The Lonely Dead

— «» — «» — «»—

'We're on it,' Monroe said. 'Soon as you called we got one of the techs into the machine. We have the physical location of the web server her site was on and we've also got an at for this Webdaddy person.'

'An 'at'?'

'Geek slang for 'email address', apparently.'

'You live and learn.'

They were standing on the balcony outside Jessica's apartment, which was still being taken apart. Monroe was sipping from a cup of ice water, but he looked unusually hot and crumpled.

'Nothing of interest in there?'

'Not aside from the computer. She kept the place pretty clean. There's not a lot of prints. LAPD will run what we have, but… There's some notebooks with scribbles and what looks like very bad poetry. No numbers or names yet. Forensics are in the bedroom now, but there's no sign she was killed here.'

'How soon before someone knocks on Webdaddy's door?'

'Not long. Email address was no direct help but we have a lead out of the registration information for the virtual server. Jessica and Jean were two of fifteen girls — here in town, two in San Diego, one in San Francisco, some out in the sticks. Barstow, for Christ's sake. The overall domain was called 'daddysgirls.net', incidentally.'

'Nice.'

'If it's here in LA then we'll go along,' he said. 'If not, it'll be whoever's local. Speed is going to be important.'

'So what do you want me to do now?'

Monroe shook his head. 'The guy you put on the barman said he just went home, smoked drugs while staring at the wall for three hours, and is now back heroically serving beer. From your impression plus what we're waiting for, I don't make him for it anyway. You could save me a phone call and bug Quantico over the note profile, but other than that… have you eaten today?'

'No.'

'I would go do that. Somewhere close. I hear anything, you'll know.'

Forty minutes later and halfway through a salad, she got the call. Swearing — it was a good Cobb, and her first meal in over twenty-four hours — she dropped money on the table and ran to the street.

By the time she was halfway to 4th Street in Venice, her phone rang again. She pulled over on the Boulevard and listened to a Monroe whose voice was flat.

'It's not him,' he said. 'His real name is Robert Klennert, and he's fifty-eight years old and significantly obese. He's basically a fetid sack of shit who sets up live porno sites. He knows tech, which is good for the hard disk, but I have a hard time buying him for being able to trap and kill a young woman or frankly a woman of any age or level of fitness whatsoever, not to mention he's way off the witness descriptions. File under 'pervert' and throw away.'

'So we're back to the 'one of millions' scenario.'

'A little better than that, maybe. LAPD have Klennert's records. Anyone who subscribed to or even guest-visited his sites will be logged. His computers are being carried past me as I speak.'

'On what charge?'

'None. He's co-operating fully. Weirdly, he appears to have genuinely paternal feelings towards 'his girls'. Which is either a big-time bluff, or…' Monroe fell silent for a moment. 'Or more likely not. It isn't him. Meanwhile it looks as though the music on the disk is going to give us absolutely zilch. I can feel this drifting, Nina. Unless something happens, I think we may have lost it to the grunts.'

Right, Nina thought. Or you sense a slog through a bewilderingly vast virtual trail that you don't understand, and you don't see how it's generating plot for The Charles Monroe Story, HBO Special.

She said goodnight. On the other side of the street a car pulled into a driveway and a small family climbed out. Husband, wife, a little girl. The adults appeared to be having an argument.

Nina wound her window down a couple inches and listened, and heard the little girl laugh. The adults cracked up soon afterwards.

Nina realized the altercation had been fake, an impersonation of whomever the family had just visited. She thought for a moment of her own childhood, which in general had been straightforward but had also featured enough genuine male anger that she doubted she could ever have laughed as that little girl across the street just had.

She watched the child as she followed her parents up the path, thinking that if the girl was greeted by some cute little puppy bounding out of the house tied with a ribbon, she might have to go thump the lucky little princess herself.

No dog. The girl lived to laugh another day.

Nina started up the car and drove towards the ocean.

9

The girl was quiet. Before she'd been wall to wall — nice to meet you, hey great place, ooh that's nice, oh yeah. Now, afterwards, she had nothing to add. Maybe she thought that was the way he wanted it (and she was right, for the moment); perhaps she believed it was all over bar the tipping (in which case, she was wrong). Could be she'd had an embolism and was committing all her energy to not keeling over. Pete Ferillo didn't know. Pete didn't care. Not even a little bit. That was what was so great about it. The not knowing. The not having to know. The not having to give a blue-eyed shit.

He reached to the table and got a cigar from his case. Ran it under his nose. No reason to, he knew what it would smell like, but he was feeling sensual. It smelled good.

He clipped the end and stuck it in his mouth. Lit it with a match — recently someone he respected had told him that was the best way, so that's how he did it now — and puffed it into life. Thick smoke barfed out of the end. He watched it go.

He was naked, lounging in an armchair with his legs stuck out straight in front. He never sat like that at home. He would be too aware of his gut, the dimpled thighs, the harsh contrasts between his sallow crotch, permatan forearms and the blotched and scarred alabaster of the rest. Here, this afternoon, he didn't have to care about any of this. Didn't have to feel it marked him down as ageing or unfit or undesirable. Didn't have to listen to its dismal messages about the passage of time or what it said about the likely state of his insides: didn't have to try to use this pudding mess to jump-start a wife who said she loved him but who used her endless sessions on the step machine as a taunt. Yes, Maria looked better than he did. A lot better. So what? Hitting the gym and the malls was all she had to do. That was his 'job', he'd look better too. He loved her, of course. He'd loved her twenty-five years. You learn to smile when you're mad, and stay your hand, and everyone gets along most of the time.

The apartment belonged to a very important customer at the Dining Room, someone with whom Pete had done business for quite some time and in other places. He was also a man who came to dine sometimes with a lady who wasn't the woman to whom he was married. Pete was discreet, could keep in his head who the guy had come with the last time. A friendly deal was struck, man to man, and now he had his own keys. A maid came in every day to keep the place spick and span and the fridge full of mineral water. The apartment was simple but well furnished. Bedroom, balcony, bathroom, living area. This last was a good-sized room, a section of it partitioned off with a little table for dining, also designed so you couldn't see the door when you sat in the main area of the suite, so the place felt bigger. Clever. The balcony was good for standing on in a robe, savouring late afternoon fun times while the proles of the city toiled and honked below. Maybe later.

For now, the chair was working for him. He watched the girl as she moved around at the counter in the bijou little kitchen area. He didn't know her last name. Didn't know her favourite colour, movie star or show. Didn't know the names of her previous boyfriends, hadn't heard about high old times with them or anyone else. He knew about her on a want-to-know basis only. He knew she was tall and tan and called Cherri, and he loved the fakeness of her name, the 'And now, on stage four'-ness of it. Her hair was every shade of blonde from strawberry to platinum and fell straight and thick down between her shoulder blades. She was slim (young slim, not watch-every-mouthful turkey neck scrawny) and she had big tits and a pretty face and a cute little tattoo of a black rose on her lower back, actually pretty well done. Pete didn't like tattoos, in general. Not on normal women. But on girls like this, he liked them. It was appropriate. It said here was a woman who was aware of her body; who owned it, used it as a resource. Pete knew of women, the girlfriends or wives of friends, who had tattoos done a year or two back, when everyone was doing it. Maria wanted one, can you believe it? Fucking cat, or something. He told her no, and he was right. Tattoos made you look like a stripper — which was fine if you were a stripper, but stupid otherwise. It was like pole-dancing, for Christ's sake. Couple years back there had been this fad in the local yuppie class for the wife to 'learn' pole-dancing, or at least take one blushing class with some smug aerobics Amazon who knew she was onto a good thing. The stupidity of it made Pete's head want to explode. There's no point in wives doing pole-dancing. The whole fucking point of pole-dancers is they're not your fucking wife. Any woman who gets into such a thing thinking they're demonstrating some deep inner sexiness that sets them apart from the vanilla wives is more likely expressing the fact (a) they take themselves too seriously, which is very un-sexy take note,

Demi-fucking-Moore, (b) they think they're pretty hot for their age, which is boring even if it's true, or (c) they're not too happy at home and would like to be having sex with somebody else. Anybody else, probably. Case in point was Pete's former friend Johnny, guy who did his accounts for eleven years. Johnny was doing great, had the place in Incline Village, the works. Then Johnny's wife went to one of these classes. Said it was the new boxercise. Did it at home for him. First time it worked, kind of, then after that it's — right, but you're still my wife, and really, you could lose a few pounds. Four months later she was fucking one of the pimple-faced slackers who worked in the personal empowerment section of the Barnes & Noble. Somehow this turned out to be Johnny's fault, so goodbye marriage, hello child support. Soon he was spending his afternoons watching real dancers, ones with scars and children, and drinking way too much. Pete moved his business to another company. So did everyone else.

Pete took another big puff on the Don Thomas, enjoying the way the smoke fugged up the room. It wasn't Cuban, not even a particularly expensive Honduran — he didn't throw money away, never had — but it tasted good. Been three years since he'd been allowed to smoke indoors at home. It wasn't impossible, wasn't like Maria set up snipers in the living room to bring him down, but there'd be the Disappointment. The silent deterrent, the weapon of mute destruction: the look that said that, despite all her dreams, life had turned out much as she'd feared. For a while you thought avoiding the Disappointment was worth it, that you didn't mind. Then some day you realized you did, but you smoked outside anyway because who needs that kind of shit every night? You smoked outside, and you minded. Quietly.

Cherri finished cutting a slice of citrus — there were fresh lemons and limes in the little fridge, how's that for a cute touch — and dropped it into her drink. Gin and tonic. Pete could smell it. His nose was very good. Had to be, you were in the food trade. Maria drank a nice glass of Chardonnay, always had. The girl sensed him watching, turned around. 'You want something?'

Pete laughed. 'Oh yeah,' he said heartily. 'But give me a minute here. I'm still breathing hard.'

She smiled professionally. 'Not that. I meant to drink.'

'Oh. Vodka,' he said. 'Neat. No fruit. Lots of ice.' He winked. 'And there will be a second time, trust me.'

'Can't wait,' she said, and turned back to fix his drink.

Pete smiled. He heard a clank from out in the corridor — some job donkey getting back from work. He took another puff of the cigar, settled back. Savoured sitting there. Loved it, the full naked ugliness of it. Out there some spent management consultant with Tums breath, some exhausted attorney struggling home with an armful of files. And him, in here, balls in the wind and a big drink on the way. Can't wait. Sarcasm? Almost certainly. Didn't matter. She looked forward to it, or not. She found his body bearable, or not. She liked doing what he asked — nothing weird, he didn't need weird, just the usual from someone new and young and beautiful was enough — or not. None of it mattered. She had four hundred dollars of his already. At the end he'd most likely make it up to five. Maria could drop that much on some Manolos without blinking; and did, regularly. Meanwhile, that was all it took to get someone like Cherri to give it all up.

As she clattered about, pouring Stoly Black into a glass, then adding the ice, Pete considered booking her again. Though she was cute — really very cute, when she squatted to pick up a spilt cube, looking briefly unpoised — he knew he wouldn't. Having a new one each time was the point. He went with her again, there'd be the question of whether it was better or worse than last time. She'd use his name, know what he wanted to drink, and familiarity would start to set in. He'd have time to notice things about her, to wonder why she didn't have the sense to put the ice in the glass first, or how she hadn't learned that gin went better with lime. And now, this afternoon, when they had sex again and this time he got only semi-hard and had to finish it off himself, that'd be just the way it was. He knew it would be that way, but she didn't. Next time, she would. Not knowing was the big thing. Not knowing, not having to care.

She was out of sight now, making some godawful noise with the ice box. What the fuck for? The glass was sitting there on the counter, full right to the top. Any more and it would be spilling out the… hey. Ice cube around the nipple. That was a thought.

He leaned across to the ashtray to rest out the cigar. Save it for later. 'Babe,' he said, indulgently. 'The ice is fine. You can bring it on through.' He turned back.

There was a man standing in the room.

'Who the fuck are you?' Pete said.

The man's smile said he had no intention of answering. Pete knew straight away that this wasn't some other guy with a key to the fuck pad. The girl stepped into sight behind him, putting on her shirt. 'I'm done, right?' she asked the man.

He didn't answer her either. Without taking his eyes off Pete he reached to the side and grabbed her by the hair. Before she'd had time to squawk he'd smacked her face into the partition wall. She grunted, went straight down.

Pete put it together quickly. The clank in the hallway; the rattling of the ice bucket to disguise her opening the door. He didn't know who the guy was, or what he wanted, but he could see now that he had a knife. It was a big knife, could be a cook's knife. Except it didn't look at all clean.

The room seemed cold suddenly, flat and full of stale smoke. The man stepped over the girl, glancing away for a moment. Pete dimly realized this was a chance, that he had to get up, move, get out of there. He couldn't seem to do any of these things. The man was only a little over average height, and trim. Pete outweighed him by many pounds and had long-term experience of smacking people's heads: he just wasn't convinced either would make a difference. He felt fat, naked and in no position to change anything about the world.

'You're Peter Ferillo, is that correct?' the man said, picking something up off the counter. When it glinted Pete saw it was the apartment's bottle opener, and when the man turned his face to him, all thoughts of movement seemed to fade away.

'Look,' Pete said. 'I don't know what the fuck's happening here. But I got money. With me. If that's what this is about, it's okay.'

'It's not about money,' the man said. His voice was soft, almost friendly. His eyes were not.

'Then what?' Pete said. 'What have I done?'

'This isn't about you,' the man said.

'Who the hell are you?'

'My name… is the Upright Man.' The man watched Pete's face for a reaction. He rolled the bottle opener in his hand absent-mindedly, then nodded — as if, with sudden inspiration, he'd thought of a use for it. Pete didn't know what that might be.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, he found out.

2: The Smoking Road

This is what I intend to do, but I do not know why.

Gerard Schaefer, serial killer,

Into the Mind of the Ghoul

10

When the guy first appeared Phil Banner was leaning against the car outside Izzy's eating a hot mushroom and eggs sandwich he hadn't paid for. Not his fault — he always offered, and Izzy always said no — but it still made him feel a little guilty. Not enough to stop him eating it, though, or to keep from going back most mornings. The sandwich was good and thick and not really designed to be eaten with fingers, and the guy with the blood was probably in view for a few minutes before Banner lifted his head and saw him. When he did he watched for a good five seconds, still chewing and not really sure what he was seeing, before he hurriedly put the food down.

The man was walking right down the middle of the street. The road was empty because it was eight thirty in the morning and very cold but it didn't look like traffic would have changed the guy's course. He looked like he barely knew where he was. He was wearing a backpack that looked both new and tattered. He was lurching like something out of a zombie movie, one leg dragging behind, and when Phil took a few cautious steps forward he saw he was also covered in blood. It was dried, or seemed to be, but there was a lot of it. There was a big bump and a nasty gash on the man's forehead, and innumerable other cuts and scrapes across his face and hands. Dried mud covered most of the rest, and just about all of his clothes.

Phil took another step. 'Sir?'

The man kept on moving as though he hadn't heard. He was breathing hard but steadily, the exhales clouding up around his face. In, out, in, out, as if the rhythm had become important to him. As if it was that, or nothing. Then slowly his head turned. He kept on moving forward but looked at Phil. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a couple days' growth of beard. There was ice in it. It had been a long time since Phil had seen a man who looked so cold.

The guy stopped, finally. He blinked, opened his mouth. Shut it again, looked up the road for a moment. He seemed so interested in what was down there that Phil glanced that way himself, but saw only the short remaining stretch of town that he expected.

'Sir, are you okay?' He knew it was a stupid question. The guy evidently wasn't. But it was what you said. You came across a person with a knife embedded in his head — though in a town like this choking on a fish bone was far more likely — you asked if he was okay.

A slow, uneven change occurred across the man's features, and Phil realized it was probably intended to be a smile.

'This is Sheffer, isn't it?' he asked. The movements of his mouth were cramped, as if his face was almost frozen shut.

'Yes sir, it is.'

The smile broadened. 'No shit.'

'Sir?'

The guy shook his head, suddenly looking more together, as if the shambling had been some habit he'd gotten into to keep himself going past the point at which he thought he'd have to drop. Phil realized he looked slightly familiar.

'That's some sense of direction,' the man said. 'Say what you like.' His face crumpled.

Phil saw that Izzy and a couple of local customers were now standing outside the diner, and that a similar audience was assembling across the street in the market's small parking lot. It was time to take charge of the situation.

'Sir, have you been in an accident of some kind?'

The man looked at him. 'Bigfoot,' he said, nodded, and then slowly fell flat on his back.

— «» — «» — «»—

Two hours later Tom Kozelek was sitting in the police station. He was wrapped in three blankets and holding a cup of chicken soup in both hands. He was in the room they normally used for interviewing, on the rare occasions the Sheffer Police had cause to interview anyone, and for storing coats and wet boots and has-no-other-home stuff the rest of the time. It had a desk and three chairs and a clock. It had previously been the kitchen area before that was moved upstairs to be next to the redone administrative space, and had a partially glassed wall that made it look a little like a room in some much larger and more urban law enforcement facility. At least it would have done had the glass not been home to stickers celebrating the town's Halloween parade. The stickers had been designed each year by the school's most talented art student, which was the main thing that stopped the glass partition looking businesslike: either someone had blindfolded the kids before handing them the paints or Sheffer was never going to host any famous hometown museum. Phil Banner had occasionally expressed the opinion that they should get them done by someone who could draw a little. He had been assured that when he had kids he would feel differently. He was going to wait and see.

Phil was standing with Melissa Hoffman. Melissa lived thirty miles away over in Issaquah and worked at the small county hospital there. Sheffer's own doctor, Dr Dandridge, was well liked but older than God and significantly less infallible, and so lately Melissa's tended to be the number they called. She was in her late thirties, not at all bad-looking, and didn't seem to know it. She was happily married to a thick-set guy who owned a small second-hand bookstore and chain-smoked Marlboro Lite. Go figure.

She looked away from the glass window. 'He's fine,' she said. 'Ankle's a bit messed up. Banged around in general. Little bit of exposure, but no frostbite. He's vague on details but from what he said he got most of his big bumps a couple of days ago: if he was going to get concussion, he would have had it already and probably not be here now. He needs feeding and sleep and that's all, folks. He's a lucky guy.'

Phil nodded. He really wished the Chief was here, and not a hundred miles away visiting his sister. 'But the other stuff.'

She shrugged. 'Said he was okay physically. Mentally is another story.' She turned to the desk where the backpack the man had been wearing had thawed. Cold water covered the surface and had dripped through cracks to the floor. She took a pen from the pot on the corner and used it to poke around, holding the bag open gingerly with her other hand. 'This thing is laced with alcohol, and you say he'd been drinking before.'

Phil nodded. It hadn't taken him long to work out why the man's face seemed familiar. 'He was trying to break into Big Frank's late one night at the weekend. I had to request that he stop.'

