'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 alclass="underline" 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.