traffic. He came right up and stood in my way and he just started talking. He told me that his wife had a dog, back when Paul was with them. Said that most of the time the boy was good, very good, almost as if he had decided this was the way things were and he'd better make the most of it. Got along okay with their daughter most of the time. But this dog, Paul didn't get on with it, and he hated it when it barked, and said it looked at him funny. The dog was pretty old, his wife had had it since she was in college, and she loved it more than anything else in the world. Even more than him, her husband said, but that was okay: he liked the creature too. Big old dozy hound, didn't do much, just slept in the back yard and thumped his tail on the ground every now and then.'

She stopped, took a deep breath. 'Then one day Paul came running in the house and said the dog had an accident. They went running out back. The dog is lying half in the yard and half in the narrow road at the end. Its head is all messed up, like it got caught in a car's wheels. Paul's crying and stuff so the dog's quickly buried and it was only later that night, when they were sitting in bed, that his wife said something. She didn't look at her husband and she talked quietly, as if speaking to the wall. She said that in all the years they'd lived in that house, the dog had never gone anywhere near the back road. She said how it would be odd for someone to be driving along it too quickly to stop. She said, too, how it was strange that it was only the head that had been so badly injured, that both eyes, and the mouth, should be so damaged.

'Her husband thought about this. Nothing more was said that night. They went to sleep, eventually. That was a week before they brought Paul back. The husband admitted that they didn't know how they knew, that they had no proof. It could still just have been an accident. But that week was enough. His wife couldn't have him there any more.'

Mrs Campbell held a finger up to stop me saying anything. 'Now listen, you. This is just something a man said. I thought it could just be some kind of overblown lie to make up for what they'd done, and that was probably there to read in my face. The guy just shook his head, and said that if I'd had to look in his wife's eyes all the years since, I'd know what was the truth and what was not. Then he walked away, and I never saw him again.'

'Jesus,' I said.

'Right,' she nodded. 'And the last thing is just me, and I'm going to tell you it, and then you're going to go. Six, seven years after that, not long before I retired, there was a fire. Muriel said she'd told you. A lot of paperwork got lost.'

'Yes,' I said. 'She mentioned it.'

'Something she doesn't know about is this. I was late getting to work that morning — tram got fouled up, I had to walk the last six blocks. Time I got there, building was already up in smoke, people standing out on the street, everyone running back and forth. Could have been a very bad day. As it was, four people got killed and a lot more got burned. Fire went up when the building was full. And as I was standing there, trying to take it all in, I got a strange feeling in the back of my neck. I turned, and…'

Her throat clicked, dry as old bone. 'There he was. On the other side of the street, watching. Grown up a little now, a young man. Looked just like you do now, only thinner. I saw him just a second, and then he was gone. Or maybe I didn't see him at all. Sometimes I think I saw that face, and recognized it. Most of the time, I think it was just in my own head, which is why I never mentioned it to no one. Not even Muriel, and she was like a daughter to me. Still is, when she's got the time.'

'It was him,' I said, quietly. 'It was Paul.'

She gripped me by the arm, her fingers strong and sharp. 'What you must not think is this was anything to do with him being in care, with the people who fostered him, who tried so hard to give him a life. It was not. Those people helped bring up Muriel and thousands more like her.'

'I know,' I said. 'My parents weren't my real parents either, and they gave me more love than I ever deserved.'

She was surprised, but gathered herself. She stood, and I understood my time was over.

At the door, as I stood on the porch, she put her hand on my arm again and said one final thing.

'I've spent all my life with young people, and on the whole I've enjoyed it a lot. But one thing about my view of the world changed in that time, and changed for good.'

'What was that?'

'I still believe we're all human,' she said, stepping back and closing the screen door. 'But I don't believe we're all God's children. No, I don't believe that at all.'

— «» — «» — «»—

I went back to the hotel because I wasn't sure what else to do. I ran out of steam when I hit the lobby and ended up sitting in the bar, staring out at the street through tinted glass. Everyone has their typical experiences, as discussed. This is one of mine.

I was spaced out and ticked off. San Francisco was a dead end. Mrs Campbell didn't remember the name of the family which had taken Paul in for good. In any event, they'd moved, and she didn't know where to. Her colleagues from that time were either dead or scattered. The trail had been severed, not least by the fire. 'I believed Paul had come back and set that fire, and I knew Mrs Campbell did too: just as I believed she understood that the young boy who had been found on the street alone had merely tolerated being moved from pillar to post until he was old enough to leave and make his own way in the world: when he would become the person to 'put things in place.'