Melissa looked at the man through the window. He appeared only dozily awake, and incapable of raising a rumpus of any kind. As she watched he blinked slowly, like an old dog on the verge of sleep. 'Did he seem dangerous? Psychotic?'

'No. More kind of sad. Happened to run into Joe and Zack next morning, and they said some guy had been in there all evening, drinking it up by himself. Sounded like the same person.'

'So four days of drinking, most likely nothing to eat, then a stomach full of sleeping pills. The signs for being in a happy place aren't great. Still, he doesn't come across like a crazy person.'

'They never do.' Phil hesitated. 'He said he saw Bigfoot.'

She laughed. 'Yeah, people do, from time to time. What he actually saw was a bear. You know that.'

'I guess.'

Melissa looked at him hard for a moment, and Phil found himself blushing when she smiled. 'You do know that, right?'

'Of course,' he said, impatiently.

Now was not the time for a discussion of what Phil's uncle had once thought he'd seen — or felt, more accurately — in the deep forest way up over the ridge. No one had ever taken that seriously, except perhaps Phil himself, when he was small. His uncle eventually stopped telling the story. More than a handful of towns up in the Cascades had their own local legends and BF displays, and you could buy lattes and muffins from more than one roadside stall fashioned in the shape of a big hairy creature. Not in Sheffer. Around these parts, Bigfoot was bunk. Or, as the Chief liked to put it, BF was a pile of BS. A wellworn lure for a certain kind of tourist town, that was all, and Sheffer wasn't that kind of town. Sheffer was quiet, genteel, and had once been used in the background of a whimsical television series. It had the rail museum and rolling stock. There were nice restaurants, and only nice people came to eat in them. The town wanted to keep it that way. The Chief wanted it most of all.

But more than a handful of people had been standing out in the street when the Tom guy had said the word, and not all of them were locals. By the end of the day a few might pass on what had happened that morning to their friends and relatives. Phil knew what the Chief thought about that kind of thing too, and he really wished he'd got the guy inside someplace before he could say the B word. When Phil had called him on his cell phone, the Chief said he would be back by early afternoon at the latest. Phil was glad about that.

'Going to see if that guy wants some more of Izzy's soup,' he said, and Melissa nodded.

She watched as he went into the room, sat at the end of the table, and spoke gently to the man. She believed Kozelek should really be examined for after-effects of the sleeping pills he'd taken, but he was adamant that he didn't want to go to any hospital, and she had no power to make him. He'd survived three very cold days and nights in the woods, and walked a very long distance in hard terrain. Given that, he looked in good shape for a guy who'd been out there trying to die. There was a case for saying he should be talking to someone about that part of things, too, but again it wasn't something she could force. She privately thought that when his brain had thawed out properly, both that and talk of unknown species would gently fade away. Then they could just ship him back to LA or wherever it was, and life in Sheffer would go on as usual.

As she turned to go she noticed something in the bottom of the open backpack. She stopped and took a closer look. In amongst the shards of glass and sodden fragments of drug packet were a few things that looked like tiny bunches of dried flowers.

She took one of them out, and saw they weren't flowers after all; more like short, bedraggled stalks. It looked as though it must have fallen into the man's bag as he careered through the forest, knocked off passing bushes and trees.

Either that, or as if it had been bought from a man on a street corner somewhere, and had fallen out of its baggie.

Here was a man who said he'd seen things, and tried to break into bars by all accounts, and in his bag was a little bunch of natural-looking matter. How about that? Partly out of professional concern, but mainly from good, old-fashioned curiosity, Melissa slipped the tiny bunch in her bag and then went outside to drive back to the hospital where, she was fairly confident, not much of interest would be happening.

— «» — «» — «»—

At about lunch time, his head began to really ache. It had been hurting a little before. Had hurt for a significant proportion of His Time Away, in fact. But this was different. This was worse.

The headache was a slow, rolling affair and had an expensive, professional quality to it. This headache knew its trade. It had relevant experience. It covered his head like a cold counterpane, heavy and insistent, and had begun to maintain outposts in other parts of his body too. His guts, primarily. He had told the doctor he didn't want to go to the hospital at least partly to gauge her reaction. If she'd barked, 'Think again, moron, you're deeply, deeply fucked and we're going to drag you by the hair to a scary place with machines with green readouts and then you're going to die,' then he'd have gone quietly. She hadn't, which meant there was a chance he was okay. He felt okay, in general, apart from the headache, and the feeling in his guts, which he was inclined to see as a sub-division of the headache. He'd read somewhere that there was a mat of neural tissue spread around the stomach, actually the second largest collection of such tissue in the entire body (after the brain, of course). Hence gut reactions, gut feelings, blah blah blah. He could see this might make evolutionary sense: give the innards enough of a brain to enable it to send up signals saying, 'don't eat that rotten crap again, remember what happened last time', much as his own had done when he'd made it back to his bag, in the forest. He was hoping the way it felt now was merely a sign of it being in sympathy with his head. If it felt this way on its own account, it was possible he should have gone to the hospital after all.

He was also hoping that the painkillers the doctor had left would start to kick in any minute. His head was making his eyes go funny. He was still hanging onto the idea that at some point he was going to stand up, go walking out into town and find the ancient fucker who hadn't mentioned the bears, but just at this moment the plan didn't feel realistic. It seemed all too likely the old geezer could beat him up.

Just then, Tom suddenly smiled.

Of course bears weren't actually the issue. Not any more. One of the reasons he wanted to feel better very soon was that he had something interesting to tell people. Something very interesting indeed. A piece of information which had kept him alive, which had hauled his body out of the wilderness. He'd kept quiet about it so far, biding his time. But when the moment came…

Then, just as suddenly, his smile dropped. He had new information, yes. A life-saving datum. That didn't make it a life-changing one, however, big enough to blot out the dark light from what had come before. He was still compromised. Once you've done the thing, you've done it. Even if people don't know. The only difference was he now perhaps had something big enough to make it worth his while taking the risk it would never be found.

He watched blearily through the glass as the Sheffer sheriff's department (in the person of Phil, whom Tom increasingly thought he vaguely recognized from before His Time Away) went about its duties. Phil was young and slightly built for a cop: most city police seemed to spend their whole time in the gym, making sure their arms bulged nicely in those short-sleeve shirts. Basically, Phil was sometimes in the room, and then sometimes he went outside. That was about it. Presumably, apart from dealing with car wrecks and people skipping their tab in bars and the occasional recreational domestic in the long winter nights, this was about as frenetic as it got: until someone came back out of the woods with a strange story to tell.

The deputy would come to check on him again soon, and then maybe he'd get into it. In the meantime, he sipped a little more soup. It had cooled, and could do with a little salt, but otherwise was very good. It was making him feel better.

His vision slowly went white.

— «» — «» — «»—

The voice came from behind him.

'Sir?'

Tom shook his head, knowing that he wasn't going to be able to get away from this. But still, he shook his head. There was red on him. There was crunching underfoot. He finally turned, and he already knew what the news was going to be, but he did not know how it was going to fit in his head.

'Sir?'

Then everything was different. He jerked his head up woozily and saw he was still sitting in his chair in a police station, a very long way from LA. It was bright, and he was swaddled in blankets and there was a small heater sat on the floor about a yard away, shoving a thin stream of warm air at him. That was new, he thought. Don't remember that.

New too was the man standing on the other side of the table. Tom blinked at him. 'What time is it?'

'It's a little after three, sir,' the man said. He was much older than the one called Phil. He was taller, and broader. He was bigger in every way. He sat in one of the chairs opposite.

'Who are you?'

'My name is Connolly,' the man said. 'I work here.'

'Okay.' Tom's voice came out a little petulant, and he suddenly yawned massively. 'I'm actually kind of hot, now.'

'My deputy says the doctor said to keep you warm. So that's what we're going to do. That is, unless maybe you think it would be better for you to spend the night over in the hospital. Seems to me there's at least a couple reasons why that might be the case.'

'I'm fine,' Tom said.

The man leaned on the table and looked at him. 'You sure?'

Now that he was a little more awake, it was becoming clear to Tom that Connolly didn't seem to be in any hurry to be his friend. He was not treating him like someone who'd made a miraculous and welcome escape from a snowy wilderness.

'I'm sure,' he said, reaching for the voice he used in meetings, when a client needed convincing that the web design work they'd received was exactly what they wanted, despite its apparent lack of similarity to what had been discussed in the briefing. It felt a long time since he'd used this voice, but it was less than two weeks, and while rusty, it did come. 'Thank you for your concern.'

'Okay. So why don't you tell me your story?'

'Al, he's kind of been through that.' This was Phil, entering the room with two cups of coffee.

Connolly ignored his deputy, sat back in his chair, and kept looking at Tom.

'My name is Tom Kozelek,' the man in the chair said. 'I'm… on vacation. Three days ago, I guess it was, I went driving up into the mountains. I parked up at a trail head, I don't remember the name.'

'Howard's Point,' the policeman nodded. 'Your car was towed back from there yesterday afternoon. You turning up has solved that little mystery, at least.'

'Right. So I parked up there, and went for a hike.'

'A hike,' the man said, nodding to himself. 'What exactly did you take with you in the way of provisions?'

'I assume you know,' Tom muttered, coldly. 'I can see my bag out there on the table.'

'Yes. I know,' the cop said. 'Don't know whether you've had a chance to catch any TV while you've been here, but at this time of year there's an advertisement which runs every hour or so. It suggests that people stay the hell out of the mountains unless they know what they're doing and have the equipment to do it with. You not watch much television, Mr Kozelek?'

'I was in a confused state of mind.'

'Right.' The man nodded again. 'And so where have you been since?'

'Walking back here,' Tom said. 'I got lost. I had maps, but I left them in the car by mistake. I was a little drunk when I started out, and usually my sense of direction is pretty good but it snowed and I fell down a gully and to be honest I just got really, really lost. I tried to find my way back to the road but by then I'd gotten turned around and evidently I just kept heading away from it. Then I found something that looked like a trail and followed it, but it didn't seem to go anywhere and kept cutting in and out.'

'Old logging track, probably,' Phil said. 'Could even have been a bit of the old mountain road itself. Most of it you can only tell something used to be there because there's a line of trees that are a little thinner.'

Connolly turned his head slowly to look at him. The deputy shut up. The sheriff looked back at Tom.

'Look, what's your problem?' Tom said.

'Me? I don't have one. Please continue.'

Tom deliberately took a long time over a sip of coffee. The guy was really beginning to piss him off. They were all like this, in the end. Every one of them so full of their special status, pretending they'd never been in a difficult situation in their own lives.

'So I just walked,' he said. 'I don't know where I was. Then last night I finally found a road. I stood by it for a while, thinking surely someone must come along and give me a ride, but it was snowing and nobody came. So I walked. And I got here early this morning.'

'Quite a little adventure, Mr Kozelek,' Connolly said. 'You must be glad it's over, and looking forward to going back home.'

'Not just yet,' Tom said, shrugging off the top two blankets. Not only was he too hot now, but he sensed the 'little boy lost' look wasn't helping the sheriff take him seriously. 'There's things I have to do here first.'

'What could those possibly be?'

Tom looked him in the eye. 'I'm going back into the forest.' He took a deep breath, and prepared to say something he knew he was going to remember for the rest of his life. 'I saw something when I was in there. Something pretty amazing.' He paused again, savouring the moment.

'This would be Bigfoot, right?'

Tom stared at him, side-swiped. 'How did you know?'

Connolly smiled, gently. 'You mentioned it a couple of times to my deputy when you first got here. To the doctor too, I believe. Matter of fact, from what I hear, it was the very first word you said when you came staggering into town. Before you fell down.'

Tom's mouth felt dry, his face red. He didn't remember telling them about it. Shit.

'Okay,' he said. 'I knew that. But I saw it. I saw Bigfoot. It was standing right over me. I saw it.'

'What you saw was a bear, Mr Kozelek.'

'No it wasn't. I thought so at the time, but it wasn't. It didn't look like one. And what do bears smell like?'

'Can't say as I've ever been close enough to find out. They're picky like that.'

'This one smelt awful. Really, really bad. Not only that, but I also saw footprints.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes it fucking well is so. You want to pretend it was a bear I saw, fine. But I saw footprints. A line of them, leading away from where I'd been.'

'They weren't your own? From when you ran from the bear?'

'No. I was scrabbling all over the place. The shape would have been all messed up. And also, you could see the fucking toes. Five big round toes, at the front. Look, I saw this.'

'Sure you did.' Connolly turned to Phil. 'You want to get Mrs Anders in here now?'

Confused, Tom watched the younger policeman as he went out to fetch a woman he now saw was sitting on the other side of the main room. Connolly meanwhile drank his own coffee in one long, slow swallow, looking coolly at Tom.

Phil returned with the woman. She was in her mid sixties, grey hair gathered in a loose ponytail. One hand was thrust down into the pocket of a yellow all-weather coat worn over a thick fleece. The other was clutching a large plastic bag. She looked apologetic and embarrassed.

Tom began to have a sinking feeling.

'This here is Patrice Anders,' Connolly said. 'Patrice lives out a few miles past Howard's Point. Don't know if you noticed it from your maps, but there's a little subdivision around from there, up off the next highway over the mountains. Was going to be the next big thing. Present time, Mrs Anders remains the only occupant.'

'It's nice to meet you,' Tom said. 'But I don't understand what this is about.'

Connolly looked at the woman, and raised his brows.

'It was me, in the forest,' she said.

Tom stared at her. 'What do you mean?'

She shook her head. 'I'm so sorry about this. I go walking a great deal. I belong to a couple of national programmes that monitor wildlife, and I keep an informal tally of what's around at each time of year. I don't know whether it's of any real use in the long run, it's not very scientific, I don't suppose, but…' She shrugged. 'Anyway, it's what I do. And the other morning I was out there, quite early, and I saw something lying down by the gully. It's actually not too far from the edge of my land, as the crow flies. Well, it's a distance, you know. I like to walk. Anyway, I went down there, and I saw it was a backpack. I didn't know whether someone was coming back for it, so I just left it there.'

Tom looked at Connolly. 'Okay. So what?'

'The footprints you saw belonged to Mrs Anders.'

'Bullshit. Are you not listening to a word I say? These were huge.'

'Give the sun an hour and the edges will melt. They're going to look much bigger than they ought to be.'

For a second Tom thought he was going to throw himself over the desk and grab the man by the throat. He knew it would be a bad idea, and not just because he was the law. So instead he kept his voice very level. He had the clincher, after all.

'Right. And the sun will also make footprints look like they've got five big toes, correct? Weird sun you've got around here, if so.'

There was quiet for a moment, and then a rustling. The woman called Patrice pulled something out of her bag.

For a moment Tom couldn't make out what he was seeing. Then the back of his neck started to buzz.

'You can buy them over in Cle Elum,' she said. 'Kind of stupid, I know. But, you know, kind of fun too. My husband bought me them for a joke.'

Tom kept staring at the pair of novelty boots, with their furry top halves, and their brown plastic feet, complete with five big toes.

— «» — «» — «»—

Phil took the woman away. It might have been his imagination, but Tom thought he sensed that the deputy was feeling a little bad for him. He hoped so, anyway. There weren't going to be any other candidates for sympathy within driving distance.

Connolly glanced up at the clock on the wall. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes, and lit up.

'Strange old day,' he said. 'More excitement than I was bargaining on when I got up, that's for damned sure.' He tapped a little ash onto the desk. 'Not a huge amount happens around here, as I'm sure you've guessed. Bet you've worked out I like it that way, too.'

Tom shook his head. 'I still know what I saw.'

'You saw jack shit, Mr Kozelek.' The policeman's grey eyes were cold. 'You went out into the woods with a bad purpose in mind, and I'm not even going to talk about how irresponsible that is when it's other men's jobs to come out and find you regardless of why you went. You got yourself screwed up with booze and pills and you either saw a bear or you hallucinated one or what the hell else.'

Tom just shook his head.

Connolly ground the cigarette out. 'Suit yourself. I'm not going to tell you to ship out tonight, because you've had a rough couple days and despite what you might think, I'm a reasonable person. You look like shit and you need to eat and get some sleep. So why don't you go do those things, and then maybe tomorrow morning think about sampling some of the other nice little towns we've got around here. Snohomish, for example, the antiques capital of the North West. Or maybe even Seattle. They have an airport there.'

'I'm not going anywhere.'

'Yeah, you are.' Connolly stood up, stretched. Bones cracked. 'Soon. You want my advice?'

'Not even a little bit.'

'Just be grateful you got away with it. Be happy you didn't get attacked by that big ole bear, and that you didn't die out there out on the mountain. Leave it at that. Because here's something else.'

He glanced out through the glass, and saw his deputy was putting his coat on at the door, ready, as instructed, to help Kozelek find somewhere in town to stay for one night only. Still, he lowered his voice a fraction. 'On my way back here, I checked up on you.'

Tom stared at the man's back, suddenly realizing that while His Time Away might have changed him, it had made no difference to the outside world. There'd been no mid-season culling of the parts of his life he didn't like. Out here, the dreary, long-running series he lived was still going strong, despite the fact its primary audience — himself — believed it majorly sucked.

Connolly looked back at him. 'I know what you did.'

11

A package from Nina was waiting at the desk first thing. I told the restaurant to round up all the coffee they had and send it to my room, and headed back upstairs. I didn't have a lot of optimism that I'd be able to do anything for her — both LAPD and the FBI would have grown-ups on the case — but it was something to do while waiting for Zandt.

I laid my gear out on the table, and got to it. When I opened the package I found a small, shiny, semi-transparent plastic bag designed to combat static, which is the main way of screwing up delicate electronic equipment. Other than dropping it, of course. Inside was a small hard disk. Stuck to it was a note from Nina.

'Be VERY, VERY careful with this,' it said. 'It's the original. Find something on it for me, then get it the hell back.'

Before I did anything else, I rang Nina's cell. She sounded hassled and distracted. 'I'm glad it arrived,' she said. 'But I don't think it's going to lead anywhere. LAPD just got done tracing the history. They found the guy who bought the original laptop, some movie industry bottom feeder called Nic Golson, but he has a receipt proving he sold it on to a second-hand store in Burbank in July last year. He thought he was going to get some big script job but then didn't so he couldn't afford to keep the machine. After that, someone bought it cash, then stripped this part and dumped the rest somewhere we'll never find it. The store's employees are being interviewed right now, but this killer strikes me as brighter than that.'

'So how come I've got the original disk?'

'I used my feminine wiles.'

'You have wiles?'

'You'd be surprised. Actually, so would I. Probably just rank.' She admitted she'd leaned on an LAPD lab rat after I'd made it clear a copy was only that. The guy was willing to cover for her, not least because they'd done everything they could with it. It had already been fingerprinted, so touching it was no problem. But…

I said I'd take good care of it.

