The Lonely Dead

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

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

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

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

— «» — «» — «»—

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

'Hey, Doug.'

'Nina. How's tricks?'

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

'Thanks. I'll smoke it later.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'So what's with the disk?'

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

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

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

'And?' she said, bored with prompting.

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

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

She read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I don't get it.'

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

'But… so why keep crossing the road?'

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

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

'I won't,' he said.

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

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

'Christ,' Nina said, eventually.

'He's killed before,' Monroe said.

'Or he wants us to think he has.'

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

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

'We don't know yet.'

'You okay, Nina?' This was Olbrich.

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

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

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