When I reached for my wallet to pay for the first beer, I remembered I'd turned off my cell. I had a missed call. It could only be one of two people, so I hit callback without bothering to listen to the message.

She answered quickly. 'John?'

'No,' I said. 'It's Ward. Your phone tells you who's calling, Nina. Just look at the display.'

'Right,' she said. 'Silly me. Where are you?'

'San Francisco,' I said.

'Oh. Why?'

'I left my heart here. Came to pick it up.'

'Good move. How's it looking?'

'Barely used,' I said, and she laughed briefly. 'What's up?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Well, not true, things are going crazy. We had a double murder this morning; someone killed a Jane Doe in a nasty motel and then whacked a cop to underline his point. He left a hard disk in the woman.'

'Charming,' I said.

'Not very. It's LAPD's business, of course, but Monroe is all over it and thus so am I. Wondered if you would take a look at this disk. I had a copy done, unofficially. I know you used to do that kind of thing on a professional basis.'

'Sure,' I said. 'Though Bobby would have been a better bet for you. And even a byte-for-byte copy isn't going to be exactly the same as the original. But I'll take a look.'

'They've already found a note and a piece of music on it. This one has a real sense of theatre.'

'What's the music?'

'Faur?'s Requiem.'

'Nice.'

'I haven't listened to it.'

'You should. Quite uplifting, given it's for dead people.'

She was silent for a little while. I didn't interrupt.

'Are you okay, Ward?'

'Sort of.' I told her, briefly, what I'd found out from Mrs Campbell. 'So that's weirded me out. Plus

I shrugged. She heard it. 'Yes,' she said, quietly. 'I know. I… I have this dream sometimes. I'm up at The Halls again, on the floor of the lobby building, after I'd been shot. You and John are out there in the houses, trying to find Sarah Becker. Bobby's gone, I don't know where. I'm on the floor, and I hurt bad, and somebody's coming to get me. And this time I think he might.'

'Shit,' I said. 'That sounds like no fun.'

'I had it again just three hours ago. It gets longer each time. I… sometimes I worry there will come a time when it doesn't end. Where he gets me, and I don't wake up.'

'Dreams last as long as you let them,' I said. 'Both good and bad.'

'Very deep, Ward-san.'

'Yeah. Sorry. I have no idea what I meant.'

She laughed, and it sounded a little more convincing this time.

'Okay, so, call when you've got the disk,' I said. 'I'll head down. There's nothing else for me up here.'

'It's sitting here on my table now,' she said.

I had been to Nina's house only once, and briefly, but I could picture it clearly. For just a moment, sitting on an uncomfortable stool with half a beer and the sound of generic chatter around me, I wished I was there now. There, or some other house. Something approximating a home.

'Don't let John meddle with it,' I said. 'I'll be there tomorrow evening. Can you put him on the phone?'

'He's out,' she said. 'I'll let him know you're coming.'

— «» — «» — «»—

I went up to my room and smoked my head off. It didn't seem to help my mood much, though it at least shoved the nicotine monkey off my back. I pulled the room's armchair over to the window, yanked the sash up, and sat looking out for a while. I saw tall dark buildings, and lights. I heard sounds of life from outside and below. I felt like I was sitting on the edge of a huge continent by myself, without tribe or hearth or hunting ground.

Slowly my depth of focus pulled closer, until I was looking at my feet instead, propped on the windowsill. Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much feted opposables, spending busy days carrying things and controlling machinery and touching interesting parts of people's bodies. They don't get to do any of that. Instead they just get pushed into small, dark leather places and forgotten about, and when they're let free they often seem little more than a strange fringe on the end of your feet.

In the end I fell asleep, and dreamed.

The place was some old town, a place of cobbled streets and teetering houses, with a compact square that held a farmer's market and stalls selling household things. I was young, teenaged, and I was in love with the gypsy queen of this market, a girl who was young, long-haired and beautiful, who glowed with the confidence of knowing every alley of this vibrant selling place, who had grown up in it and felt its forces and lives running through her: confident with beauty, unreachable but at the same time so gorgeous that she felt like everybody's love. There was a moment that felt like a real memory, a glimpse of her walking through the stalls with a couple of lesser girls in tow, her face the clearest thing in the world, surrounded by a tumble of dark hair shot with auburn lights.