Then I put the phone down, and looked at something I now knew had spent a while inside a dead woman's face. It was hard to work out whether it was that, or the risk Nina had taken, which was the more unnerving.

Coffee arrived. I drank some with a cigarette. This had the usual result of making the world's challenges seem more feasible. I pulled out a cable I owned which had a Firewire plug on one end and an Oxford Bridge on the other and carefully inserted the disk's connectors into the latter and the plug into the back of Bobby's laptop. The disk appeared on the desktop.

I opened it and confirmed what I'd been told. There were two files, a piece of music stored as an MP3 file and the message. Nina had told me that the quote at the beginning of the text had been nailed to a German writer called Heinrich Heine. The recording of the Faur? Requiem was from a well-respected issue of the early 1960s, which didn't necessarily mean anything either. There's a timelessness to classical music performance. Most recent is not necessarily best. The most I could take from the music was to note it had been digitized at 192 k/sec in joint stereo, a high-quality setting. Given that most people can't hear the difference between 192 and 160, that maybe suggested either it had been designed to be played through a quality audio system, which could reveal the deficiencies of a lower sample rate; or more simply — and more obviously — the music was of importance to the person who had put it there. So, big deal either way. I listened to it several times while getting on with the next part, and noted what sounded like a little channel hiss, and a fairly certain click or two. It was possible the MP3 had been recorded from a vinyl source. It seemed unlikely that someone computer literate would disdain CDs entirely, so this maybe suggested the person owned an LP of the music that had some kind of sentimental value. Big deal again.

I fired up a piece of industrial-strength scanning software, and waited while it went about its business. A lot of people seem to think computers are just machines, like vacuums or the VCR. They're wrong. Right from the start, from the jumped-up abacuses of the Amiga and Apple II, we've had a different relationship with computers. You knew right away that this was something that had rights. If your washing machine stops working or TV goes on the fritz then you get it repaired or take it to the dump. These are pieces of old, transparent tech. They have no magic any more. If a computer messes you around, however, you're never really sure whose fault it is. You're implicated. You feel vulnerable. It's like the difference between a pencil and a car. A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model (too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rustbucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealt with. Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by the things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.

A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousandfold. It has fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser's history log and in the disk cache — not to mention all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a co-worker but carefully throw them all away, you've still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually empty your software's trash.

Even if you think you're being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren't out of the woods. All that happens when you 'delete' a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it — like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It's like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can't put his finger on them, can't show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files, making it impossible to return to what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real — the computer's earlier experiences; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We're like that.

It took half an hour for the software to do its pass. This brought up nothing, and merely proved what Nina's pet tech had already established: the disk had been very comprehensively wiped before the two files were copied onto it. Not only had the note-writing man been blinded, he'd then been taken out and shot.

The jug of coffee was cold. I set one of Bobby's proprietary pieces of pattern-matching software working on the disk. This would trawl over the surface looking at the junk which had been written over it, checking for any irregularities — or unexpected regularities — in the binary stew. Short of physically taking it apart and going in with tweezers, this was as deep as man could go into the shadowy childhood echoes of the digital mind. The past resists intrusion, even amongst the silicon-based.

A dialogue box popped up on the screen and told me the process would take a little over five hours. It's not very exciting to watch. I made sure the power was plugged in, and went for a walk.

— «» — «» — «»—

At three o'clock Zandt called from the airport. I gave him directions to L'Espresso and headed back over there to wait. Forty minutes later his cab pulled up. John got out, glared at the guy in costume in front of the hotel, and walked up the street to me. He came at a moderate pace and very steadily. I knew what that meant.

He told a passing waiter to bring him a beer, and sat down opposite me. 'Hello Ward. You're looking kind of lived in.'

'Me? You look like a crack house. How's Nina?'

'She's great,' he said.

He waited for his beer. The beard had gone. He didn't ask me how I was or what I'd been doing. In my limited experience of Zandt, I'd learned he didn't do small talk. He didn't do tiny talk or big talk either. He just said what he had to say and then either stopped or went away. He was drunk. You'd have to have spent time with a drinker to know — as I did, for a year, once — because there were few external signs. The bags under his eyes were darker, and he reached for his glass the moment it was put down; but his eyes were clear and his voice calm and measured.

'So what do you have on Yakima?'

'Like I said, not much. I went back to LA and told Nina what we'd found. She reported it, and nothing happened. I basically started looking into it because…'

He shrugged. I understood. There wasn't much else. He had been involved in the investigation of the Delivery Boy murders, as a result of which his daughter Karen had been abducted and never seen alive again. His marriage fell apart. He quit the force. I believed he had been a very good detective: it was he who had worked out the Upright Man was running a procuring ring for well-heeled psychopaths up at The Halls, abducting people to order. But even if Zandt had wanted to go back to being a cop, which he didn't, LAPD weren't likely to be in the market. So what else was he going to do? Become a security guard? Go into business? As what? Zandt was as unemployable as I was.

'We could join the Feds.'

'Right. You were thrown out of the CIA. That's always impressive. Anyway. Do you remember the word on the door of the cabin we found?'

'Not really,' I said. 'I saw there were letters there, but they just looked like they were part of the general mess.'

He reached into a pocket and produced a small piece of glossy paper. 'One of the pictures I took,' he said. 'Printed at high contrast. You see it now?'

I looked closely. There certainly were letters hacked into the door. If you studied it hard, you could just make out the word or name 'CROATOAN'. It had been there a long while, too, and was partially obscured by later weathering and further marks. 'Meaning?'

'I thought it might be an old mining company name or something. But I can't find one. The only reference I could find to it is strange.'

He pushed a further thick sheaf of paper towards me. I saw a lot of words in a variety of very small typefaces, divided into sections, underneath the overall title 'Roanoke'.

'I'm hoping there's a precis.'

'You've heard of Roanoke, right? The one on the east coast?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Vaguely. Bunch of people disappeared a long time ago. Or something.'

'They disappeared twice, in fact. Roanoke was England's first attempt to establish a colony in America. The Brit explorer Walter Raleigh was granted a stretch of land by Elizabeth I, in one of her charters to try to grab a chunk of this New World. In 1584 Raleigh sent an expedition to see what he'd got: specifically, they checked out an area called Roanoke Island, on the tidewater coast of what is now North Carolina. They took an initial look around, made contact with the local tribe — the Croatoan — and wound up heading back to England. In 1586 a second group of a hundred men went out. They didn't have it so good. Didn't take enough supplies, ran into trouble with the locals through not treating them well, and in the end all but fifteen were picked up by a passing ship and went home. But Raleigh was keen to establish a working colony, and so the next year a further party was sent to make sure this new 'Virginia' got consolidated. He appointed a man called John White to lead them and be their governor. One hundred and seventeen people went along. Men, women, children — the idea being that family groups would make it more permanent. They were specifically told not to head for Roanoke Island, but … that's where they ended up. They found the fortifications the previous group had built, but no sign of the fifteen men who'd been left to guard it. Just gone. Vanished. White re-established contact with the Croatoan, who said an 'enemy tribe' had attacked the fort and killed at least some of the soldiers. White was ticked, obviously, and when one of the new colonists was found dead he decided to attack the local bad-boy tribe, the Powhatans. Except his men screwed it up and managed to kill some Croatoans instead, presumably on the time-honoured 'they all look the same to me' principle.'

I shook my head. 'Nice going.'

'So of course the Croatoans suddenly and reasonably retract all previous goodwill — and refuse to supply them with food. The colonists had arrived in summer, too late to plant crops, and what little they'd brought was going bad.'

'They were kind of stupid, the early settlers.'

'Stupid or brave. Or both. Either way, White decided to go back to England for supplies. There was no choice. It was agreed that if they ended up having to go inland, the colonists would leave markings showing which way they'd gone. Also, that if they'd left because of attack, they'd carve a cross somewhere prominent. Problem was, when White got back to England he found the country was at war with Spain — and he didn't make it back to Roanoke for three whole years.'

I thought about that for a moment. Abandoned in an alien land with neighbours who hate you, the food running out. The leader pops home for a take-out and stays gone from 1587 until 1590. 'And when he returned?'

'Gone. Every single one. Disappeared. Nobody living, no sign of bodies. Personal possessions left behind. No sign of a cross carved anywhere. There was the word 'Croatoan', however, carved on a gatepost.'

'Okay,' I said. 'That's kind of spooky. So what happened?'

He shrugged. 'That's the last sure thing anybody knows. White wanted to know what had happened to the people he'd left behind, but the captain and crew of his ship couldn't care less, so he was forced to go back to England. He tried to get another expedition out there in late 1590 but by this time Raleigh and his investors had lost interest. Since then lots of people have tried to put the thing together, starting with a guy called John Smith who was at the Jamestown settlement twenty years later.'

'And?'

'Smith talked to the locals and came up with a few ideas, and they're pretty much the ones still floating around. It turns out the word 'Croatoan' was applied not just to a tribe but also to a large and not very well defined geographical area. So it could have been carved to indicate a destination, as agreed with White. Alternatively it could have implied that the Croatoan themselves had a change of heart and started helping the hapless colonists. Or, if you choose to believe it meant the named tribe had started attacking, then you could theorize that the colonists were forced to head inland. Either idea leads to the possibility that some or all of the settlers (some theories have the male colonists being killed, leaving just the women and children) became assimilated into a local or not so local tribe, and there are a couple of native peoples — notably the Lumbee — who have long-term claims in this direction, some of which sound pretty solid. This theory has been taken seriously since the mid-1800s at least, and speculated about since Jamestown. There's stories of a minister in the mid-1600s meeting friendly natives in the area who spoke English, and talk of some German explorer whose name I couldn't track down who claimed to have had meetings with 'a powerful nation of bearded men' — i.e. possible descendants of the settlers.'

I'd thought the carvings on the door of the cabin hadn't made much impact on me, but as John said this, I found myself suddenly cold, out in the middle of nowhere, in the company of the dead.

Zandt waved an arm to catch the waiter's attention. The waiter started to explain he was busy, caught the look in Zandt's eye, and went to get him another beer. 'The question is why it was carved on the cabin door we found.'

'A quote?' I said. 'Some reference to the Roanoke mystery? But what sense would that make?'

'He's trying to tell us something.'

'I really don't think that place had anything to do with Paul. There was nothing to tie him to it. And anyway — why would he care? Why would he want to tell us stuff?'

'He spent half of Sarah Becker's incarceration lecturing her. Then there's the piece you found on the web three months ago, the diatribe about how everyone except the Straw Men are infected with a social virus which made us start farming, and started the slide towards being civilized. He's on a mission to inform.'

We paused, as drinks were put in front of us. 'The big thing about Paul,' I said, 'is that he doesn't think he's just another lunatic'

'None of them do, Ward. None of these men get up in the morning and think 'I'm going to do something evil today'. They do what they do, and some of them understand that it's bad, and some don't, but either way it's not why they do it.'

'Yes,' I said, irritated at his tone. 'I understand.'

'They do it because that's what they do, just like addicts jack themselves with smack. They're not trying to kill themselves. They're not trying to fuck up their lives. They just have to have some heroin, as you need a cigarette and some people need their shoes to be clean and others have to make sure they tape their daily shows or check the door's locked three times when they leave the house. Everyone's got their magic spell, their maintenance rituals, the private things they do that they believe make the world work.'

'What's yours these days — beer?'

'Fuck you.'

'What's the deal with you and Nina?'

'It's none of your fucking business.'

'Yes it is,' I said, angry now. 'There are three people in the world who know about the Straw Men. I've spent three months skulking around the country keeping out of the way. I beat the shit out of some poor guy in Idaho because I thought he'd come to clip me. I'm out on a very long limb with very few resources. You two are it.'

'What about the money from your folks?'

'Gone,' I said. 'Not spent. Wiped. They got to it.'

'Shit,' he said. 'I'm sorry to hear that.' He looked across the street for a moment. 'Things got fucked up,' he said eventually, apparently watching a man who was moving paintings around in a gallery window. 'I moved in. You know we'd been together before, back when I was married. I thought it might work. We both did. But… She's quite intense.'

'Right. Whereas you're just a big fluffy teddy bear.'

He turned his head back, his gaze ending on me as if I was by only a narrow margin the most interesting or relevant object in vision. 'I've always thought so.'

'What were you doing down in Florida?'

He just shook his head. He was beginning to really piss me off.

'Okay, so what else have you found out?'

'Nothing,' he said.

'That's it, for a month of looking? You came all the way over here to tell me this? That's your big news?'

'I haven't spent my entire time on it, Ward, and I don't report to you. I've been trying to have a life. There are other things that are important. The Straw Men aren't everything in the world. The Upright Man is just another killer.'

'Bullshit,' I said, loudly. 'He killed your daughter and my parents. He's not just another anything. And your investigative response is some crap that happened four hundred years ago?'

'Sometimes you have to go back a long way to do what needs to get done.'

'And that means… what?'

He shrugged. He'd said all he had to say.

'So what are you going to do now?'

'Check into a hotel somewhere, I guess.'

'This one's not bad.' I felt exposed the moment I'd said this, and wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

He smiled. 'Too expensive for the likes of me, Ward.'

Digging myself deeper: 'So accept a loan.'

'A loan? I thought you were the guy with no resources.'

'John, why are you being such an asshole?'

He stood, and dropped ten bucks on the table.

'Because it's going to take more than this to do something about them,' he said.

He walked away, up the street, and didn't look back. I watched him until he had disappeared from sight, and then went upstairs to pack.

12

It was a little after six and Tom was standing on the balcony that ran along the entire front of the two-storey, L-shaped motel when the car pulled into the lot. He was feeling better in most ways, but worse in others. Getting out of the police station had helped. Also changing his clothes. The deputy had been patient about waiting while Tom picked up new jeans and a fleece jacket and everything that went underneath. What else he had owned prior to His Time Away was stowed in the trunk of the rental car, now sitting down in the lot.

A long hot shower and a sit in the room's single chair had got him to the point where he more or less felt able to go in search of food. His old clothes were stashed in the bag the new ones had come in. Though it seemed hard to believe they'd be wearable again, he felt a superstitious bond with them. A part of his mind — the part that had kept every wallet he had ever owned — was prepared to impute power to the inanimate, to believe power lay lodged in things. Without those clothes, who knows what might have happened?

Though he would not quite have been able to admit it, even to himself, there was another aspect to it. The clothes were his witness. They had been there. They knew what he had seen, or felt. In all the time he'd been struggling through the wilderness, desperate for civilization, Tom had kept one thought in his mind. Not only did he now want to stay alive after all, he had a reason to. He knew something. He was bringing news.

The experience had not gone quite as he'd hoped.

He still believed in what he'd seen — or had felt. It was evident that no one else did. The sheriff's position had been starkly clear, and the deputy took his time from him. The fifteen minutes he had spent in the little clothes boutique across from the market had shown Tom that news travelled fast. He'd already guessed this from the fact that the Patrice woman had heard enough to come and drop her drab bombshell (she had spent five minutes afterwards apologizing profusely to Tom, which had somehow just made things worse). People quickly knew what he'd said he'd seen. And by the time he was handing over a credit card for his purchases, it had become evident to Tom that everyone now thought he was a crazy person.

He was drunk in Frank's, you know, couple nights before. Tried to kill himself in the forest, but not with a gun or something hunky like that. Pills, I believe. Passed out, thought he saw something. Then spent two days lost. How funny is that!

Funny, or sad. The girl behind the register didn't articulate any of this, but her very, very kind smile said it all. The man behind the motel's reception desk hadn't given him much eye contact either; but at the end, again there was a slanted smile. Tom got the message. He was one step away from laughing stock. And two steps away from something far worse. If Connolly said anything about what he'd found out, the kind smiles would stop. And Connolly didn't know the whole of it.

He had spent some of the time in the chair staring at the phone, wondering whether he should call home. It had been three, four days. He couldn't remember whether he'd called the night before His Time Away. He knew this didn't speak well of his state of mind. He didn't believe he'd done so, thought he'd wisely denied himself the temptation to say something big or portentous. He felt he owed Sarah a call now, to let her know he was all right, but knew she had no reason to suspect he wouldn't be. His radio silence would be nothing more than additional evidence for the 'Tom is an asshole' school of thought. He wanted to tell her his news. He had to tell someone, and one of his key insights in His Time Away had been that he still cared about Sarah very much. He wouldn't have to tell her why he was out in the woods in the first place (though she might find out later, so he'd have to leave room for that revelation): he could just say what he'd found. The problem was that, as he stood trying to hang onto the feeling he'd had in the forest, that of being in danger but being worthwhile, his news looked flawed.

Without it there was no reason to call 'home', and nothing new to say. And what did it amount to, after all?

That thing which everyone knows doesn't really exist? The big silly furry one that always turned out to have been faked? I saw it. I was that close to a mythical beast. It stood over me and I smelt its terrible breath. At least… I think I did — while I was drunk out of my mind, and half asleep, and a retch away from death. And then I saw a footprint. Though maybe I didn't, and if the truth be told I was hearing voices at the time. That's my news. PS I love you.

Ought to win her respect right back. She'd probably leap straight down the phone, just to be with him again. My brave explorer. My … stupid fucking fool.

No. What she knew already was bad, but not as bad as what she might some day find out. For them to stand any chance against that, any chance at all, things had to be good from now. She would have to believe his word against that of others. He couldn't call her now sounding like a lunatic. Didn't want to even send her a text message. When he communicated with her again, it had to be the start of an upward track. But no matter how long he stood out on the balcony, he couldn't work out where one of those might start.

The car pulled around the lot in a smooth arc and came to rest right in the middle. The driver's side door opened almost immediately and a man got out. He was a little over medium height, had brown hair cut well, and was dressed like city folk.

He looked up at the balcony and gave a little wave. 'You wouldn't be Tom Kozelek, by any chance?'

Tom frowned at him for a moment. 'Yes,' he said, eventually. 'Who are you?'

The man grinned. 'How about that? Come a long way fast to talk to you, and there you are, just like that.'

'Okay,' Tom said. 'But who are you, exactly?'

The man pulled a card out of his wallet, and held it up. It was too far for Tom to read the words, but the logo looked familiar.

'I'm someone who wants to hear your story,' he said. 'Now — should I come up there, or are you going to let me buy you a beer?'

— «» — «» — «»—

At quarter of seven Al Connolly was still sitting at his desk in the station. There was no real reason to be. Phil had gone off duty but his other deputy, Conrad, was killing time out in the front. Connolly could have been at home, but the truth was there wasn't a great deal to do there. Still, he was just about to get up and head on out when there was a knock on his door. He looked up to see Melissa Hoffman standing outside.

'Doctor,' Connolly said. 'What can I do for you?'

'Well,' she said, 'it's nothing really. Just … well, I found something out, and I thought I maybe should tell you.'

He looked towards the machine in the corner and saw it was half full. 'You want a coffee?'

