The Lonely Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Just emails,' Jean said.

'They have no way of finding your address?'

'Not unless you give it to them.'

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

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

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

Jean gave a lopsided grin. 'Could be.'

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

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

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

'Like I said, I was gone.'

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

'Not right now.'

'Any in the recent past?'

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

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

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

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

— «» — «» — «»—

'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.'