Then later, I returned as a man, more confident but more dry, having lost in magic what I had gained in stature. The market had shrunk to a few stalls, revealing the streets — where before it seemed the market existed in a realm by itself, needing no such environment in which to live. I walked it, hearing echoes where before there had been only the sound of bargaining and laughter.

And then I saw her. She was working at a stall selling offcuts of cloth, mixed buttons, things made of plastic. Her hair was cut short, and had gone prematurely grey. She still looked young in the face, but had thickened, and seemed shorter, more businesslike.

I passed by the stall and saw her pushing something into a plastic bag, some two dollar purchase for an old woman. I realized she was now just a woman who ran a market stall. The princess I was returning to see, to show that I was now a man, and thus worth something, worth her gaze, had gone: all the more so because there was someone who took up her place in the world. If I hadn't seen her, I could still have believed that somewhere she walked, still wreathed in magic and sex and smiles.

But now I had, and could do nothing but walk a little way from the market, and turn and look back at it, knowing that my youth, my core, the thing that had driven me all these years, was dead. Only then did it strike me that though she had glanced at me, she had not recognized me; that though she was now just a market stall holder, I was not — and had never been — anything at all.

When I woke I turned groggily to the clock by the bed and was astonished to see only an hour had passed.

My cell phone rang. I picked it up, recognized the number.

'You're back,' I said.

There was a pause. 'It's Zandt,' he said.

'I know,' I said, foggily. 'You were out earlier.'

There was another pause. 'Ward, I'm in Florida.'

This made no sense to me either, but I went with it. 'Okay, good for you. So?'

'Yakima,' he said.

I sat up straighter. 'What about it?'

'I've got some information. Maybe. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense.'

'Well, I told Nina I'd come down to see her in LA tomorrow. Why don't I see you there?'

'You spoke to Nina today? Why?'

'She's after some whack-job and she wants me to take a look at a disk.'

'So where are you now?'

'San Francisco.'

There was a pause. 'Why?'

'I've been trying to track the Upright Man. Without much success.'

'Stay there. I'll come to you.'

'John, I just told you: I'm supposed to go meet Nina.'

'I don't want to go to LA.'

There was something off about his voice. 'Okay,' I said. 'I'll see you here.'

'I'll call you when I get in.'

And with that, the phone went dead. I was pretty sure that what I'd heard in his voice was that he was drunk.

I thought about that a moment, then called Nina back and said it would be an extra day before I could get down to her. I didn't say why. She said she'd overnight the disk to me instead.

'Fine,' I said. Then: 'Is John back yet?'

'He was. He went out again.'

'He's hard to tie down.'

'You said it.'

We said goodbye.

I turned back to the window, and looked out at the city some more. It ignored my gaze, as cities do.

8

Nina was just heading into LAPD the next morning when the call came in: a cop in patrol division had gotten a strong hit on the photo of the dead girl. She swung a turn which had twenty drivers hammering on their horns, and headed for a bar called Jimmy's, over near where La Cienega hit the Boulevard.

There was a black and white and an unmarked with a flasher parked outside already. Nina added her car to the collection and hurried inside. The bar was dark and smelled of spilled beer: the air felt worn, as if it had passed through the lungs of too many people who couldn't sit up straight. She spotted Olbrich standing talking to a guy who had long hair and a glassy smile that said if he'd known this kind of heavy shit was going to break out, he wouldn't have had that huge joint before he left home.

'This is Agent Baynam,' Olbrich said as she approached. 'Don, why don't you tell her what you've told me.'

'Her name's Jessica,' the bartender said. 'That's for sure. And I know she lived in West Hollywood. I'm pretty sure also her second name is Jones, I think she said that a couple times and I know people here called her JJ, but … you know, not everyone…'

'Uses their real name. I got you,' Nina said. 'Jessica was a regular?'

'Yeah, then some. Lot of nights. Some afternoons.'

'She a hooker, Don?'

'No.' He shook his head vigorously. 'Absolutely not. She was going to be a singer or something once, I think. Think she said that one time. She was pretty enough, that's for sure. She's a waitress now. Or was, I guess, shit.'

Olbrich prompted him. 'And she was in here on Saturday night, you think?'

'Yeah. She came in around five with a girlfriend. Don't know her name, but I've seen her around before. Black, long straight hair. It was two for one pitcher night so, you know, they both got loaded pretty fast.' He coughed. 'The girlfriend's more of a full-on goodtime person, and I'm pretty sure she ended up at a table with some guys and took off with them. JJ just kind of hung out for a while, then she was sitting with this other guy.'