She nodded, sat down diffidently. People always did. No matter how much they wanted to look at ease, all but a few looked as though they wanted to have the cuffs clapped on right away, in case there was some sin they'd forgotten. The few who didn't look that way were always genuine criminals, who at some deep, deep level just didn't understand.

He fixed them both a cup, sat back at the desk, and said nothing.

'Okay,' she said. 'I did something naughty. When I was in here this morning, checking the mountain guy, on the way out I spotted something in his bag.'

'What kind of thing?'

'This,' she said, and put something on Connolly's desk. He picked it up, turned it over. It looked like a small clump of weeds. Old weeds. 'I probably shouldn't have taken it.'

'Probably,' he said. 'What is it?'

'That's just it,' she said. 'I saw it there — actually it was one of several in the bag — and I wondered what it was. Here you've got a guy who's making outlandish claims which we know aren't true.'

'That's all been squared away,' Connolly said, comfortably. 'Turned out there was a confusion.'

'Oh,' Melissa said, disappointed. 'Then maybe this isn't news after all. I just thought I should check it out. Didn't want to find it was some bad stuff he'd got locally, and we were going to have a rash of drug nuts popping up all over.'

'It was a good thought,' he said. 'So…'

'So I have a neighbour who knows about plants and herbs. I took it to her, see if she could tell me what it was.'

'Would this be Liz Jenkins?'

Melissa looked very slightly uncomfortable. 'Yes.'

'She understands a lot about herbs, I know. Matter of fact, you get a chance, you might want to find a way of hinting to her she might want to be a bit more discreet about her use of one of them. Her boyfriend, also.'

'I will,' Melissa said. 'And I know about all that, and it's part of the reason I went to her.'

'Oh yes?'

She flushed. 'Yes. I thought she'd be able to recognize the kind of thing that people might want to smoke.'

Connolly smiled. 'Whereas you'd be at a complete loss.'

'Exactly.' Melissa cocked her head and smiled back, thinking not for the first time that Connolly was a better guy, and a little bit more subtle, than most people gave him credit for. 'Shall I go on?'

'I'm agog. Did she know what it was?'

'Actually, it's two things.' Melissa placed a piece of paper on the desk and smoothed it out so they both could read — or attempt to read — Liz's baroque handwriting. 'If you look closely you can see one stalk has the remains of some tiny flowers on it. I didn't see them at first. That one is called Scutellaria lateriflora, or skullcap or sometimes Quaker bonnet or hoodwort.'

She leaned forward to disentangle another of the scraggy strands, which to Connolly looked indistinguishable from the rest. 'And this other stuff in amongst it is Valeriana officinalis. Now. Scutellaria grows all over the US and Southern Canada. It's not especially rare. But the interesting thing is Liz said a group called the Eclectics back in the nineteenth century used it as a tranquillizer or sedative, to treat insomnia and nervousness.'

Connolly nodded. He sensed there was more.

'And valerian is mentioned by a pre-Civil War herbalist called Thompson. He says the earliest colonists found several Indian tribes using it, and he called it, and Liz showed me the quote, 'the best nervine known' — by which he meant 'tranquillizer.' Complementary therapists use it today for anxiety and headache and (again) insomnia, and Liz claims it's been favourably tested against Valium.'

'That's real interesting,' Connolly said. 'Amazing what you can run across out there in the woods.'

'It is, isn't it?'

'So you're saying this stuff is just local flora, and it got brushed into the guy's bag as he was stumbling along in the night.'

'No, Al, I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that for three reasons.' She put her coffee down, and counted off on her fingers. 'The first is it would be a family-size coincidence that two known herbal remedies happened to fall into his bag, especially ones that sound perfect for the mental state of the guy at the time. The second is that if you look down at the lower end of the stems there, it looks a little like one of the stalks has been used to bind them all together.'

'Can't really see that,' Connolly said. 'Could just be the way they were mushed together in his bag.'

'Okay,' Melissa said. 'Be that way. But here's the thing. Scutellaria lateriflora is a perennial. It dies back in the winter.'

Connolly said nothing.

'Al, that guy could have dragged his bag from here to Vancouver and none of that stuff is going to end up inside. Which means it was put there deliberately.'

Connolly looked at her for a long moment, then reached across and picked up the coffee pot again. He raised it at her, but she shook her head. He took his time pouring another cup for himself, quietly wishing he had gone home just a little earlier.

'I don't really see where this is leading,' he said, finally. 'Okay, so the guy went to a herb doctor recently. What's the big deal?'

'Maybe there is none,' Melissa said. 'But I don't see him doing that, getting these kind of dried remedies and taking them along on an admitted suicide jaunt. Does that make sense to you?'

'No, I guess it doesn't.' Connolly could have suggested that the plants were left there from some earlier time or trip, but he'd already noticed that backpacks just like the one Kozelek had were for sale right there in Sheffer. 'So where does that leave us, Mrs Fletcher?'

Melissa laughed attractively. 'Nowhere. Just thought I'd pass it on. We're having supper over at the Wilsons' tonight anyhow, so it was on our way. I left Jeff over in Frank's, and actually, unless I want to lose the Wilsons as friends and dining companions, I should go haul him out of there before he gets into another round.'

Connolly accompanied her out to the street, and stood watching as she walked the long diagonal across the wet road to Frank's double-lot spread of warm light and neon, treading carefully to avoid messing up her dinner party shoes. She was a good doctor, and it didn't matter to him if she and Liz Jenkins spent the occasional private evening not making much sense. Al had enjoyed some nights like that himself, back in the day. She'd most likely drop the stuff about the plants. Wasn't really anywhere it could go.

But he walked back to his office just the same, sat at his desk, and thought a while.

— «» — «» — «»—

Tom and the journalist were just starting on their second beer in Frank's when the doctor lady came in to pick up a guy who was presumably her husband. This man had been sitting talking affably with the barman on the other side of the room. She calmly but firmly made him leave his drink on the counter, and led him back to the outside. Tom turned to watch them crossing the lot and saw her laughing hard at something her man had said. Tom had made women laugh sometimes, too. Suddenly he missed the sound very much.

'Anyone you know?' the journalist said.

Tom shook his head. 'Local doctor. The police got her in to look me over.'

'Cute.'

'I guess so,' Tom said. 'Taken, though.'

'Everybody's taken these days, Tom. Including you, judging by the wedding bands you got there. Is there anything I need to know about that? About how come you're up here all on your own?'

'There was some difficulty back home,' Tom said. 'I came out here to clear my head.'

'Okay. That will do for now.'

Tom wondered how long it would be before the man decided he had to know more about that, and how he could keep him away from that information. He set his beer down and looked at him. From his neat shirt and suit alone you'd know this was a guy just up from the city, and who maybe wasn't quite as smart as he thought. As usual, he was smiling. Tom supposed that was a trait that came in handy when getting people to tell you things. The man — whose name was Jim Henrickson — worked for Front Page, whose red and white logo Tom had recognized from twenty yards. Fashion, fame, celebrities — along with Hitler's Hideout in Antarctica, Aliens Abducted My Pay Check, and Fish Boy Born To Idaho Beauty Queen. And now … Suicidal Designer Finds Bigfoot.

The difference being that Front Page headlines were never actually that bald, and the writers went to some trouble to look like they were proper journalists. Even if some of the stories wandered into the realms of the bizarre, they were soberly written and took an even-handed approach. Plus it was glossy. The entertainment world took it pretty seriously and their film and fashion people got invites to all the big parties. It was, as celebrity hack mags went, pretty classy. That made a difference. If Henrickson had been from the Enquirer or World News, Tom would be elsewhere by now. Eating, probably. But the news had to start somewhere, and in the last half-hour, Tom had gradually started to think that he might have an audience for his announcement after all.

'You believe me,' he said.

'Actually, I do.'

Tom felt exhausted, and strange, and tearful. The man saw this, and gently clapped him on the shoulder. 'It's okay, my friend.'

'Why?' Tom asked. 'Nobody else does.'

'Main reason is you just don't seem like a liar, and most of the nonsense I hear is lies rather than mistakes. Second thing is that this is not the first time I've been up around here on a story like this. Nine months ago three hunters fifty miles north east of here, up near Mazama, reported a very similar incident. Something appearing in their camp in the night. A pungent aroma. They heard strange noises, too, a kind of quiet wailing. You hear anything like that?'

'No. But… I was very firmly asleep, before I woke.'

'Right. Well, it freaked them out. These were three big ole boys, been going out in the woods since they were kids, and they came running scared out of their minds.'

'I don't remember hearing about that.'

'Read us every week, do you?'

'No,' Tom admitted. 'In waiting rooms, mainly. Sorry.'

'Your implication saddens me, Tom. Waiting rooms are an important environment. We get men and women through that pre-dental anxiety, more power to us. No, well, you didn't hear about the hunters because we didn't run with it. Hearsay from three beardy guys in plaid may be enough for our competitors, but it's no use to FP's sophisticated readership. Our whole USP is that though we'll cover the Weird Stuff, we won't even table it unless we think we've got a case.'

'Hitler's Hideout in Antarctica?'

'What can I tell you?' The man laughed, throwing his hands wide. 'It was a strange old rock formation and no mistake. Personally I wouldn't have run that one, I admit it freely, but I'm just a field grunt. Sold a shitload of copies, that's for sure. Hitler, the perennial bad boy. We miss him now he's gone. Anyway, my point is if BF's going to be found anywhere, it's going to be up here in the Pacific North West. You have literally hundreds of reports over the years, back to a guy called Elekah Walker in the 1800s — and there's deep background stuff too. All around this part of the US you can find ancient rock carvings of things that look pretty monkey-like, despite the fact you've got no native primates, or so They say.'

'Wasn't there some footage, too?'

The man shook his head. 'The Patterson film. Turned out to be a fake, only recently in fact. All of it does, either fake or could-be-fake and nothing to prove otherwise. That's your biggest problem right there. There's lots of people who don't want the Truth to be known. You give Them the slightest opening and They're going to take you down. But we'll get there.'

Henrickson took a sip of his beer, eyes bright with good cheer. 'You want to know what else I think?'

'Okay,' Tom said. His own beer tasted good but was making him feel strange. It was probably a bad idea, but he didn't want to stop just yet. In the meantime, he was happy to let the other man talk.

'Conspiracy theories are bunk.'

'Right,' said Tom, nodding. 'Okay. Which one?'

'Not one. All of them. All conspiracy theories are false. They have been invented by the Authorities — to hide what's really going on.'

Tom laughed. 'Good one.'

'I'm not joking.'

'Oh.'

'The only theory which can be true is this one, because I know for sure it has not been put about by Them, because it was invented by me. The more bizarre it appears, the more likely a theory is to be true — because it only sounds weird in the context of the lies we've been trained to accept.'

'You've lost me,' Tom said. 'Could be the beer.'

'The authorities control all information — therefore they must have invented these theories too. They plant 'conspiracy theories' because the real truth would be even worse for us to know. Example. You know this idea that we never really landed on the moon, right? That it was all a fake?'

'I saw a television show. Plus there was a movie…'

'Right. Capricorn One. And a bunch of books, dah dah dah. But the truth is that the idea we didn't go there is itself a fake conspiracy theory, invented to draw attention away from the real truth. There is no moon.'

'Excuse me?'

'There's no moon. No planets or stars either. Everyone's yakking about did we go there or not, and so they miss the real truth. There's no there, there. Galileo was on drugs. This is it, my friend; this ball of rock is all she wrote. Which also explains the 'The Government Knows About Aliens And Is Covering Them Up' theory, right? Fact is there are no aliens, because — see above — there is no rest of the universe. The idea was invented back when it got obvious we needed a new horizon, otherwise we'd kill each other by Tuesday. Gives us something to focus on. Who's going to get to the moon first, us or those super-bad Reds? Then we land there, but it's like we get bored immediately and don't bother any more. Isn't that kind of weird? We got there with forty-years-ago technology, but we don't do it now we could fit those computers on the head of a pin?'

'But there's the space shuttles.'

'Right. And every so often one of them blows apart. 'So that's why we haven't made it to Mars yet, boys and girls — because space is dangerous'. It's all bullshit, and that's what the Little Green Men are for. We don't go out there, but it comes down to us, therefore it must exist. And it's not just far horizons crap, either. Tell me this: who killed John F. Kennedy?'

'I don't know. My impression is it's sort of a mystery.'

'Right. And why is that?'

'You're going to tell me, I suspect.'

'To cover up the fact that Kennedy isn't dead.'

'He's not?'

'Of course not, Tom. Actually kind of a sweet story. He was forced out by the people he and his family had pissed off, the mob, Cuban nationals, the CIA; and it's like, 'Go forth, or we're going to whack you'. So he struck a deal so he and his one true love (Marilyn, who else?) could disappear. Their deaths were faked and now they're living in Scotland together. They started an alpaca farm. One of the first in Europe, I believe. It's small stuff, but they do okay and, you know, they've got each other, right? That's why shit keeps happening to all the other Kennedys. Some of them know about JFK's secret love farm. They're supposed to keep quiet about it, otherwise the whole conspiracy base will come to light and people will think 'Shit, if they can do that, then what else isn't true?' The first sign a Kennedy's going to squeal, and splat! They're history. Discredited, dead, or both. There's a rumour Lady Diana got wind of it too, need I say more?'

'You don't really believe all that.'

The man smiled. 'No,' he admitted. 'That's not what happened to JFK. But that's the first thing you learn in my business. What's true is immaterial. It's what people believe. Belief is the truth.'

There was a soft clunk at Tom's elbow, and he saw a new beer had arrived. He didn't remember seeing it signalled for. Another skill that probably came in handy in a job like Henrickson's.

'Jim, you don't have to get me drunk,' he said.

'Tom, Tom, Tom,' Henrickson said, shaking his head. 'Jeez! And you think I'm paranoid. Trust me. I'm in the mood for some suds, and you're keeping me company. You're in the system now, and that means you're not going to get screwed around. We have a story here, I'm hoping, and that means you're going to get paid big time. Though I do want your word, right here and now, that you're going to talk to me only on this, not anybody else.'

'Sure,' Tom said, knowing no one else would listen.

'Excellent. Which means we only have one remaining thing we're to sort out.'

'Some kind of proof.'

'I'm not talking court-of-law proof, of course. We had that then I'd say screw Front Page, let's get talking to the BBC and CNN and NYT But we need something. You got a description that sounds promisingly like the thing the hunters ran into, but you could have picked that up somewhere else.'

'But I hadn't heard…'

'I believe you. Others won't. You had a footprint, too, but that will be long gone, plus there's the inconvenient old woman with her stupid boots.'

'But that's it,' Tom said. 'That's all I had.'

'Actually no.' Henrickson shook his head. 'Not from what you said. You might have something you don't even realize. Tomorrow we'll go take a look.'

Tom just looked confused. 'Trust me,' the man said again, and winked.

— «» — «» — «»—

Al Connolly was leaving the station for the night. A quick conversation with Patrice Anders had explained Melissa's find: she had put the herbs there. The situation was nice and tidy again. He considered heading over to Frank's for a soda and some wings, but decided it had been a long day and that a beer in front of the tube at home would do just as well. His house was big and empty, but it was quiet and the phone wouldn't ring.

That sounded good.

13

Ten minutes after her phone conversation with Sheriff Connolly, Patrice was still standing in the little kitchen area of her home. A scant four-by-six-foot corner of the main living space, it had a window that looked out into the trees. She was looking out through it now, though if the truth be told she wasn't seeing anything. Not anything anyone else would see, anyhow.

— «» — «» — «»—

For almost all their lives Bill and Patrice Anders had lived in Portland. When the kids left home in the mid 1980s the adults started tentatively to remind themselves how you spent free time: like staff from an abandoned zoo, released with the animals back into the wild. They began to go for weekends out of the city, enjoying themselves in a somewhat aimless way, but it wasn't until they discovered Verona that they had horizons once again.

Little more than a bump on 101, the coast road down the state's Pacific edge, Verona has a few streets, wooden houses, a grocery, not much else: chances were you'd be through and past without it occurring to you to stop. But if you were dawdling south, and kept your eyes open as you left town, then just after the bridge over the inlet there's a sign for the Redwood Lodgettes. A sign burned into an old log, pointing into trees. Patrice saw it, and they pulled in to have a look. That whim changed the rest of their lives.

The Lodgettes were a piece of fading history, the kind of old-school resort that used to mark the end of a morning's driving and the dawn of an afternoon's swimming and shrieking and padding to the sea and back with sand and pine needles underfoot; mom happy because the place was nice and had somewhere to wash clothes, father relieved a budget had been met; the children knowing these things, however vaguely, and basking in the warmth of a family bound in simple satisfaction for once. Fourteen cabins were dotted around a couple of wooded acres, bordered by rocky shoreline on one side and the inlet on another. On that first visit Bill insisted on sketching out the layout of their cabin (Number 2), so taken was he with the way it had been put together: sitting area, kitchenette, bedroom, bathroom and storage eking every spare inch of living space out of sturdy log constructions twenty feet square. A wood-burning stove in the sitting room made it the perfect place for chilly spring evenings; the bedroom was cosy on cold winter nights. The wraparound porch was where you lived in summer and autumn, listening to the birds and the distant sound of water, musing about what you might have for supper, keeping a book open on your lap to legitimate not doing anything, including reading it.

In the evening they wandered over the bridge back into the tiny town. They found a bar that stood on stilts in the bay and had pool tables and loud music they recognized, and further up the hill a restaurant as good as any in Portland. They drank local wine and local beer and were enchanted. It was a long time since that had happened. Enchantment isn't easy to come by, in this day and age. Verona pulled it off, in spades. Bill and Patrice found themselves breathing more slowly, holding hands on the beach and smiling at fellow walkers, looking out to sea and feeling the curvature of the earth. They chose the same appetizers three nights running. The old couple who ran the Lodgettes — the Willards — were calling them by first name by the second day. When it came time to leave Patrice had to be hauled away by a tractor, and extracted a promise from her husband that they were coming back as soon as they could.

It was decided there and then. When the world needed getting away from, this was where they'd come.

— «» — «» — «»—

Ten years passed, with twenty visits, maybe twenty-five. The Willards retired in 94, but nothing much changed: Patrice and Bill kept pulling in to the Lodgettes like seabirds bobbing up on a twice-yearly tide. They nearly brought their children, once, but the visit fell through. This was far from unusual. When discussing Josh and Nicole one time, Bill described the relationship they had with them as 'cordial', and that pretty much nailed it. Everyone loved each other, there was no question of that, but they kept their heads about it. Nobody went berserk with affection. Phone contact was regular, visits friendly. They met for the major festivals, when well-chosen gifts were exchanged and everyone was helpful in the kitchen. Their children worked hard. If their careers were more important than visiting, there wasn't a great deal that could be said. They went down to Verona anyway. It was nice to have the place to themselves, not to have to worry whether others were finding it quite so comfortable as them. They didn't suggest a family trip again.

