'Anything unusual about this one?'
He looked back at her. 'He was just a guy. He had short hair. Kind of good-looking, I think. That's all I can tell you. It all got busy after that, and next time I looked it was late and JJ was gone and someone else was in the booth. You could talk to the girls who were working the floor, they might have served them. But they won't be in until tonight. Except Lorna, she'll be on lunch.'
There was a shout from the doorway, and a uniform stuck his head in. 'Lieutenant?'
The policeman turned. 'You got it?'
'We do.'
Olbrich jerked towards the door with his head. 'We got an address, Nina. I'll go with you.'
'She really dead?' the bartender asked.
'Yes,' Nina said. 'She's really dead. I'm sorry.'
He nodded, and turned away.
When Nina got to the door she glanced back and saw the man slowly wiping a cloth over a table in a bar that he had to keep working in, and she thought: we never really know who we leave behind.
— «» — «» — «»—
The address was Apartment 7, 3140 Gardiner. When Nina's car got there, Monroe was already outside with two cops.
'He moves fast, doesn't he?' Olbrich said.
'You better believe it.'
The building was three storeys high and dirty white. A staircase went up the outside of either end. Nina walked up to the second storey and waited with Monroe while one of the detectives tracked down the building's super.
Monroe looked at her. 'Feeling better this morning?'
'Fine,' she said. He spoke quietly, and so did she. 'And thank you for your concern, Charles, which is not at all beginning to bug me. Anything useful from Profiling on the note?'
'Not yet. And you don't think there will be. Why?'
'Profiling didn't really work for the Washington sniper, did it?'
'That's a completely different…'
'No it isn't. They decided it had to be a white guy because the perceived wisdom — based on a not-very-scientific study done a pretty long time ago — is that the majority of serial killers are white, and so any report phoned in about a black guy was ignored. Meanwhile a couple people said they saw white trucks, and so suddenly that's what everyone's looking for, despite the fact white trucks are the Starbucks of the highway and not seeing them would be unusual. The licence plate of the killer's blue car is run through the system half a dozen times because of suspicious behaviour, but no, it's not a white truck and he's not a white guy, so we're not interested. The profilers say killers never work with other people — except, um, this one did. We shouldn't have been listening to them anyway: anyone with a brain knew from the start this was not a serial killer but a multiple murderer on a politico-religious mission, in which case anything profilers say is irrelevant. All it did was cloud the issue, and it could do the same here. I'm just not sure I believe in their shtick any more.'
'So why did you ask me if they'd come back with anything?'
'To try to steer you away from further solicitous enquiries.'
'Nina, when are you going to tell me what happened last year?'
'I already done told you, boss,' she said, smiling sweetly. In her head, however, she reminded herself to be careful. Monroe was many things, but he wasn't stupid.
At that moment Olbrich appeared at the stairs with a bunch of keys. 'Zinman's taking a statement,' he said, heading for the door to Apartment 7, 'but the guy's got nothing for us. Kept herself to herself, blah. And he's as dumb as a bag of rocks. We set?'
Guns now in hand, Nina and Monroe nodded.
Olbrich knocked on the door, waited, and received no response. So he unlocked the door and opened it slowly.
'This is the police,' he said. 'Please step into sight.'
Nothing happened. He opened the door a little further. This revealed a fairly large room, about twenty feet square. Electing to wait outside, this was all Nina saw until the two men had gone in and called an all-clear. Nobody home.
When she stepped into the apartment she saw a coffee table and a tired red couch in the middle, and a computer workstation under a window on the far side. The computer was grey and cheap-looking. There was a small red light at the bottom of the monitor, but the screen was black. A television sat to the side of the workstation, where it would be visible from the couch. For optimum viewing it would have been moved a couple of feet to the left, but there it would have blocked the door to the bedroom, where the two men were. A thin black cable was running in there across the floor from the computer workstation. Before following it Nina took a few steps the other side of the sofa, and peered into a small kitchen with a big window overlooking the street. It was tidy. As she turned back she noticed a battered-looking guitar propped up in the corner behind the sofa. It was dusty and missing a string.
In the room's remaining corner was a small desk. A couple of notepads. Nina carefully lifted the cover of one and glanced at a page. Doodles. Stuff that looked like lyrics. One sentence, 'Rain that never washes', had been written and then crossed out.
'Come look at this,' Monroe said.
The bedroom was small, enough space for a double bed, a small vanity and that was that. A tiny bathroom stood off the bottom end. The bed was unmade. The men were looking at a small object on a tripod to the side of the bed. It was to this that the black cable ran.
'Camera,' Olbrich said.
'Webcam,' she corrected. 'See where the cable goes?'
She followed it back into the main room and over to the workstation. Turning her hand over so her fingertips were out of the way, she gently moved the mouse.
The screen of the monitor flickered and woke up. In the centre of the screen was a window which took up about a third of its extent. It showed a picture of the side of the bed Monroe was still standing by.
'I'm not going to touch it,' she said, 'but you're going to find a cable modem feed out the back of this machine. Jessica had a website where people could watch her.'
'From where?' Olbrich asked.
'From anywhere in the world.' She stood back from the desk. 'Bad news. Our suspect list just jumped into the tens of millions.'
— «» — «» — «»—
Three hours later she was back at Jimmy's and sitting in an upper room that belonged to the owner/manager, who wasn't called Jimmy.
'Sounds like a bar's name,' Mr Jablowski had said, when she asked. 'Whereas mine doesn't.' Alerted by Don the barman to the morning's visitors, he'd elected to be on site for once. He was strangely dapper for a man who owned what was basically a beer-pit for the afternoon alcoholic crowd, but there are a lot of drug dealers who don't jack the product either. Don meanwhile had gone home for a few hours, to 'chill out'. The investigators had his address, but she privately didn't think it was one they were going to visit. She was no profiler either, of course — which was why, on her suggestion, a plainclothes was following the barman home.
Another detective and an agent were out in the sparse lunchtime drinking crowd. One of the waitresses who'd been on duty the night of Jessica's last visit was due to arrive soon, and an eye was also being kept out for men who fitted an extremely generalized description. Things were going nowhere fast out there, in other words. Back at the girl's apartment, the opposite was true. It was being ripped apart, and investigating officers from three separate agencies were ploughing into anything they could find: reading, photographing, dusting.
Nina, meanwhile, was talking to a young black woman called Jean. Jean had come in looking for Jessica because they'd been due to hook up the night before and her friend had never showed. Also because she wanted a drink. Don had pointed her straight in the direction of the cops, and kept her heading that way even when she remembered she'd much prefer to be somewhere else.