'What guy was that?' Nina's voice was even, but her chest suddenly felt tight. Olbrich was good, and kept out of it.

'I was telling the officer here. Don't know the guy. I only noticed because…' He shrugged.

Because you were kind of sweet on Jessica, Nina thought. I understand. 'Did she often meet up with guys?'

'Pretty often,' the guy said. He looked away, apparently at the rows of battered tables and chairs he had to put in place.

Nina nodded, watching him. And one night, maybe several nights, a wet kiss on your cheek bought another pitcher after the money had run out, yes? And do you still think about that sometimes, though for her it was a nothing, forgotten forever by the second swallow?

'Anything unusual about this one?'

He looked back at her. 'He was just a guy. He had short hair. Kind of good-looking, I think. That's all I can tell you. It all got busy after that, and next time I looked it was late and JJ was gone and someone else was in the booth. You could talk to the girls who were working the floor, they might have served them. But they won't be in until tonight. Except Lorna, she'll be on lunch.'

There was a shout from the doorway, and a uniform stuck his head in. 'Lieutenant?'

The policeman turned. 'You got it?'

'We do.'

Olbrich jerked towards the door with his head. 'We got an address, Nina. I'll go with you.'

'She really dead?' the bartender asked.

'Yes,' Nina said. 'She's really dead. I'm sorry.'

He nodded, and turned away.

When Nina got to the door she glanced back and saw the man slowly wiping a cloth over a table in a bar that he had to keep working in, and she thought: we never really know who we leave behind.

— «» — «» — «»—

The address was Apartment 7, 3140 Gardiner. When Nina's car got there, Monroe was already outside with two cops.

'He moves fast, doesn't he?' Olbrich said.

'You better believe it.'

The building was three storeys high and dirty white. A staircase went up the outside of either end. Nina walked up to the second storey and waited with Monroe while one of the detectives tracked down the building's super.

Monroe looked at her. 'Feeling better this morning?'

'Fine,' she said. He spoke quietly, and so did she. 'And thank you for your concern, Charles, which is not at all beginning to bug me. Anything useful from Profiling on the note?'

'Not yet. And you don't think there will be. Why?'

'Profiling didn't really work for the Washington sniper, did it?'

'That's a completely different…'

'No it isn't. They decided it had to be a white guy because the perceived wisdom — based on a not-very-scientific study done a pretty long time ago — is that the majority of serial killers are white, and so any report phoned in about a black guy was ignored. Meanwhile a couple people said they saw white trucks, and so suddenly that's what everyone's looking for, despite the fact white trucks are the Starbucks of the highway and not seeing them would be unusual. The licence plate of the killer's blue car is run through the system half a dozen times because of suspicious behaviour, but no, it's not a white truck and he's not a white guy, so we're not interested. The profilers say killers never work with other people — except, um, this one did. We shouldn't have been listening to them anyway: anyone with a brain knew from the start this was not a serial killer but a multiple murderer on a politico-religious mission, in which case anything profilers say is irrelevant. All it did was cloud the issue, and it could do the same here. I'm just not sure I believe in their shtick any more.'

'So why did you ask me if they'd come back with anything?'

'To try to steer you away from further solicitous enquiries.'

'Nina, when are you going to tell me what happened last year?'

'I already done told you, boss,' she said, smiling sweetly. In her head, however, she reminded herself to be careful. Monroe was many things, but he wasn't stupid.

At that moment Olbrich appeared at the stairs with a bunch of keys. 'Zinman's taking a statement,' he said, heading for the door to Apartment 7, 'but the guy's got nothing for us. Kept herself to herself, blah. And he's as dumb as a bag of rocks. We set?'

Guns now in hand, Nina and Monroe nodded.

Olbrich knocked on the door, waited, and received no response. So he unlocked the door and opened it slowly.

'This is the police,' he said. 'Please step into sight.'

Nothing happened. He opened the door a little further. This revealed a fairly large room, about twenty feet square. Electing to wait outside, this was all Nina saw until the two men had gone in and called an all-clear. Nobody home.

When she stepped into the apartment she saw a coffee table and a tired red couch in the middle, and a computer workstation under a window on the far side. The computer was grey and cheap-looking. There was a small red light at the bottom of the monitor, but the screen was black. A television sat to the side of the workstation, where it would be visible from the couch. For optimum viewing it would have been moved a couple of feet to the left, but there it would have blocked the door to the bedroom, where the two men were. A thin black cable was running in there across the floor from the computer workstation. Before following it Nina took a few steps the other side of the sofa, and peered into a small kitchen with a big window overlooking the street. It was tidy. As she turned back she noticed a battered-looking guitar propped up in the corner behind the sofa. It was dusty and missing a string.