Then they happened to be in Verona for a weekend one late August and fell to talking to the new owners. It wasn't that they had a close relationship — unlike the Willards, Ralph and Becca seemed to forget them after each visit and affability had to be forged anew — but they soon picked up something was afoot. There was an air of non-renewal. They asked, and Ralph confirmed it without much evident regret: this was the Lodgettes' last summer.

On hearing this Patrice's heart was pierced, and her hand went up to her mouth. She barely heard as they were told the business wasn't making enough money, though the town was growing in popularity as Cannon Beach and Florence and Yachats got too expensive and people looked further down the coast for romantic minibreaks. This wasn't helping the Lodgettes. Young money didn't want rustic cabins. It wanted DVD players and organic juices. Stone Therapy was a baseline requirement. The resort occupied a prime location and a spa hotel there would be a no-brainer for someone who knew the business. Bill later muttered to Patrice that if Ralph or Becca had mastered the art of remembering guests between stays then things might have gone differently, but that's the way it was. A developer up from San Francisco had made an offer they weren't prepared to refuse.

They sat on the deck of the bar before dinner, sipping their Verona drinks: a rare beer for him, an even rarer Sweet Manhattan for her. Patrice felt more glum than in a long, long time. Why did life have to be this way? It seemed as if with every passing year the world accepted into it more and more things that meant nothing to her, innovations that seemed trivial or confusing but were heralded like the dawn of a new age. She put up with all that stuff, did her best to understand the attractions of cell phones and Windows and Eminem: but why did the parts that mattered to her have to get shoved aside in the process? Bill was also quiet. There was a look on his face, the one he got when he was trying not to think about something. He was reserved during dinner, not even bothering to look through the wine list, something which — since more or less giving up beer — he'd tried to get in the habit of doing. Patrice put it down to him feeling the way she did, to asking himself the same questions, most of all a question she was too sad to put into words.

Would they still come to Verona?

With the Lodgettes gone, vanished beneath just another hotel of the kind you could find by the bushel in glossy books telling couples of a certain age where to go to rekindle their love (or have affairs with their brokers or neighbours, more likely), where would they stay? There was already a hotel further up 101, on the north side of town, but it was a characterless brick sprawl with a treeless lawn, nowhere you'd go on purpose or twice. They could try the new place after it was built, but it would be disloyal to something that mattered, unfaithful to the old place. She knew the paths between its trees. She couldn't take breakfast on a balcony over a parking lot where their cabin had once stood.

So what would they do? Find somewhere else? She didn't want to. She didn't want to have to start afresh. Having Verona meant they took far more breaks than they might otherwise. A decision was saved. They knew every mile of the drive, stopped at the same places for lunch there and back. They'd lose all of that, along with countless other rituals too small to have a name, down to the little joke by which they referred to the elderly gay couple they exchanged nods with on the beach as The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Of course there were other places along the coast, and it wasn't as if Verona was actually heaven on earth (the grocery store remained very functional, so they always stocked up in Cannon Beach), but you can't find another bolthole just by looking.

One of the walls of Patrice's inner house had been taken from her, and she couldn't find any way to feel good about it.

As they walked hand in hand down the road after dinner, still quiet, Bill surprised her by suggesting a nightcap. In the early years they'd always done this: people-watching the locals, a quiet cigarette for Bill out on the deck hanging over the bay. Gradually they'd found that dinner left them comfortably tired, and had taken to just wandering home.

Patrice smiled, said yes. She was glad. He was good like that. He didn't always talk about things out loud (which had driven her crazy on more than one occasion over the years), but he always understood. She sat out on the deck while he fetched the drinks. She could see lights in some of the cabins across the inlet, just as always. They were like stars to her, something by which to navigate through life. She realized that next time these lights would have been extinguished, and knew there and then this was their last visit. When she turned at the sound of Bill coming out with a drink in each hand, her eyes were wet.

'I know,' he said, sitting opposite her.

He put his hand on hers, looked out at the lights for a moment. Then he picked up his drink and held it for her to knock against. She shrugged. She didn't feel like it. There was nothing to toast.

He insisted, keeping his glass high. Stranger still, she saw he had a cigarette in his hand — and he hardly ever smoked by then. Patrice began to suspect his faraway look hadn't meant quite what she'd thought. She raised a quizzical eyebrow, and then her own glass.

'I've got an idea,' he said.

— «» — «» — «»—

As she stood now, still looking out at the forest, Patrice could remember that evening with a clarity missing from almost all of her life since. The last big decision. The last thing that had felt like a step upwards rather than more standing in place, or worse, slipping sideways into some place she'd never been.

'We've talked about buying some land,' Bill said. 'Somewhere cheap, with trees.'

That was true. They had. Or Bill had, anyway. She'd listened and nodded and been vaguely positive, not thinking it would ever happen. They didn't need somewhere else. They had Verona.

Except… now they didn't.

She said: 'We don't really have enough…'

'Money. Yes we do. For the land.'

'But not to build a house.'

'Right. So how about tomorrow morning I go to Ralph and make him an offer on one of those cabins?'

She stared at him, willing him to say it.

'Cabin Two,' he said, and by then her eyes were wet again. 'We do a side deal with Ralph. Developer's not going to want them — they're just in the way. They don't have to knock it down, and we get it moved to wherever.'

'Can you do that?'

They talked about it for an hour, until both were wild-eyed and starting to gabble. Next morning Bill did as he'd said.

Ralph made a phone call and half an hour later the deal was done. The faraway look didn't quite leave Bill's eye, however: by the afternoon things had progressed and they were the owners of not one, but three of the cabins. Bill told her they could have one for them, one for an office/study, one for guests. The kids, perhaps. Patrice didn't really care. The main thing was that Cabin Two was safe. She still wished it could stay in Verona, that the Lodgettes would be there forever and nothing had to change, but if that wasn't the way it was going to be, then they weren't taking it lying down. She wanted to fix stickers over the cabin saying it was their property now. She wanted to lift it up onto the car's roof rack and take it right away. She wanted to set up a machine-gun post.

Once they had three cabins to find a home for, buying a piece of land changed from a vague notion into the thing they were doing next. They spent a few weekends looking for a spot and settled on the area just north of Sheffer, on the east side of the Cascades. It was an afternoon's drive from Portland, up 5 and over 90; a nice little town, charming without being fake, and land was still reasonably priced. Developers had staked out stretches on the roads out of town, but there hadn't been any takers so far and some of the For Sale signs were beginning to fade. They bought a forty-acre lot way out at the end of the access road, complete with a ton of trees and its own cold little lake. If you climbed over their back fence you were in National Forest, and no one was ever going to be able to change that. This time Cabin Two had a permanent home.

Most utilities were on site, and the rest didn't take long. They got the cabins moved, ritualistically following them up the coast in their car. One had to be virtually rebuilt at the other end, a cost they hadn't anticipated, but when she saw them in place Patrice stood and looked with tears running down her face. She didn't turn to Bill. She knew he didn't really like her to see him cry.

Cabin Two went near the lake, the 'office' a little further around, and the guest cabin right the other side. By the time they had been on their plot for a week, Bill and Patrice knew this was where they lived now. They sold the house back in Portland, got rid of most of their stuff, and committed themselves. He tweaked and customized the office and guest cabins, learning skills he'd never realized he wanted to have. She did a little landscaping around the cabins before the snows came down, and then sat by the fire with plant and seed catalogues, planning for the spring. They spent the Christmas up in Sheffer, getting to know the town, what it had, what it didn't. Both children called on Christmas Day, which was nice.

On January 1st, 2001, Patrice was led out of the cabin to see that Bill had built her a bench which went around the biggest tree by the lake — manhandling rustic chunks of wood down there by himself and in secret. They sat shivering on it together, drinking a big thermos of mulled wine, and she grew warm in his arms and believed she was about as happy as she could ever be.

In March it turned out Bill had lung cancer. When he died four months later, Patrice could have picked him up with one hand.

14

Somewhere, on a screen, a young woman sits crying on her couch, captured in the past. The couch is saggy and covered in a suede-like material in dark rust. The wall behind it is white and holds a mirror and a large painting of tulips which is not altogether bad. The woman is in pretty good shape and tan but for pale triangles over her breasts; she is naked apart from a pair of tight white pants. In her right hand she is holding a cigarette; the left is in her hair, which is long and brown. Her face is wet and crumpled, eyes open but turned inwards. In front of her is a coffee table on which sits a large glass ashtray, two remote controls and a half-empty coffee cup. It is early on a Sunday morning, and she looks badly hungover.

She smokes her cigarette down and stubs it out. You see this in jump cuts, because even though you have been a member of this website for three months, the software you are using to watch it — the cheerfully named CamFun, a $12.95 shareware value — is set to update the image only every two minutes. Most people simply log into the web page using a browser like Microsoft Explorer. You are using CamFun because it enables you to save the pictures more easily, storing them onto the hard disk as a movie file of sequential images which you can re-watch any time you choose — which is what you are doing now, in fact, watching something that happened several weeks before. The site itself hasn't been updated for a few days, which is weird. The other reason you use the software is that you can select the frequency with which the image you see is updated. You can take advantage of the members-only fifteen-second update, or choose instead to be updated every third image, or every sixth — thus, every minute or two. This might seem perverse when you are paying $19.99 a month for access to the quicker rate, which is supposed to make the experience seem more real. For you it has exactly the opposite effect. A scene updated every twenty seconds looks like something filmed by a security camera: the way it samples reality implies that what is missing is not important. But it is important. The reality of the original is lost in those infinitesimal omissions. If you cut the gaps back to a minute or two, however, something changes. What's missing seems to swell, giving the images more weight, making them pregnant with duration: a daisy chain of moments, stasis toppling into sudden movement, a dance to stuttering time.

The period through which you wait for an update charges the scene with anticipation. Two minutes is enough to hop someone from one end of the couch to the other, as if by magic, or to take a freshly lit cigarette and burn it halfway down, apparently in an instant. It's enough to make a woman disappear, to zap her from couch to kitchen. To the kitchen. Back to the couch again. There she is… blip — she's gone. Where? Out of vision, off radar/the planet, and yet still within the apartment, one presumes. Blip — she's back again. Two minutes is real. Things can happen in it.

The fact that the woman is semi-naked is almost immaterial. Not completely, of course: the webcams of the fully clothed are a niche interest. They do exist, in droves, bright and intense young ladies with their weblogs full of Highly Individual Thoughts About, Like, Everything (how embarrassing if they ever got to read each other's, and discovered they'd had identical Highly Individual Thoughts), but they're of no interest to you. This woman is pretty. You like seeing her body once in a while. But you are not like all the other perverts, and ultimately it is her you are watching, not her breasts — which is just as well, because she does not reveal them often.

This woman, who has chosen to set up her life in this way, to have a window in her apartment through which people — men bathed in cathode glow or wreathed with flat-screen pallor, sitting in bedrooms and dens across the world — can peer. This woman, who has an acoustic guitar which she picks up every now and then, but not for long; who gets through a steady half-bottle of Jack Daniels a night when she's at home; who occasionally has noncommittal sex on this couch — encounters in which you are not very interested, hardly at all, though you do have some saved to disk and on those occasions you did increase the frame rate. She does not play to the camera during these events, and you half suspect that she has simply forgotten it is there.

This woman who was, for some reason, sitting crying alone on a Sunday morning four weeks ago. You have watched this movie before, and find it fascinating for reasons you cannot quite understand. She blips to invisibility, stays hidden for another two-minute beat, then is back on the couch. She has lit another cigarette in the meantime, and is wearing a blue towelling gown. Her hair has been pushed back to fall behind her ears. She is no longer crying, though her face looks drawn and glum. She is looking to the side, out of a window, you think, though you have never directly seen that wall of the apartment. Two minutes later her feet are on the coffee table and she is looking at her knees, the cigarette almost finished. She looks tired, and resigned to something or other.

How many thoughts have passed through her head in that time? What were they? You cannot tell. Somewhere between her and you that information has been lost, trimmed from reality by the processes of digitization and transfer and storage and re-transfer and projection in red, green and blue. It seems obvious that the loss occurred somewhere in that process, at least, but perhaps it did not: maybe it was only at the very last second, as the information tried to leap the gulf from the screen to another human's mind, that all was lost. All the differences in the world are as nothing compared to this: the difference between being you and being me. It makes the chasms between gods and men, between men and women, between dead and alive, seem almost trivial.

You are you. She is someone else. Between lie the stars.

You watch, and you speculate, and you think. You can do all this without knowing the answers, without having to engage with the mundane truth. It might be something trivial or boring: a broken nail, a bent fender, the sudden and vertiginous realization that she's approaching thirty and still doesn't have a child. It might be something else, something darker and sharper and outside of your world or understanding: a bad experience with a client (you vaguely assume she might be a whore); bad news about a friend (some predictable drug-fuelled auto-da-f?); some other bad bit of bad news of the kinds that this bad old world always has up its bad sleeve. It doesn't matter. That is the beauty of this webcam, of all webcams, of the internet itself — of our world as it has become. You can observe, and interpret, or just let the images welter there in front of your eyes, until you've had enough. Then you can quit the file and close the hidden folder where it rests, and get up and walk away. It is like the news, glimpses of Iraq or Rwanda. It is someone else's life, someone else's problem. You are safe from it.

Or so you think — until an hour and a half later, when two FBI agents turn up at your house while you and your wife are eating dinner. You realize then, far too late, that gaze is two-way even on the internet. You listen, hot-faced, in the final moments of the period in which your marriage is straightforward, as the female agent tells you the woman called Jessica is dead, and that in the last three months the expensive computer in your study logged more watching time on her site than anyone else.

You have been her biggest fan, in other words, and the FBI want to talk about what happened to her, as do the policemen outside; and your wife looks like she was carved out of cold white marble; and you cannot Quit out of this, and there is no escape.

— «» — «» — «»—

Forty minutes later Nina came out of the living room, leaving the Jessica fan — whose name was Greg McCain — sitting opposite Doug Olbrich. She joined Monroe, who had been listening from the hallway. McCain was bolt upright in a corner of the couple's nicely distressed leather couch. He was in his mid-thirties and had an expensive haircut of the kind Hugh Grant used to affect. He had requested that his lawyer be present. Maybe McCain should have been left to his own devices in the meantime, but Olbrich was sitting silently opposite. Sometimes that kind of thing worked.

Monroe turned to her. 'What do you think?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'His wife alibis him for around the time Ryan was shot. She says he left for work at about quarter of eight and she's so evidently pissed at him that it seems hard to believe she'd back him up out of loyalty.'

'Discovering your husband likes watching women on the web is not the same as dropping him for the murder of a policeman. Or believing him capable of it. Either way, it's not impossible to get from their house to The Knights in a quarter-hour.'

'No, but it would be hard. And I've had another thought.'

'Which is?'

'We've been assuming the man who killed Jessica was also the man who killed Ryan.'

'Well of course. I don't think that's a useful…'

'Charles, listen. Jessica was dead maybe forty-eight hours when we found her; hard to pin it down because of the heat. The story we have is that a man murders a woman, in private, and then a day or so later comes out and kills a policeman as a 'look at me'. As I said at the time, this is extreme behaviour.'

'Explain it another way.'

'I can't. Yet. I'm just saying that the only link between the two events is proximity.'

Monroe shook his head. 'Hell of a coincidence, don't you think?'

'No. They could still be connected. Just not the same guy. Which means Jessica's killer could be in some other part of the country by now. Or he could be happily sitting at home, with an alibi for the wrong day.'

Monroe looked away then, and spoke unusually quietly. 'Why would someone else kill a policeman?'

'I'm just saying if we work with the idea then we have a different question to ask Mrs McCain.'

He nodded. 'Do it,' he said.

— «» — «» — «»—

Gail McCain was in the kitchen. She was standing looking out of a window onto the yard, and her back was straight. Nina wondered what the woman had been assuming the evening would hold. The couple had no children, so their quiet, civilized meal would have most likely been followed by a little television or gentle work, two people sharing their affluent, child-unfriendly space.

'Is my husband under arrest?'

'No,' Nina said. 'Not yet.'

'So we don't have to entertain you here any longer.'

'You could refuse to, certainly. In which case the LAPD might have to arrest you so we could talk somewhere else. Knowing those guys they'd break out some of the extra big flashing lights, the ones that really shine into the neighbours' windows.'

'If they had reason to do that, you'd have done it already.'

'Are you an attorney, Mrs McCain?'

'No. I work in television.'

Something in the woman's voice or face heated one of Nina's brain cells half a degree. She turned to the policewoman who was standing by the door. The officer was short but stockily built and stared impassively across the corridor. Her hair was in a ponytail, pulled back so tight her forehead looked hard enough to flatten a nose like putty, or batter through walls.

'How about that?' Nina said. 'The lady works in television. Pretty cool, huh?'

'Whatever,' the policewoman said, without moving her eyes.

Nina shrugged at Mrs McCain. 'Officer Whalen is notoriously hard to impress. Me, I think television's fabulous. So well done'

'It's just a job.'

'But it's such an important one, isn't it? Friend of mine, guy called Ward, has a theory says producers are the new priests, and their job is to mediate between the common man and the heavenly realm the other side of the screen. Say the right thing, be the right way, and you'll put them in a reality show or a soap or the new Friends, zap them straight to the Emmys at the right hand of Whoopi Goldberg. You feel like a priest, ever?'

'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'I don't blame you. I don't understand Ward half the time either. But my point here is that being a lawyer would be a lot more use to you, right at this moment. You sure you understand the situation?'

'I believe so.'

'You understand we are investigating the murder of a woman called Jessica Jones, found dead on Wednesday morning. You understand that Jessica was a web girl, and your husband was a member of her site. This entitled him to view a webcam in Jessica's apartment, which frequently showed her in the nude.'

The woman spoke through clenched teeth. 'I understand all of the above.'

'Good. Would you say your husband was technically competent?'

'What do you mean?'

'Computers. I see there are several in his den. Is he good with them?'

'I think so. He fixes mine, if it goes wrong. But…'

'Thank you. Now, in general your husband doesn't look like a likely suspect. Which is why we're glad to have you both voluntarily assisting us, and why we're here quietly, without the big lights. For the moment. I just want to ask a few questions, and you're done. Okay? You told Lieutenant Olbrich that your husband left for work on Wednesday morning at around seven forty-five, is that correct?'

'No,' the woman said, coldly. 'I told him Greg left at exactly that time.'

'How can you be so sure?'

'Greg always leaves at quarter of eight. That's what time Greg leaves.'

'But presumably sometimes it's a little closer to eight, and sometimes it's a little earlier? Your husband's also in television, I understand? I'm assuming sometimes he has to make sure he's there early. It's not like punching a clock, right?'

'Yes, but…'

'So he must have early meetings, on occasion.'

