Only when Nina was clear of the entrance and standing some distance from anyone else did she get out her cell phone. She walked to where she couldn't be overheard, and hit John Zandt's number on speed-dial. He didn't answer after twelve rings, and she was put through to the phone's answering service.
'Hi, it's me,' she said to the machine. 'I know you don't want to talk about this kind of thing any more. But I could do with your help.' She hesitated, not knowing what else to say, then added: 'Hope you're okay.'
Then cut the connection, and stood irresolute. For just a moment she felt odd, fluttery at the back of the neck, as if someone was watching her.
She turned, but there was no one. No one she could see, anyhow.
— «» — «» — «»—
At just after two she sat stirring a coffee while her boss talked on the phone. They were perched outside a scruffy cafe half a block from The Knights. All but one of the squad cars had now moved on to other things, but from where she sat she could see four unmarked vehicles that were part of the investigation. She sipped her coffee and watched as further pieces of Room 11 were hauled out to be analysed in depth. It had been established that the room had been rented five days before, cash in advance. Nina hoped he was being grilled, yet again, and she hoped it was somewhere airless and hot and that they took their time.
Monroe closed his phone. 'It's done,' he said, with evident satisfaction. 'Olbrich is assembling a task force: RHD of course, us, FD&D, the whole Serious Crime Cluster Fuck. This needs to be kept tight. There's a lot of angry officers around.'
'Clipping a cop in broad daylight. Even by wacko standards, that's extreme.'
'Wacko?'
'Come on, Charles.' Nina had lost patience with official nomenclature round about the time she assisted with the extrication of a young black kid from a trash can. The kid had been there a week, in weather as warm as today's. His mother ID'd the body, then killed herself three weeks later by walking off the Palisades. That had been a few years ago. Monroe still went through the motions of using impersonal and uninflected terminology for people whose deeds shredded whole families and histories in their grubby hands. 'What would you call him? Inadequately socialized?'
'This is going to happen fast,' Monroe said, ignoring her. 'A cop-killing in broad daylight. This is not a man who has control of himself any more. We're going to have to hit the ground fast.'
Nina rolled her eyes. Out of control, begging to be caught. And yet nowhere to be seen. The most high-profile investigation she had yet been involved in — officially at least — had been the Delivery Boy murders back in 1999/2000. Again, here in Los Angeles, and also working under Charles Monroe. He'd made similar assumptions then, about a man who'd taken the lives of three bright and worldly young women without leaving a trace. He had killed again, more than once, and then disappeared, and had never been caught. Monroe had floated on to the next job, onwards and upwards. The girls' parents still took the world one day at a time. 'Question is, will there be others?'
'There may be, yes. That's what I'm saying. Unless we…'
'No. I mean have there been any before this? If this is the end, as you think, where is the beginning? What got him to here? What's this guy spiralling out from?'
'People are on it. LAPD are cross-checking as we speak.'
'And we still have no idea who she is.'
'No purse, no possessions apart from old pjs, dickhead behind the desk says he never saw her before she was dead. A photo will be prepared once they've cleaned her up a little: people will be on the street with it by the end of the afternoon. You know what that thing in her face was?'
Nina shook her head, a coppery taste in her own mouth. She had seen many dead bodies, some of them in states around which she'd had to build a wall in her head, so she didn't come upon the memory unexpectedly. But there was something about the ones where they did things to the victims' mouths. Sexual mutilation you almost took for granted. The mangling of a public part of the body, like the eyes or mouth or hands, somehow seemed a more social desecration. Sexual was private, a personal assault; public said LOOK, UNIVERSE, AT WHAT I HAVE DONE. It was outward-directed, some statement designed to change the world. Or so it seemed to her.
'A hard disk,' Monroe said. 'A small one, like in a laptop. One of the techs recognized it before it was even out of her head.'
'No prints?'
He shook his head. 'Clean. But someone in a lab is finding what else it can give us. There's a serial number, for a start. It came from somewhere, was bought somewhere. And there may be something left on it, of course. We'll know tonight.'
He caught the expression on Nina's face this time. 'He left it there for a reason, Nina. Let's get back to work.'
He stood up, thumb already dialling another number on his cell. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She wouldn't want to be Charles Monroe's phone, Nina thought. That was a job for a phone with tough abs.
She drained the rest of her coffee, aware of his eyes on her, critical. 'What, Charles?'
'How's your arm holding out?'
'Fine,' she said, irritably. He wasn't asking about her arm. He was reminding her of unfinished business and of why their professional relationship had taken its second turn for the worse. She got the message. 'Good as new.'
He looked like he was going to say something else but then got an answer on his cell, and turned and strode away, already in mid-flow. Someone was learning just what a damn fine SAC Monroe was; how in control, how just right on top of things.
As she followed him, Nina checked her own phone for something like the twentieth time. She saw there was a text message from Zandt, at last, and quickly called it up.
It said: I'M IN FLORIDA.
'Oh for fuck's sake,' she muttered, stuffed the phone back in her bag, and walked back out into the heat.
5
I checked into the Armada on Powell, in San Francisco downtown not far from Union Square. It was appealingly expensive and had a guy dressed as a Spanish soldier standing on the pavement outside. Passing tourists were taking photographs of each other with him, presumably so that back home they could tell their friends that here they were, with a guy in a costume, outside a hotel they weren't staying in. By the time I was settled it was too late to do the big thing on my agenda, so I went for a walk instead. As I walked I thought about what I knew, which boiled down to this: I had been wrong about just about everything to do with my life. I had believed I'd been born to Don and Beth Hopkins in Northern California, where they had been living well-tempered lives of average tedium. They mowed the yard and kept the car clean and they bought enough material goods to keep the gods of commerce smiling upon them. My father built up a realty business and, after I'd left home, this led to them moving to Dyersburg. He had continued to enjoy some success as a broker of luxury houses until a car crash had taken both of their lives. But on the day after their funeral, when I'd gone to their house to try to understand what I was supposed to do about it, I'd found a message. It had been hidden in such a way as to draw the attention only of someone who knew my father very well.