In the room's remaining corner was a small desk. A couple of notepads. Nina carefully lifted the cover of one and glanced at a page. Doodles. Stuff that looked like lyrics. One sentence, 'Rain that never washes', had been written and then crossed out.

'Come look at this,' Monroe said.

The bedroom was small, enough space for a double bed, a small vanity and that was that. A tiny bathroom stood off the bottom end. The bed was unmade. The men were looking at a small object on a tripod to the side of the bed. It was to this that the black cable ran.

'Camera,' Olbrich said.

'Webcam,' she corrected. 'See where the cable goes?'

She followed it back into the main room and over to the workstation. Turning her hand over so her fingertips were out of the way, she gently moved the mouse.

The screen of the monitor flickered and woke up. In the centre of the screen was a window which took up about a third of its extent. It showed a picture of the side of the bed Monroe was still standing by.

'I'm not going to touch it,' she said, 'but you're going to find a cable modem feed out the back of this machine. Jessica had a website where people could watch her.'

'From where?' Olbrich asked.

'From anywhere in the world.' She stood back from the desk. 'Bad news. Our suspect list just jumped into the tens of millions.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Three hours later she was back at Jimmy's and sitting in an upper room that belonged to the owner/manager, who wasn't called Jimmy.

'Sounds like a bar's name,' Mr Jablowski had said, when she asked. 'Whereas mine doesn't.' Alerted by Don the barman to the morning's visitors, he'd elected to be on site for once. He was strangely dapper for a man who owned what was basically a beer-pit for the afternoon alcoholic crowd, but there are a lot of drug dealers who don't jack the product either. Don meanwhile had gone home for a few hours, to 'chill out'. The investigators had his address, but she privately didn't think it was one they were going to visit. She was no profiler either, of course — which was why, on her suggestion, a plainclothes was following the barman home.

Another detective and an agent were out in the sparse lunchtime drinking crowd. One of the waitresses who'd been on duty the night of Jessica's last visit was due to arrive soon, and an eye was also being kept out for men who fitted an extremely generalized description. Things were going nowhere fast out there, in other words. Back at the girl's apartment, the opposite was true. It was being ripped apart, and investigating officers from three separate agencies were ploughing into anything they could find: reading, photographing, dusting.

Nina, meanwhile, was talking to a young black woman called Jean. Jean had come in looking for Jessica because they'd been due to hook up the night before and her friend had never showed. Also because she wanted a drink. Don had pointed her straight in the direction of the cops, and kept her heading that way even when she remembered she'd much prefer to be somewhere else.

'Cam whore?' Nina said, repeating what the girl had just said.

Jean shrugged. 'That's what it's called. Don't mean you do nothing like having sex or whatever. 'Cam girl' is okay too.'

'Jessica never entered into sex for payment, as far as you're aware?'

'Hell no. Nor me neither, lady, get yourself straight about that.'

'Working girls are not allowed on the premises,' Jablowski said, smoothly. 'I'm very strict about that.'

'When you're here, which sounds like it isn't very often. Sir — I wonder if you could leave us alone for a moment?'

The owner left. Nina let a pause settle. 'And so, Jean, I take it you're a cam girl too?'

'Yeah. I, uh, I put Jessica onto it. But like I say, it's not like…'

Nina looked her straight in the face. 'I'm not suggesting it's like anything at all, Jean. Cam whoring is a field of which I'm almost entirely ignorant. I need to know about it, though, and I need to know right now. It could have a lot to do with why Jessica isn't around any more. So why don't you just tell me how it is?'

The girl sat back, lit up a cigarette, and talked.