'He does, of course.'

'And while he generally leaves at seven forty-five, there will be times when he could have left the house at quarter after, or even a little later. What makes you sure that on the morning in question he left at this default time?'

The woman looked irritable. 'Because I just know. Look, Ms Baynam, are you married?'

'I'm not, no.' The brain cell heated up another half degree.

'It figures. If you were, you'd know what I was talking about. When you're married to someone, you know what's going on in their world. Too much, maybe. You get your own life and half of the other person's. I know when Greg's busy, when he's up against it at work, when something's going haywire and meetings start popping up all over the day. No, I don't carry his diary in my head and I can't always quote chapter and verse. But I know what's going on in his life.'

'So… I'm sorry: so you knew about the webcam thing? You knew he was spending time watching girls getting naked, having sex, live on the internet?'

'No I didn't, but that's

Nina cut in smoothly. 'Different. Of course. You know everything about Greg, apart from that, and that's perfectly reasonable. Men are sneaky about that kind of thing. You can't be expected to know about it. There's probably a detail or two he doesn't know about you either, right? That's also fine. That's married life, from what I understand — but, you know, I'm only guessing. Looking in, from the cold, dark wastes of spinsterhood.'

'I didn't mean…'

'Of course you didn't, Gail. But otherwise, apart from these little details, you'd say you have a solid understanding of Greg and his schedule and his life.'

'Yes. Yes I do.'

'Excellent. You've been very helpful.' Nina heard the doorbell ring from the other side of the house. 'Sounds like the cavalry has arrived. I think the Lieutenant is finishing up with your husband anyway, so we're going to be leaving very soon.'

Nina smiled warmly, and started to walk away.

Then she turned back and asked, as if enquiring after the name of her interior designer; 'What was your husband doing on Monday evening?'

The woman stared at her. 'Excuse me?'

'What was your husband doing on Monday evening? From your understanding of his schedule?'

'He…'

Nina watched as the woman realized she had hesitated too long, that the question, dealt unexpectedly out of nowhere, had penetrated a weak defence she hadn't realized she had to build. 'Was he out, that evening?'

'Yes. He… he had a meeting. A late meeting.'

'How late would that have been?'

'I don't remember. It was late.'

'This was a meeting relating to his work?'

The woman saw Nina staring at her.

'Yes,' she said. 'I think.'

— «» — «» — «»—

'We're going to go,' Olbrich said, quietly. He, Monroe and Nina were now alone in the kitchen. 'Two people at his company confirm he was at or near his desk by the usual time on Wednesday. He was out late Monday evening, as you found, and it wasn't a meeting. What it was, he claims, is a strip club with a client. The alleged client is now back in England.' He looked at his watch. 'McCain has no personal address for this person, and so we're going to have to wait until UK business hours to chase that down. But frankly…'

He tailed off.

Nina yawned massively. 'We don't have shit to hold him on and he doesn't look like the guy Jessica was seen with in Jimmy's.'

'Right. Yes, he watched Jessica. Yes, he occasionally goes to strip clubs. When he 'has to'. Nice work if you can get it. Any more than that and he's a dead end. His lawyer's with them now and he's pumped up to fight, and he's got a point. We either have to make this serious or leave it alone for now.'

Monroe shook his head and stalked out into the hallway.

Olbrich looked at Nina. 'What's his problem?'

'Doesn't like leaving empty-handed when we came in this heavy.'

'It was his call. I told him it should be more subtle.'

'Monroe's more of an 'Advance straight to Go' kind of player.'

They followed her boss along the hallway and stopped outside the door to the living room. Nina was expecting sass from one or other, and most certainly the lawyer — it seemed like everyone in television or movies was forever talking back to the police nowadays, and so everyone in real life felt they had to do it too, as if to stay in character — but there was none forthcoming.

Olbrich apologized without apologizing. Monroe asked that they take no out-of-town trips for a few days. Nina was going to just breeze on out without a backward glance, but then she heard her name being called in a female voice.

Go ahead, sister, she thought, as she turned. Push a little harder and just see what happens.

The McCains were standing together facing her. Their lawyer had faded to the back of the room and wasn't looking happy.

'My wife says I should give you this. My lawyer disagrees.'

The husband was holding something out to her. It was smaller than a paperback book but about as thick.

'What is it?'

'A portable hard drive. I, uh…'

His wife looked at the floor. 'Get on with it, Greg.'

'There are some pictures on it,' he said. 'Movies, too. Recorded from the site. I don't know whether it's any use but…'

His wife finished for him. 'We don't want it in the house.'

Nina took the disk. 'That's very helpful.'

Once it was out of his possession, the man's shoulders seemed to slump with relief. Nina realized that far from being an all-out disaster the evening might even work in his favour. A minor middle-class guilt, now blown into the open, fate taking the secret out of his hands. Sure, his wife would give him hell for it, and be hurt, and he was going to have to accept the role of house scumbag for a while. It would sure as hell Come Up In Conversation.

But it wasn't a secret any longer, and being able to throw open the windows of your dark private rooms can be worth quite a price. His wife wasn't going anywhere: they had this lovely life together and who the fuck wants to start dating again? A couple of months down the line this evening's embarrassment might even have been parlayed into a revivified sex life.

Some people just float.

'I didn't know she was dead,' he said. 'I'm sorry to hear about it.'

'The circumstances have not been widely reported, and we'd like to keep it that way.'

He nodded, looked away. His wife took a step back, as if unconsciously detaching herself from the evening, but then came forward with her husband to see Nina to the door: to see her off the premises, in effect — woman dealing direct with woman in a way men never really seemed to realize was going on. Saying things without saying, pushing without raising a hand.

As she walked down the path to the cars Nina made her own small side-step in her head, and slipped the disk into her pocket before it was visible to the men. Tomorrow it would join the rest of the evidence, such as it was.

Not tonight.

15

I got to Nina's mid-morning. The cab driver who dropped me off looked down at the house dubiously.

'You live here?'

'A friend of mine does.'

'Brave friend,' he said, and backed off up the road.

I walked down the vertiginous driveway that curved around to the front of the house. I had been to Nina's only once before, briefly and three months previously, sleeping on the sofa for a night after she, Zandt and I had returned Sarah Becker to her home and family. Nothing good seemed to have happened to the house's exterior since. The property was old school California Modern: a row of square rooms with a kink for the kitchen turning it into an L, like a very small motel. Possibly something of a big deal in the late 1950s, a kind of low-rent Case Study house, but from a stone's throw away you could tell its days were numbered.

I knocked on the door. 'It's open,' a voice said, from a distance. When I stepped inside I could see Nina out on her balcony, talking on the phone. She waved distractedly without looking at me.

I dropped my bag and hovered for a minute in the main living space. The space, anyway. It didn't look like much living had taken place there recently. It wasn't dusty, particularly, or markedly untidy, but that was because the room held virtually no personal possessions bar the racks of books and files on the long cases over on the other side. I walked into the kitchen area and opened the fridge: inside were two bottles of wine, a carton of orange juice and another of milk. Nothing else, and nothing in the cupboards either. Nina evidently subsisted on liquid fuel alone.

When I turned back to face the main area it somehow looked even quieter and more still. I had read once how in first millennium Britain the locals would use the long-abandoned remains of Roman villas and ruined churches for shelter on journeys across a land that was otherwise largely uninhabited. They called these places 'cold harbours', because while a night's protection from the elements could be found there, they harboured no other life or warmth. Nina's house felt like that, and I thought this as a man who had stayed nights in motels and factories with boarded-up windows and big demolition notices nailed to the walls.

'Hey, Ward.'

I looked over to see Nina was off the phone and standing in the doorway. Her hair was a little longer than it had been, and it seemed like she'd lost a few pounds from a frame that had always been slim. Something about her put me in mind of something, or someone, but I couldn't immediately work out what it was.

'Should call the cops,' I said. 'Someone's stolen all your food.'

'You didn't look hard enough. It's all stacked right where I need it. In the supermarket.'

'You have any coffee on site, at least? Or is Starbucks looking after that for you?'

It turned out she had lots.

— «» — «» — «»—

'I've run most of the software I can,' I said, handing the disk back to her. 'And come up blank. There's a couple more pattern-searching things I can try, but they can leave traces, so I'll do them on the copy, if you've still got it. Bottom line is that whoever erased the disk did it well. It's very, very blank. I'm sorry. Sometimes there just isn't anything there.'

'Don't worry,' she said. She was leaning on the rail of her deck looking out across a hazy sea. 'I knew it was a long shot.'

'Are you any closer to finding the guy?' I had my chair as far back on the deck as I could, so as to marginally increase my chances of surviving when it all suddenly gave way.

'No. There are cops talking to the main users of her site. There aren't many, and none of them look good for it. We talked to the number one fan but I don't think there's anything there either. We have a very generic description of the guy she was seen with the night she died, we know now she waited tables sometimes and cops have talked to people where she worked, and that's it.'

'Who was she, anyway?'

Nina shook her head. 'Down from the Bay Area. LAPD are still trying to trace family in Monterey. They have an address they believe is current but the parents seem to be on vacation. Her few known associates in LA seem to know nothing about her prior to meeting. You know what these people are like: yesterday was likely a bad day — so why not just have a beer and forget it? You should have met this Jean friend of Jessica's. They were big buddies, apparently — had the same first initial and everything, hung in the bar a lot, you know, like, super-best friends, rilly. Now she's dead, and with Jean it's like 'Bummer. Where's the next party?''

'Nice.'

'What do you expect? Jessica was a woman who lived in an apartment and got sad sometimes and drank too much and then died. That may be all we ever know.'

Her voice had died during the last few sentences, until it was barely more than a mumble.

'Nina, are you okay?'

She turned to me. Her eyes were green and bright. 'Sure I'm okay,' she said, more strongly. 'I just don't know the answer to your question. Who was she? You tell me. She had a name and a guitar. She lived, she died. Come Judgment Day, that's all that can be said of anyone.'

'A depressing world view, but anyway not what I meant. Was that John on the phone? You can drop the 'he's out buying groceries' line, by the way. I've already gathered you aren't an item any more.'

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

I prompted. 'So where is he now?'

'I don't know,' she muttered. 'It took a day and a half of messages to get him to call me back, for which I get five minutes of evasion and then a dial tone. It's not like I'm fucking stalking him. We're over, and that's fine and dandy by me. I'm just worried. He's acting strange. Stranger than usual.'

'What happened with you guys?'

'You ask him the same question?'

'I did.'

'And he said?'

'Nothing intelligible.'

'Figures.' She looked resigned. 'It just didn't work out, Ward. Like the man said, maybe you can never go back, and it's not like we had so much to revisit. We had one thing in common — two, I guess: time spent together before Karen was murdered, and the fact neither of us are going to make the starting line-up for any All Star Relationship Squad.'

'Plus you're both kind of scary.'

She smiled properly for the first time since I'd turned up. 'Scary?'

'In a nice way.'

'Coming from a guy with scabs on his knuckles and a gun in his jacket, I'll take that as a compliment.'

I slipped my hands under the table. 'You're very observant. You should be in law enforcement or something.'

'Want to tell me about the fight?'

I didn't. Admitting to Nina what I'd done, or that I'd been nervous enough to do it, was not something I wanted to get into right then. 'Guy kept asking me if I wanted fries. I just snapped. You know how it is.'

She shrugged. 'John was here for a few weeks. It kind of worked. We hung out, we took walks, we talked about my work — because, of course, he didn't have any. That's part of the problem. Maybe the problem. John was a very, very good detective. He has this insatiable urge to find out. But he couldn't go back to LAPD and he couldn't see anywhere else to go. Quite soon I started coming back from work and he wasn't here. He'd turn up after midnight. Wouldn't say what he'd been doing. Usually he'd been drinking, but that wasn't it. He just started shifting to the side. His head was somewhere else. Then suddenly he wasn't around for five days.'

'Where'd he go?'

'Florida. Where his ex-wife lives.'

I knew Zandt's marriage had broken up after the disappearance of their daughter. I also knew that he'd paid a visit to his wife after we'd found Karen's remains, eighteen months later; and I remembered him telling me the night before that killers weren't the only important things in life. 'He was there two days ago also.'

'I know. He sent me a text message.'

'You think he wants to get back with her?'

'I don't know. I don't think he does either. There's only one light in his head right now and that's finding the Upright Man. On everything else his wheels are spinning.'

'Funny. He told me exactly the opposite.'

'John lies.' She said this with a matter-of-fact bitterness, and thought better of it. 'Sometimes. He tells the truth sometimes too.'

'Well, his investigative skills are getting rusty, I'm afraid. All he has to show for his time since Yakima is some bizarre piece of non-information about the Roanoke colony in the late fifteen hundreds.'

'What?'

I filled her in on what I could remember of John's history lesson. She looked bleak by the time I was done, and we sat in silence for a while.

Eventually she stood. 'I have to get to work. You in a hurry to be elsewhere?'

I shrugged. 'I have nowhere in particular to go.'

'Good. I was going to ask you another favour.'

— «» — «» — «»—

After she'd gone I made more coffee. It felt good to be in a house, even one as unhouselike as Nina's. In a house you don't have to be spending money or on your best behaviour the whole time. You can just sit around. It's not like that, out there in the world. But I found that having the opportunity to simply hang, unobserved and unbugged by other humans, made me feel a little weird. So I got onto Nina's request.

Before she left I'd copied all the files from the disk she'd been given by Greg McCain. The disk itself was now being taken into the care of the cops, along with the one from Jessica's head. How she was going to explain the former's dog-legged journey I didn't know, and I didn't like the risks she was taking. She was the only one of us still latched into anything real world, and I got the sense she was drifting, like a plug slowly being drawn from a socket. I knew from experience that once this happens the shapes can subtly change, and you may find you don't fit back again. The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs.

First thing I did was watch the movies. They weren't proper, full-motion video, but long sequences of stop frames blipping forward at intervals. There were six. Three showed Jessica having desultory, drunken sex with three different guys: twice on the couch that dominated her tiny living room, once on the bed. The frames were grainy and badly lit and in one case in almost total darkness. There was no attempt to play to the camera, the position of which remained static. It was like watching a Ken and a Barbie being banged together by a child who had no idea what the action was supposed to signify. Time-stamping on all three suggested they captured the very end of evenings spent in bars. One of the other videos showed a four-hour period in which the woman watched television, did some spring-cleaning, played the guitar briefly, and made a half-hearted attempt to put together a not very complicated shelving unit. For most of this period she was wearing a pair of orange shorts, and nothing else. Another showed her sitting doing nothing, apparently in the aftermath of crying. The final video was stop motioned at much longer intervals, about five/ten minutes or so, and showed Jessica asleep on her couch, under a blanket, flicker-lit by the television out of frame. At the end she woke and sat watching it for a while with a cup of coffee. Nina had told me Jessica was in her late twenties. In the awake portion of this video, she looked about forty-five.

Then I worked through the stills. There were an awful lot of them. McCain had thrown them all into one big folder. I dropped this onto a graphics viewer and clicked through some examples at random. The images showed Jessica doing the same kind of things as the videos, but without the sex. Being naked or partially naked. Reading a magazine. Eating food. Sitting at a computer. Drinking coffee or Jack Daniel's. Sleeping. Smoking. Staring into space. The cumulative effect was strange, and I began to get a sense of Jessica's appeal to McCain. I was familiar with webcams myself, having spent some slow hours watching street corners in New Orleans, or the shore of Lake McDonald, or views out of computer stores on the main streets of nondescript towns in the Midwest. It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didn't watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of presented subject matter, made the view itself seem more real. If you watch something in particular, all you see is that thing happening. You see the moment, the event, and you are distracted from the long, slow tide of eventlessness which it overlies. If you watch nothing, then you see everything. You see the thing as it is.

These myriad accidental views of Jessica achieved the same effect. Not a single image was composed. In many she was partly out of frame, or out of focus. The effect was to show nothing in particular, and thus to reveal everything. Your view of her life became similar to her own, an endless series of uninflected, unintended and ultimately quite tedious moments. McCain's Jessica collection brought home the reality of the woman more clearly than anything else I could imagine, capturing and celebritizing her in pixels. This was her fifteen megabytes of fame.

Having glimpsed her life before the event, only then did I look at the Polaroids Nina had left me. These showed Jessica's apartment on the day when the LAPD had found it. They too were flat, blank views, but they were not uninflected. Every square millimetre said something quite direct: their very existence announced that the girl who had lived in this place was dead, which is why I had wanted to see the others first.

I looked at them closely for a while. Then I went back to the beginning of the files on the hard disk, set the system to order them chronologically, and looked at them again.

It took a long time before I noticed something.

— «» — «» — «»—

'See?'

Nina nodded. 'There's no picture that shows it better?'

'That's as good as it gets. I've blown it up but…' I switched to a window I'd hidden behind the first. 'We don't live in a movie, and so the blow-up looks like shit.'

Nina leaned forward and stared at the picture on the screen. She was looking at a grainy and blocky picture that showed Jessica lying on her bed, from the chest up. A man's face was over hers.

Neither of us were interested in the man. LAPD moved fast: they already had print-outs of the three men featured in McCain's movies, and were showing them to Jessica's associates, starting in Jimmy's bar. The barman there had said none of them looked much like the guy he'd seen the girl with the night she died. These had been amongst the things Nina had achieved before returning to the house mid-afternoon. What we were looking at instead was Jessica's bedside table. This was visible in a gap between the blurred faces and chests of Jessica and her temporary new best friend. On the table was a lamp, a cheap-looking radio alarm, a small pile of books whose garish spines suggested they had self-help titles, three coffee cups, and a small picture frame.

Nina picked up the Polaroid which showed the bedroom, and peered at it. 'You're right,' she said. 'It's not there. And I didn't see anything like it in the apartment.' As soon as I'd noticed the discrepancy I'd called her with a description of the frame, and she'd stopped by Jessica's to look for it. 'When is this grab from?'

'Just less than a week before she died.'

'Assuming the date stamp is accurate.'

'It is. The creation date of the file confirms it.'

'A week. So she could have moved it somewhere herself in the meantime.'

'You couldn't find it. If a picture is important enough to keep by your bedside, you're not suddenly going to decide you don't want it in the house any more.'

'You could if it was an ex-boyfriend.'

'True. But look.' I switched to a third image, which showed only the frame on the bedside table. 'This is it blown up even more. I used interpolation software which basically looks at the colour value of each pixel, compares it to the ones surrounding it, and tries to make an intelligent guess at increasing the size of the image. It looks like shit when applied to a picture of this low quality, but it does show something interesting.' I pointed at the centre of the picture. 'You can't make out any features, but you've clearly got two heads there.'

'Exactly. Jessica plus a former guy.'

'I don't think so. What's the colour on top of both their heads?'

'Grey.'

'The hair colour of older people, in other words. Parents, perhaps.'

'You think?'

'Jessica may not have actually made it back home very often, but I'd have been very surprised if there wasn't a family picture in the apartment somewhere. Nice photo of mom and dad, or if she had a problem with one or both, some idealized sibling or favourite niece. Some record of family. That's what girls are like.'

'Is that so? You found one here yet? Hidden amongst the sewing and the love letters to Justin Timberlake?'

'No,' I said. 'But I haven't looked hard. And you're not a girl.'

'Right. Just a scary woman.'

'Not just,' I said. 'But my point is that something is missing from Jessica's apartment.'

'You think the killer was there.'

'I do. And here's the proof.' I double-clicked on another file, one of the still images McCain had stored in the folder. It showed Jessica spark out on the couch in a somewhat inelegant pose. She was wearing floral pyjamas, pale blue, with little pink and white flowers. 'You said she was found…'

'That's them. Those are the pyjamas. Christ. You're right. He'd been there.'

'I think he had been closing in on her for a while — hunting her, as he probably thinks of it — and spent time in her space as part of the build-up to murdering her. He took the pyjamas and I think he also took a souvenir. He would have worked out that these were Jessica's family, and decided to take something that was close to her, something that mattered.'

'And she wouldn't have noticed?'

'Name me an object in this house that you look at every day. And look at the picture: the table is a mess. Also…'

'But what about the pjs? You'd notice if they were gone, surely.'

'Which is what I was about to say. He was most likely there during the day of the night before he killed her.'

'So why not just wait for her and kill her on home territory?'

'Because it was her home, not his. You know what these people are like. They want to sculpt the event. It has to happen on their terms.'

'Does this actually help us?'

'He found out where she lived. How? It means that on at least one occasion he could've been seen near her apartment. It means that he had to get in. Again, how?'

'LAPD have already canvassed the neighbourhood. Nobody saw anything.'

'But how did he find out where she lived?'

'Ward, you have very good eyes but you're not a cop. He probably just followed her home from a bar. I'm sorry, but even if you're right this doesn't give us anything more to go on. He took pyjamas and stole a picture. Maybe. Big deal. We'll put it right there on the warrant, just below the murder thing.'

I turned to her, irritable, but she looked tired and I put away what I'd been going to say. 'Funny you and John didn't make it work. What with you both being so reasonable and open-minded.'

She smiled. 'Look — I'll call it in.'

'Thank you,' I said. 'I feel validated beyond my wildest dreams. Now let's go liberate some of your food from the store.'

'Screw that. Let's go somewhere they'll cook it too.'

— «» — «» — «»—

We ended up over in Santa Monica, eating at an Italian place on the Promenade. We ate for a short while, at least, and then moved back to the bar area for somewhat longer. Nina looked good with a glass of wine in her hand. It fitted like it was meant to be there. I told her what little I had done in the last few months, and as the wine kicked in I eventually told her how much I missed Bobby, and my parents, and she nodded and understood and didn't say anything to try to make it better. I realized I didn't know very much about her at all and found that she had grown up in Colorado, gone to college in LA, and not much else. She told me about some old girlfriend of hers who had called her and she was supposed to be meeting with, and we agreed that the past was another country and one which the movement of time's tectonic plates pulled further away every year. As it got to mid-evening the bar got more crowded, Nina glaring at people to keep them away from my seat during my occasional trips to smoke outside. With Nina, a glare is enough.

As I got more drunk the people around me seemed to get louder and more obnoxious. The chatter was of the movie business (of course), of money, of health and weight, of fashion. The more inconsequential the subject the louder they seemed to want to talk about it, an endless prayer to the gods of fate. I got more and more cranky until Nina was sitting silently while I ranted. Fashion makes me furious. It always has. This summer we're all going to be wearing vermilion, are we? Says who? When we see a bikini made of squares of brightly coloured plastic, why do we pretend anyone will wear it? No one will ever wear it. Ever. No one. So what was the point of the designer drawing it, showing it to other people, eliciting their ooh's and ah's? All of these activities took time and money, as did the marketing and the booking of hotels and equipment; all of it moved to and fro via the gas-guzzling limos and airports of the world until the action reached a beach somewhere exotic so an over-paid buffoon could photograph a skittish smack-head in a garment which no one will ever actually wear. The whole episode is a hypothetical. 'If you looked like this model (which you don't) and had the money to go on vacation to places like this (which you don't) and could further afford to pay a head-spinning amount for a swimsuit ($1000 — have you lost your fucking mind?) … then you might wear this — if it didn't look uncomfortable, modish and plain howling stupid (which it most certainly does).' This, I snarled at Nina, is what capitalism does to show off. It's our culture flopping out its dick. 'Hey, you shadows in the non-Western chaos — just look at our surplus capacity. If we can piss all this time and effort away on such useless, vacant crap, then just imagine the quantities of gold and guns and grain we must have stashed away, how well fed and happy the citizens of Our World Inc. must be.'

Except they aren't all happy, and some of them aren't very well fed — and as time goes on, this fakery becomes all there is. But nobody knows or cares what happens behind the lifestyle billboards, because life for the people who matter just keeps getting better. The toddlers have taken over the asylum, and they're having everything made child-friendly to fit. They've turned smoky, cool coffee shops into places where the healthy go to iBook their Deep Thoughts; made fuggy, scary bars into places that look like airport lounges and feel like the Personnel Relaxation Facilities of futuristic megacorps. I was in a bar recently and it smelled of incense: how fucked up is that? Not smelling of smoke is bad enough, but spiced lavender? Inside is not supposed to be fresher than outside, can't they see that? The whole country is turning into a muffin-padded nest where the MBAs and soccer moms of America can sit reading books on how to love themselves more, as if that could be remotely possible. And they can't achieve this by setting up dedicated shrines for this ungodly self-absorption, they have to change all my places, the dirty and average and unexpected, so they're exactly the same.

Part of the problem, I went on — now easily as loud and obnoxious as the fashionistas and wannabe movie moguls — is that I could remember a world in which nobody ran. Can you imagine? Where the sight of average joes puffing along the street was bizarre and new and you wondered what on earth they thought they were doing. Now running is the new giving to charity. Running is the new wisdom, the absolute good: the modern ritual walkway to the gods' approval and beneficence. Run, and you will be successful; run and all will be well. If we were in charge of the Catholic Church then sainthood would be conferred strictly according to the time the candidate spent wearing Nikes. 'Yes, sure, Father Brian did good works and saved lives and stuff, but what were his splits on the mile? Father Nate? Forget it, dude. That guy never ran a half-marathon in his life.'

We have lost all sense of proportion, of what is important or reasonable or sane: while around the world the countries which don't have the time or luxury for this bullshit are getting ever more pissed at us for behaving like we own the whole playground. But who cares, right? Here's another dumb movie about wacky teens! A great new diet is racing up the charts! J-Lo got herself some new bling — just look how damned pretty it is! Who gives a crap what's happening in dusty shit-holes where they don't even speak American? Life's great! Crack open a decaf Zinfandel! I ran out of steam and drink at exactly the same time. Young people on nearby tables were staring at me as if I'd declared the three-act structure null and void.

'Fuck you,' I suggested, loudly. Everyone turned away.

Even Nina was looking at me, one eyebrow raised. 'The Prozac really just isn't cutting it, is it?'

'The world is fucked,' I muttered, embarrassed. 'Everyone in it is fucked too. Roll on Armageddon.'

'Yeah, I can remember what it was like being fifteen,' she said. 'Don't fret. It will pass.' She stood. 'Come on, Ward. I'm drunk. You're loaded. It's time to go home.'

I saw the credit slip on the table and realized that, somewhere in the last fifteen minutes, she'd paid our tab.

I slid off my stool and followed her out of the restaurant, feeling foolish. That, and something else.

— «» — «» — «»—

By the time we'd located a cab and ridden it back to Nina's house the wine in my system had tipped over and started making me feel weary and worn out. Most of the journey had been in silence, though not an uncomfortable one. I made a big thing about paying for the ride and then stumbled wildly getting out of the car. Maybe Nina was right. Boys achieve a degree of timelessness: didn't matter how ancient my body sometimes felt, fifteen seemed a glass ceiling for my level of sophistication.

When we got inside I headed straight for the coffee machine. Doing so took me past Nina's answer phone.

'You got a message,' I said.

Nina touched a button and looked at the number it flashed up. 'It's Monroe.'

The message was short. A man's voice brusquely told Nina to call him whatever time she got back. She rolled her eyes, but immediately hit a button that returned the call.

'Charles Monroe's office.' The voice came out of the speakerphone loud and clear.

'It's Nina Baynam,' Nina said, rubbing her eyes. 'I got a message.'

The person on the end didn't answer, but no more than three seconds later the voice of Nina's boss came on the line.

'Nina, where the hell have you been?'

'Out,' she said, evidently surprised at his tone. 'Why didn't you call my cell?'

'I did. Three times.'

'Oh. Well, I was somewhere loud.' She looked pointedly at me as she said this. 'What's the problem?'

'I've just had a phone call from the SAC in Portland.'

Nina immediately looked more serious. 'Another killing?'

'Yes, and no. Not another hard disk. Not another girl.'

'Well, then what?'

When Monroe spoke again, it was carefully and slowly. 'A prostitute named Denise Terrell — working name Cherri — walked into a police station there the night before last. She was disoriented. She claimed she'd been on an afternoon out-call and 'something happened'. Next thing she knew it was night and she woke up propped against a dumpster. Eventually they worked out she had serious concussion and took her to a hospital. The next morning she had remembered some more and started saying she'd been booked to one of her agency's regular clients but had struck a deal with another man, who somehow knew they had dealings with this particular john. This man had contacted her direct and offered her money in exchange for her letting him know when and where the meeting was going to take place. Said the guy owed him a lot of money and he wanted to catch him somewhere private, when his guard was down. The girl agreed.'

'Charles, is there a bottom line here?'

'The Portland cops went to the address she supplied. They found a dead man. His name was Peter Ferillo. He owned a restaurant and used to have ties to organized crime down here in LA. He was naked and messed up and had been shot in the head and left sprawled in a chair. They dusted the room floor to ceiling but found nothing. But then a patrol officer found something in a flowerbed thirty yards up the street. It was a bottle opener, with traces of blood on it. Ferillo's blood. They got a print off it. A good, full print. They matched it.'

The wine in my system seemed to have disappeared. Nina and I were staring at each other.

'Nina,' Monroe said, 'the print belongs to John Zandt.'

16

As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with its email address private driveways, its dotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands like a god. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. It's about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down; our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work. Sometimes things need to be taken out. Finding Jessica there had been the new beginning. Of course there are many Jessicas; but there was also only one. Once found, you could open the window into her life, confirm her existence; but you could shut it also. You could close the program down, make it unborn. You could quit and reboot, and then the past was gone and everything was clean. The DELETE key is there for a reason. Sometimes you just have to start fresh.

One of his favourite series of webcam pictures was of Pittsburgh, a city to which he had never been. The series consisted of three shots covering the period from 5.43 to 6.14, one morning in late May of 2003. All were taken from the same camera, though one which altered its direction and degree of zoom between shots, rather than giving one constant view. In the first picture the dawn sky took up the top half of the frame, all blue and red and swirled with epic cloud. Below, the Allegheny River curled up left from the centre, the 6th, 7th and 9th Street bridges and their lights reflected back up from the dark mirror water below. Everywhere, down the streets, along both sides of the river and in a circle around the fountain and pool at the end of Point State Park and the Gateway Center, there were more lights. Little points of white, made golden or rosy by the fading darkness and the limitations of the webcam. The second shot was much closer range, and in the intervening quarter-hour the camera had zoomed heavily and pivoted in an entirely different direction. It was impossible to tell how this little section fitted into the city as a whole. The frame was largely filled with trees, a glimpse of a curved highway cutting through them into the city, a few early birds on their way to work. In the final picture you were back out on the confluence of the rivers, and in wide shot. The angle was slightly different from the first. You were turned a little to the south and looking up the Monongahela just as it joined the Allegheny, the Fort Pitt Bridge still dark. There were no points of light anywhere now — either the city turned them off at six sharp, every single one, or dealing with a now brighter stretch of sky had caused the webcam to over-compensate in all the terrestrial areas.

He had spent time studying these images, understanding what the web was saying about the people it watched. It showed you could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house: it was their address, but that didn't mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren't fair game for cats or traps. Similarly, you could sit in a restaurant all day without ever becoming more than just some guy temporarily taking up space which belonged to someone else, space you hired by handing over money for coffee and burgers. Even if you had your nice house in the suburbs you paid tithes in every direction; you chipped away at the loan you took to buy the property, you hacked at the vig for your son's dentistry and the money pit of your daughter's someday wedding, you paid the insurance that might cover your parents' tumour care but wouldn't save their life. You took your days and handed them over to other people, who did things with them, who made stuff with your days, who sold their products with your life. Your days, your time, were their secret ingredient, their twelfth herb or spice; your life was given away free in the bottom of their packets like invisible jack-in-the-box treats. In return they helped you pay off some of your debts to the banks and the hospitals and fate: and so you went back and forth, every day, riding the rail between your house and your place of work, driving in a machine you were paying off in instalments and which someone would tow off your driveway, no matter how manicured, within days of a payment not being made.

You kept doing this until you got old and your life started running in reverse, and you went from having a whole house to just a room in one of your children's houses, assuming they'd take you; and finally to a stranger's building, some rest home, surrounded by old geezers you'd never met before and might not have liked even if you had: the young don't understand that the physical similarities of old people do not mean they're the same inside. They don't all got rhythm either, as it happens. Even more acutely than failing health, this progression makes it bluntly clear that life is going in very much the wrong direction. All that time spent owning a house, all those loans and aspirations, are erased, wiped off the disk of your life. It lifted gently out of your hands like a kitchen knife taken from someone too young. The things you acquired and which have helped define you are given or sold or thrown away, and you are squeezed again into a little room, as if you were twelve once more — but this time, instead of feeling at one with the outside world, by now the whole thing has long ago stopped making sense. You sit in quiet places and look out of windows and try not to panic as you notice both how much you are forgetting these days, and how little of value there is to forget. The layers of self you spent decades accreting are dissolved, reducing you once again to dependence, and there's no kidding yourself that this is a mere stage to be got through, that your time lies ahead. It doesn't. You've had your time. Your time has been and gone. Now you are merely colour in the background of someone else's time, and even that probably won't be for long.

Meanwhile other people now drive your freeway to and from work, and live in your old house, and repaint the walls and tear down your shelves, and the planet spins.

— «» — «» — «»—

One day, after a particularly arduous trip to and from the john, when she was settled back in her chair and looking exhausted and small and ashamed, his grandmother had looked at the boy and said:

'It's a pity He puts the worst bit at the end.' He hadn't understood immediately, but had done seven months later when he sat quietly behind one of the chairs in the living room, two hours after coming back from Grandma's funeral. He had been sitting there a while, thinking about the old lady, when his mother came into the room holding a record. She went over to the player, turned it on, and then sat in a chair and listened.

He was severely freaked. He didn't know what to do. He knew this was a private moment of his mother's and she would not take at all well to finding she was not alone. He knew this especially when he heard something that might have been his mother crying. He had never heard his mother cry before. He never heard it again.

So he just sat, and listened.

His mother sat through the recording once, from start to finish. Then she got up, wrenched the record off the player and threw it viciously into a corner, where it smashed into many pieces.

She stormed out. The front door slammed.

When she was safely external he cautiously emerged from behind the chair. His body told him to get the hell gone from the room, go upstairs, go out, do something, but his mind said his mother was halfway to a bar already and it wanted to know what the music had been. The mind won.

He stepped over to the record player to look at the sleeve. It was Faur?'s Requiem, and he recognized it from Grandma's room, one of the few possessions she'd brought to their house. The sleeve was old and battered, and it looked like the record had been pulled out and replaced a great many times, back in her real life, when she got to choose what music was played within her hearing. Perhaps it was this that made him go over to the corner, pick up one of the biggest fragments of the shattered disc, and take it with him back up to his bedroom: a realization that there would come a time when he would be controlled by others once more, and that the time in between was all he had.

He was twelve years old. Four years later, Faur?'s Requiem was the first album he bought. By his late teens it was already something he played only privately. Faur? was one of those composers, he had learned, who was a little too well known. It was like putting on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, or Beethoven's Fifth or Bach's Air on a G String. You wound up looking ignorant no matter how much you actually liked it, because you were surrounded by people who valued ideas — including the idea that they were clever and unusual and not just part of the common mass — rather than experience. People who thought it was better to admire something than to actually like it, who either lived a life of constant fragility, or indulged themselves in private.

People who did not have the courage to realize that if they acted powerfully enough, they could tip the planet.

It was not long before he left those people, all people, far behind, when he found the smoking road. Listening to his mother, and hearing those strange, ugly/beautiful sounds coming from inside her, that had been real. That had been something that was happening, a real-time incident, a change in the world's colour as his grandmother's death scraped its indelible mark on reality. It had been like a glimpse of a distant lake or sleeping girl or grubby street corner, frank and vulnerable in its simple truth.

Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler; merely a message from our sponsor.

The old woman's death said something, especially as he knew the fall which had finally killed the old lady had not been purely accidental. She was being helped down the stairs, after all, and he had heard her say 'No' urgently, once, just before she fell.

But then everything was quiet for her, and she no longer cried out in the night or soiled herself, and her ragged breathing was no more. She was put in the ground and slept easily, and she must surely have known, in some way or another, that her daughter had cried for her after she was gone.

The worst bit didn't have to be at the end, that much was clear. It didn't have to be quiet and pointless. So long as there was someone there who cared, the end didn't have to be so bad at all.

So why wait?

— «» — «» — «»—

When he got to the city he parked. He walked some distance to his destination. He kept on the move, because movement was best. Even now, this part of the process was strange and ungovernable, and a lesser man might have entertained the idea this was because the impulse was coming from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Not him. He knew it all made sense, that sometimes this was what we are for.

He walked. He waited for the night. He waited so that someone else special would no longer have to wait. He was actually doing it for his own reasons, of course, and for wider-reaching benefits, but that didn't stop it being the right thing for her too. Everything would be fresh, and all would be quiet.

It was truly a no-lose situation.

17

The elevator opened. Burt was standing inside. He grinned and stood back to let Katelyn in, then realized he had to get out with his big cart and that this had to happen first regardless of the dictates of his code of chivalry. He hesitated, went back and forward an inch or two, then rolled his eyes and shrugged. This, or something like it, happened pretty much every night.

He apologetically clanked his way out and then turned back to hold the doors open. 'Fetching the menus, Ma'am?'

'That's right, Burt. How's your night?'

'Getting it done.'

Burt was the Seattle Fairview's only black employee apart from the much celebrated Big Ron, the daytime concierge. Katelyn liked Burt. He was twice as old as anyone else on the payroll and worked twice as hard, even at gone three in the morning. If you saw Burt, he'd be doing something. The idea of him at rest was absurd.