Hooking was one thing, she said. Everybody knows where that's at. Putting up a cam, that was different. You never met no one, you took no risks, you encountered no bodily fluids. You never even did nothing, not really. Just took your clothes off. Do whatever you'd be doing normally, but naked. Watching TV. Cleaning the kitchen. If you had a boyfriend round, maybe you left the camera on, maybe you pointed it the other way. Whatever. Weird thing was that for some of the watchers, the less you did the better. Jean had a day one time when there was lots of shit going down and she didn't slop around in her underwear, just plain forgot about the camera and got on with her life like a normal person — and next morning she had a tray of sweaty emails wowing her for such 'great teasing'. Men were whacked out when it came to sex, Jean believed. Just when you thought you'd got them figured out, they did or said something made you realize you hadn't scratched the surface of how fucking weird they could be. She had a weird-ass impulse, every now and then, to fuck with their heads. To sit around looking fine and then hold up a piece of paper saying, 'I cooked some skanky vegetarian crap last night and the apartment still smells like a cow's insides'. To wander just out of the range of the camera's gaze and do something really rude and sexy, that would pop those guys' eyes out if they could only see it. Or to let rip with a life-changing fart and sit there and smile into the camera, knowing that no matter how big and flat their screen, it wasn't telling them everything there was to know about her world.

'You said you got Jessica into this,' Nina said. 'How did that come about?'

'I met a girl at a party, like eighteen months ago. She was doing it already and she gave me an email address for this guy who sets up sites. This dude calls himself the Webdaddy, and never mind how fucking creepy that is, but basically he knows the science bit. You email him a picture; he emails you back and you talk some about 'boundaries' — like how naked you will go, what else you'll do, if you got a boyfriend and if you'd do things together, if he's on for it, stuff like that. If Webdaddy likes you, he mails you a CD with some shit on how to set it up. You get yourself cable internet and go over to Circuit City and buy a webcam for fifty bucks. Everything else, he takes care of it. Your site, your billing, the works. End of the month, a cheque arrives. Simple as that.'

'Do you have a street address for this person?'

Jean shook her head. 'Email, is all. Jessica was the same. He's right there on the web. Why you going to meet him in real life?'

'But what if there was a problem with the system, or a payment didn't arrive?'

'You email him. This guy lives on the web, lady. You mail him, there's a reply before the SEND button has bounced back up.'

You set your webcam in position — basically a cheap, low resolution digital camera. A USB cable went from that into the back of your computer. Software there grabbed a picture of what was visible through the camera's lens and automatically uploaded it, via cable internet, onto a server on the web. A little while later that picture was replaced by a new one, and so on and on. Meanwhile, out there in the universe of men with time on their hands, the user had your web page loaded in his browser, the picture right there in the centre. A piece of code caused the page to refresh the picture regularly, uploading the new image from your webcam to replace the old one on the screen. An interaction of computers, software and telecoms that would have been science fiction twenty years ago; years of research and millions of dollars, and voil? — people in Kansas, Cardiff and Antwerp can desultorily jack off while you vacuum nekkid in LA. Weird world? It surely is. But Jean didn't have to have sex with strangers or go shake her stuff with scary-ass strippers. Jean was all for it. Jean thought it was progress that worked for womankind.

'Jessica would have been making a few hundred a week from doing this?'

The girl shook her head. 'Nothing like. She only been doing it a few months, didn't have many subscribers. She didn't go out of her way to entertain, you know what I'm saying. Most the girls perform. She'd take her shirt off sometimes — you got to or you get dropped — but she didn't like doing it. And she didn't do no sexy stuff either, I don't think. She was going to stop doing it at all, she said, going to get back into writing songs. She kept it real secret. Nobody here knew about it. Only me.'

'The men who subscribe to your site. How much contact do you have with them?'

'Just emails,' Jean said.

'They have no way of finding your address?'

'Not unless you give it to them.'

'Did Jessica give any indication she might have done? That she was in special contact with any of her subscribers?'

'Like I said, she wasn't really into it at all. She needed money. But she was a proud person. She wasn't going to do nothing she was going to feel bad about. Leastways, not unless she was real drunk.'

'You guys were pretty drunk the other night, right?'

Jean gave a lopsided grin. 'Could be.'

'And you left Jessica when you went to party.'

'I met some guys. When I left, she was still here.'

'The barman said he later saw her sitting with a man. You know anything about that?'

'Like I said, I was gone.'

'She didn't have anyone in particular that you know about?'

'Not right now.'

'Any in the recent past?'

'She had boyfriends. But they were just guys.'

Nina sat in silence for a moment, and looked at the woman opposite. After the initial news of Jessica's death, she'd bounced back fast. Jessica was evidently an acceptable loss. Nina thought again about the speed of A — Z, and Z to Jane Doe. It was hard not to when confronted with a girl who was twenty-three and mostly having a good time and thought it would always be so, that self-belief and attitude would work as a magic cloak.

She said: 'You realize you're not invincible, don't you?'

Jean looked right back at her, cocked her head and smiled coldly. 'You neither, girl.'