Reassured that she was safely in the elevator, he winked and trundled off, on his way to fix something or re-attach something or scrape something off. Katelyn watched him as the doors closed. He was a night toiler too, and something told her he felt the same as she did, the same sense of being in a special position. She'd never asked because, well, you just didn't.

Or was that too simple? Did she believe such an observation lay outside the terms of their working relationship, and if so, why? Did it say something bad about her? Was hierarchy more important to her than she'd thought? Or was she patronizing him without realizing it, not taking him seriously because he was old or…

Christ, it was too late now.

— «» — «» — «»—

This was not a job for the night manager, she knew. Some hotels left it to the bell boy, a final errand before he knocked off; or, if there was 24/7 room service, sometimes the overnight cook would put the machine on in the dead zone around four a.m. and fetch them himself, most likely wandering the corridors with his pants down, judging by the night cooks she'd met. One place had asked for the menus to be hung on the door by six, rather than two, and there it had been the first job of the day for the service staff who'd later be running those same breakfasts upstairs. That seemed wrong to her. You might think breakfast was the first event of the new day, but it wasn't. Not for the guests. It was the last thing. They returned from evenings in an unfamiliar city, mid-evening and surly or late and politely shit-faced — guessing which was half of the fun. Katelyn liked to imagine them sprawled hiccupping across the bed, gripping a complimentary biro, brows furrowed with lonely concentration, ticking and annotating. When you were on vacation, or away on business, the arrival of breakfast was of existential significance. It reminded you who you were — or who you'd thought you were, at least, at midnight and full up to the ears with wine.

So Katelyn believed. She'd tried explaining this to one of the guys on reception and he'd looked at her like she was speaking Mandarin. A few of them treated her like that whatever she said. Night managers were rarely women. Something to do with their responsibilities, maybe, the fact they had to deal with strange doings in the night — explaining to non-guests that you didn't run a cab service to the suburbs; dissuading goggle-eyed businessmen from bringing back women who were too obviously whores; finding someone to clear up the vomit in the middle elevator. (People always threw up in the middle one. Nobody knew why. Not even Burt.) Most night managers weren't on an upward track. They came on at nine, or whenever the particular hotel deemed the real action to have died down, installed themselves in the back office and drank coffee. If they were lucky, they'd continue doing that until the sun came up, taking a minute every now and then to check that the downtime maintenance and cleaning and restocking was getting done by people paid half as much as they were. If fire-fighting was required they'd boss people around until the problem had gone away, been forgotten or superseded, then go back to flipping through magazines. At dawn they faded like the dew, back to their apartment or little house, to sleep out the day like chubby vampires.

Katelyn was different. As the elevator rose in the night, the reflection in its wraparound mirrors reassured her she was young, female and attractive. Okay, not young. Scrub that. She had good skin, though, and hair that needed little pampering. She looked businesslike in her charcoal suit. She didn't have to be here. Shouldn't be, perhaps. You could enter hotel management without any experience whatsoever, but she had worked for enough flip-chart generals to know that bullet points were no match for time spent on the ground. During the day a hotel seemed like a huge engine, driven by internal principle. Sure, as soon as you got the other side of the reception desk, once you'd stepped behind a few of those doors marked 'Private', you realized that wasn't quite the case. You understood that a hotel was the head-on collision of a zillion different 'To Do' lists getting done at variable rates; that it was a flesh-and-stone computer running seventeen competing pieces of software (some new and can-do, some old and bug-ridden and leaking memory all over the place), and that a full-scale crash was always just around the corner. There was a momentum, nonetheless, the sense of an ecosystem rubbing along together, a relay team running an endless race.

At night it was different. The software went to standby and you became more aware of the hard fixtures: the desks, the chairs, the wall lamps, providing rest and shedding light for no one but themselves. The elevators which might take it upon themselves to travel up and down, for no obvious reason, clanking and hissing in the small hours. Most of all, of the building itself, its long corridors and massive haunches, suffused with the white noise of downtime. Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itself, to think its big, slow thoughts. To wander the halls then was to sit down with some big brick animal in darkness and listen to it breathing at rest.

And maybe that's why most night managers weren't women. Katelyn knew she should have been at home, asleep, or listening to another human's breath. A cat didn't count, no matter how much she loved him. It needed to be a child's breathing, or at least a man's. You could listen all you liked in her apartment, but you wouldn't hear either. She should stop kidding herself.

That's why she was here.

— «» — «» — «»—

The doors opened on the sixth floor and she strode out like a night manager should. Six wasn't so many floors, but it was all The Fairview had. Katelyn had been through this recently with a disgruntled guest, who'd been expecting the kind of vista he'd had at one of the sister hotels in the same small chain up in Vancouver. The Bayside there had twenty-two floors and superb views across Burrard Bay to the mountains — Katelyn knew this, having been there on an orientation course. There were hotels in Seattle with more extravagant views, but none with the same boutique attention to individual quality of service. The man glared at her, knowing he'd been volleyed with brochure-speak, but seemed happy enough when he left. Bit of a nut in any case: had the fruit plate with sausage patties on the side, both mornings, which spoke of conflicted desires.

The air was still and warm. She walked the silent, carpet-padded corridors, following three sides of a small square. Up, across, down. There weren't many menus. Weekends at this time of year were quiet. There was a tourist couple down on five — having seen them stagger home after midnight, Katelyn was interested to see what they'd ordered — but mostly it was business folk. These would be up early and sucking down the free Starbucks and croissants provided in the lobby between seven and half past eight. The whole floor yielded only twelve orders, mainly for the hotel's idiosyncratic version of a two-eggs breakfast. Nothing much of interest, though there was a request for the steel-cut oats which made her smile. The guest in question was a big guy. Oats wasn't what he wanted. He was being good. His wife would have been proud — assuming she believed him, assuming it ever even came up, which it wouldn't except in the context of a conversation he was destined to lose. He should just have had the big breakfast, like he wanted. Still, good for him.

At the end of the floor she glanced back to check she hadn't missed anything, and then opened the door to the stairs. The rich carpet stopped just the other side of this door, a cost-cutting manoeuvre which she approved of.

She was making the stairs' halfway turn when she heard a noise above. She looked up, ready to smile, assuming it was Burt come to do something in the well.

There was no one there.

Odd. The sound couldn't be from below, because she could see the door to floor five. She peered over the rail. No movement down there either.

Whatever. Hotels made noises. Probably one of the cleaning staff coming on duty. Though — she checked her watch — at quarter after three, that couldn't be right.

She opened the door at the bottom of the flight, half expecting to see Burt clanking by and thinking maybe she'd say something to him. Something friendly, to show there would be no ageism, racism or hierarchy-dictated interaction on her watch.

The corridor was empty.

Oh well. Burt would never know what he missed.

Floor five was slow going too. A few toast and coffees, but — aha. Eggs, sausage, bacon, extra sausage(?), hash browns, oats, fruit, coffee and tea for what looks like, what, four? And a continental breakfast with toast. And an English muffin, probably. Could be more toast. Or bacon. And an orange juice. Delivered at seven thirty.

Katelyn smiled: that would be the drunk tourists. She pulled a pen out of her jacket pocket and made a few alterations, judiciously reducing their order to something that wouldn't scare the hell out of them when it arrived. She also nudged delivery back to seven forty-five. They'd thank her for it.

She walked on. More toast, more eggs. She tried to remember the last time she'd been on vacation herself. It had been a while, that was for sure, back before her parents died, which made it five years. Funny what you remembered. Snapshots of views. A favourite coffee place, reading a trashy novel. Some trinket lusted over, bought, now lying forgotten in a drawer. Vacation sex. Boys now men, just as she was now presumably a woman. Anyone over forty who thought of herself as a girl was kidding herself, whatever was implied by magazines that funded themselves through adverts for anti-wrinkle creams.

There was the sound of a door opening.

She turned. 'Burt?'

No reply. She'd kept her voice low — nobody wanted waking at this time — but he'd have heard, and responded.

A guest, maybe?

She added the tourists' menu to the bottom of her stack and walked back the way she'd come. When she passed the door to the stairs she noticed it was open. Not wide, but propped on the latch.

She hadn't left it that way. You had to close it. Fire regulations were strict on the subject, and there was a sign which said so very clearly. Burt knew about them too. Strange time to be using the stairs, in any event.

She pushed the door further ajar, and said 'Hello?'

The sound echoed down the staircase, but didn't seem to meet anyone either going down or coming back. Just another sound in her own head. Except…

She turned quickly.

The corridor was empty behind her. Of course it was. But it felt like it hadn't been so a moment before.

That was kind of creepy. Burt wouldn't do that. A late guest wouldn't do it either.

There was only one way someone could have gone. Katelyn walked quickly back across the foyer, passing the elevators. A glance at the floor indicator showed they were all down in the basement. Which left…

She looked down the other corridor.

Empty. Pairs of doors, leading away. Silent as it should be.

But then she heard a click. Very quiet, from down the end.

So probably a very late guest. Came up the stairs for reasons of their own, let themselves into their room. Elevator phobic. That's it. No big drama.

Except… something didn't feel right.

The guest had to pass right behind her — which she'd felt. Wasn't it bizarre not to say hello, even if you were drunk, embarrassed at not being cool in front of the staff?

Unless you weren't supposed to be here at all.

It happened all the time. The hotel doors were open all day and half the night. You walked in, nodded confidently at the desk, nobody gave you trouble. At the right time of afternoon or evening you could take as long as you liked to get into a few rooms.

Katelyn had two choices. Go downstairs, pick up the radio she should have had with her — damn it — and get hold of Burt, or else galvanize the useless security guy who spent the night lurking in the basement jerking off. Burt, preferably, who wouldn't look at her as if asking what she was doing being night manager if she needed her hand held after dark. He wouldn't say it, or possibly even think it. But other people would, if they heard about it.

Which led to choice two.

She turned from the elevators and set off down the corridor. Feeling very calm, businesslike and relaxed, she picked up a couple of menus on the way. Continentals.

Behind her she heard the sound of one of the elevators in movement.

She stopped, looked back, hoping that it might halt at the floor and the doors open, that another employee would happen to arrive. If so, she'd call them over on some pretext or other.

The doors didn't open. She shook her head, irritated. This was her hotel. She wasn't going to be spooked.

Another menu. A few more blanks. Another menu.

She stopped in mid-stride, turned back.

Strange. The door of room 511 didn't have a menu. But it did have a 'Please Make Up My Room Now' sign.

That didn't make sense. Who puts that up before they go to bed?

She gave the door a gentle push. It opened a couple of inches.

It was dark inside. Odd again. The door should have been locked, of course, self-locking doors being basic security in a modern hotel. Not to mention it having a latch, which at the very least should have kept it closed.

She rapped on it, quietly. There was no response.

She didn't know if the room was supposed to be occupied. Along with her radio she should have brought up a list. She'd never seen the point. People either wanted breakfast or they didn't. What was she going to do: wake them up to see if they'd forgotten?

She reached inside the door and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. Ah. Suddenly this was looking more explicable. Obviously there was a problem with Room 511, circuits burned out or something. It happened. The sign was on the door was most likely there to remind someone to get on to fixing it.

But why hadn't she been told? This was exactly the kind of thing that should be on her schedule. If people didn't take her seriously how the hell was she supposed to do her job?

Katelyn's mouth set in a tight straight line. Not being taken seriously was something she absolutely couldn't bear.

She pushed the door open further and took a step into the dark interior corridor. Stood and listened. Couldn't hear anything.

She walked into the room. It was stuffy. The air around her seemed to ebb and flow, stirred tidally with the breath of all those sleeping around her. Normally street and ambient light would have kept it light enough to make out shapes easily, but the drapes at the far end had been left drawn. She could make out that the bed was empty and unused, but little more than that.

She felt her way over to the desk and tried turning on the light.

It didn't work either. Okay, so the power was definitely screwed. She didn't really understand how that could happen in one room alone, but…

Suddenly the room seemed darker still, and there was a soft click. She turned. The rectangle of yellow light from the corridor had disappeared.

She heard something that might have been the sound of feet on carpet. She took a step back, banged into the edge of the desk.

She swallowed. 'Is someone there?'

He didn't answer, but there was. He stepped out of the deepest shadow, face a softness in the sparkling gloom.

Katelyn tried to move backwards, but there was nowhere to go. He took another smooth step towards her, and she caught a glint down by his hand.

She gathered herself to scream, but just then his face passed through a dim beam of filtered light, a cloud coming out from behind another, darker cloud. Something about his features stopped her mouth, and she stared at him.

'No,' he said firmly. 'You don't know me. Nobody does.'

And then he came at her, up through time, with a speed nothing could have stopped.

— «» — «» — «»—

Nobody got their eggs or toast or steel-cut oats on time the next morning. There were a lot of complaints, especially from the top two floors, where the menus had inexplicably disappeared. It was early afternoon before a guest checked into Room 511 and found menus spread over the floor of a room that was otherwise empty, and where the lights didn't work.

The hotel kept the disappearance as quiet as it could. The police questioned Burt first, of course, but he was as bewildered as anyone and more upset than most. He'd liked Miss Katelyn. Last night he'd nearly said something when they met at the elevator, tried to say 'hi' in a way that was a bit more personal, case she thought he was being standoffish or something just 'cause she was the boss or white or something. Now she was gone. Most people seemed to think she'd just wigged out and would be back in a few days with her tail between her legs. A lady night manager meant 'no one back at home', so they said, and women like that were all one stop from the funny farm or Prozac Beach.

Burt knew Miss Katelyn wasn't like that, and when the elevator doors opened the following night and she wasn't standing there, he believed she was gone forever, and gone nowhere good.

18

When Nina woke at just before five she knew there was no point trying to sleep again. She and Ward had been up for two hours after Monroe's call, trying to work out what it meant and what it didn't mean. So far as she could see, it could be only one thing. Somehow, somewhere, Zandt had managed to tread heavily on the toes of someone close to the Straw Men. They hadn't been able to get to him direct, so they'd set him up. She'd tried throughout the night to get hold of him. His phone was turned off.

Ward had sobered up quickly, and in the end made a suggestion she knew she had to take seriously. She had to get Monroe somewhere private, and tell him some things. Not on the phone. Face to face. If she was going to try to convince him that there was a group of men and women operating behind the face of what most people understood as America, that they killed and lied and now had her ex-lover in their sights, they were going to have to be in the same room to do it. It probably should have been done three months ago, but — racked with paranoia and with several deaths on their hands — none of them had believed it the right thing to do.

Right now, that seemed like a mistake.

She drank five cups of coffee, working out what she was going to say. How much could be revealed about what had happened up at The Halls, without putting any of them in jail. She waited until seven, when she knew that he would be awake and on his feet. If she could catch him before he left for work, perhaps they could meet. She was walking over to the phone when it rang.

It was Monroe. He was already in the office. He instructed her to meet him there immediately, and he didn't sound like someone she could tell anything at all.

— «» — «» — «»—

He was waiting for her outside the elevator on the sixth floor. His face looked like stone.

'Charles,' she said, quickly. 'I need to talk to you.'

He shook his head curtly and turned to walk down the corridor. A little way along he threw open a door and stood back, waiting for her. She made up the distance hurriedly, stepped inside.

Room 623 was the kind of anonymous corporate space which exists in every good-sized company in America. Under business conditions it says 'Look: we can afford the best stuff out of the catalogue. We're not afraid of you.' What it was supposed to convey in law enforcement Nina had no idea. A large wooden table loomed in the middle, polished to a high reddish gloss and surrounded by the most expensive and least used chairs in the building. One wall of windows looked down over the back parking lot; the others were panelled to waist height but otherwise bare. There was a poorly framed photograph of someone receiving a commendation, not recently, and nothing else.

A man in a dark suit sat in a chair that had been positioned so that it stuck out from the top left corner of the table. He was above average height and had the kind of skin which makes a man of a certain age look like he's been injection-moulded in very hard plastic. His hair was neatly cut. His eyes were a flat, pale blue. His lashes were long. He was not wearing a tie and everything about his shirt said this was because he didn't have to. He was in his mid fifties. Despite being put together with due regard for all the conventional aesthetic beats, Nina thought he was one of the most unmemorable-looking men she'd ever seen. Nothing specifically said he wasn't an agent, but he wasn't. He certainly wasn't the SAC from Portland, whom she'd met.

'Good morning,' she said, holding out her hand.

He didn't shake. He neither introduced himself nor smiled. Nina left her hand in place for five seconds, then dropped it. She stood her ground a few moments more, giving him the chance to stop being an asshole. He didn't take it. She held his gaze as long as felt necessary, then looked away.

She could play that game. 'Whatever,' she said.

'Sit down and be quiet,' Monroe snapped. 'You're here to listen. You're asked a direct question then you may and should answer it. Otherwise zip it. Understood?'

Nina knew then that something was badly wrong. Monroe had faults. He had a tendency to think he was smarter than he was, and to believe that criminals — and other agents — would respond to the same management techniques as appliance salesmen. But he was above all else professional, and yet his tone spoke of anger and personal grievance.

He was still staring at her. 'Understood?'

'Sure,' she said, spreading her hands. 'What's…'

'The Sarah Becker case,' he said, and Nina's heart sank further. Even though this related to hat she needed to tell him, this was not the way could happen. Not in front of someone else, and especially not in front of the guy in the corner. Why not sit on one side or the other, incidentally? He had made himself impossible to ignore and yet Monroe had not introduced him. He seemed unwilling to even acknowledge his presence. It was as if there was a ghost at the end of the table, one Nina could see and he could not.

'Okay', she said. Monroe opened his folder, There were neat notes on the paper within, but he didn't refer to them.

'The Becker family claims their daughter simply turned up on their doorstep,' he said. 'Out of the blue, after being missing for a week. Says she was released near her abduction location, which she claims was in Santa Monica, and walked home by herself. A neighbour says otherwise, claims she saw the girl brought to the Beckers' doorstep by a man and a woman and that a car driven by a third man waited for them across the street. This neighbour is elderly and I wouldn't normally be interested except that a teenage girl of Sarah's description and condition received emergency treatment at a hospital in Salt Lake City the night before. She was admitted at the same time as a woman who was suffering from a gunshot wound to the upper right side of her chest. Both patients disappeared early the next morning. And all this at pretty much exactly the time that you sustained just such an injury, apparently in a hunting accident in Montana.'

Nina's head hurt and her heart felt as heavy as stone. She shrugged, knowing she was not going to be able to tell Monroe anything at all. Not now, not ever.

'The hospital sighting engages my interest,' he continued, 'because between there and a town called Dyersburg in Montana — the town near to which you flew, only the night before — used to be a development called The Halls, now a hole in the ground that everyone from the local cops to the NSA would like to have explained. The cops are particularly interested because they have a missing officer, a dead realtor, and two other unexplained fatalities.'