“It was a good idea,” she said.
Then he had a flash. “Wait a second. Webpages have names so we can remember them, right? But don’t they all have numerical addresses too?”
“Try it,” she said. He typed HTTP:// 419.20.028.04 into her browser and after a couple of seconds, something began to happen. A page was loading.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on…”
There was a box in the middle of the screen, like an abstract painting. The browser rendered it slowly, finally revealing a dirty whitish image. They stared at it, disappointed again, but then the image began to drift. “Whoa,” said Jenner. “It’s a webcam, I think.”
She was right. They were looking at a moving image. A camera was scanning slowly to the right, tracking along a wall, a painted concrete wall, it seemed, stained by water. There was a shag carpet and some litter scattered around the bottom of the wall. It was a basement. The camera moved slowly, in total silence, picking up faint pools of light and leaving them behind. There was nothing of interest in the room, and the pan took a full minute to reach its farthest righthand extremity and then the image flickered, went black, and renewed itself where it started: an image of the empty room and the camera beginning its pan to the right again. They watched the entire sequence a second time.
“I can’t believe this,” said Wingate.
Jenner stabbed the screen with her finger. “Wait – did you see that?”
“I saw someone’s dirty basement.”
“No,” she said. “At the end. Watch again.”
He leaned in closer to the screen and followed the camera’s gaze. As it got closer to the end of its movement, he noted again a shadow on the walclass="underline" it stretched to the left. But something was moving within it.
“There,” said Jenner, and she held her forefinger against the right-side edge of the screen. “It’s a person.”
He hadn’t seen it, and he watched again. And on the fourth pass, he saw it. Just a flash, onscreen for less than a second, but unmistakable: the right leg and arm of a person, someone seated in a chair. Visible for an instant against the gloom of the wall behind and then gone, and it was moving: a jittery motion caught on its downbeat. On the fifth viewing one more detail popped out, and Jenner clamped her hand to her mouth. In the upper third of the image, glinting for a millisecond, there was an eye, floating in the dark in an unseen head, an eye wide open in terror. Someone was looking at them, someone knew they saw. A fraction of a second was all they needed to read the message in that eye. It said HELP ME.
“Good Jesus,” said Wingate. “I better get hold of the skip.”
6
She’d told Wingate she’d meet him upstairs: there was no computer in the basement, but when he got to the house, she was still downstairs putting on a housecoat and getting ready to negotiate the stairs. Glynnis offered him something to drink, but he declined and waited in the front hallway, uncomfortable and nervous. There was something roasting in the oven – a rich, meaty fragrance filled the main floor of the house. “Sit at least,” said Glynnis. “Or has she told you to refuse all hospitality?”
“No, no, not at all,” he said hastily, and sat in the chair in the living room closest to the hall. It felt like he was taking Hazel out on a date.
Glynnis vanished into the kitchen and then reappeared with what looked like a glass of beer. “You like apple juice?”
“Uh, yeah, I like it.”
“Fresh-pressed,” she said. “No preservatives.”
He thanked her and sipped it in her presence and then nodded to show how much he liked it. He could hear Hazel coming up the stairs, and Glynnis opened the door for her.
“Orpheus arrives from the underworld,” she said, and Hazel waved her off.
“What was so urgent?” she asked Wingate.
He stood and put his drink aside. “Can you take me to the computer you said was connected to the internet?”
She took him down the hallway, ignoring both Glynnis and the smell of supper. As they went into what he presumed was Glynnis’s office, the front door opened and they heard Andrew greeting his wife.
“Is your mother still living here?”
“She’s having her pre-dinner nap,” said Hazel. “Now show me what you were talking about.”
Wingate waited for the computer to boot up and connect. They were still using dialup in this house, and it took a few minutes. He typed in the url and waited for the image to load. On a slower connection, the pan wasn’t as smooth as it had been at the detachment, and the irregular movement across the room made the short clip seem even more menacing. She sat down in front of the screen and he showed her where to look at the end of the sequence, and when she saw the flicker of the two body parts, she started. He pointed out the eye to her and she was silent, taking in its significance, as he and Jenner had. He was surprised to see that the pan ended a half-inch or so past where it had terminated an hour earlier. “There’s more now,” he said.
“It’s longer?”
“It shows more,” he said. “At the station house we could only see the very edge of the knee and arm. And that eye. Now there’s a bit of bicep and more pantleg.” The leg was still juddering nervously and the floating traumatized eye stared out ceaselessly. An extra second or so had been made visible at the end owing to the extension of the pan. Hazel was shaking her head slowly.
“Well, that’s creepy as all hell. Is it happening right now? Is it live?”
“I can’t tell.”
“And an hour ago, there was less?”
“Just a bit.”
She studied the sequence a couple more times. “So someone sinks a mannequin expecting it to be pulled up in order for us to decode a set of numbers and tune in on time to see this?” She swivelled in the chair. “Where are we with our fishing couple?”
“We have two numbers and one seems to be disconnected. It rings a couple of times and then there’s a busy signal. The other just rings. I don’t know if one’s a cell or what, or if these people live together even.”
“How many times have you called?”
“A few. But it’s the long weekend and until I saw this, I wasn’t sure how urgent -” “Did you run the names?”
“CPIC has nothing. I can do a reverse trace on the numbers and get some addresses.”
“Good. And in the meantime, get Howard Spere’s eggheads on this site and see if they can figure out who’s uploading it.”
“I also tried Eldwin’s number, but his wife said he was out of town for the long weekend.”
“I bet he is. Who is this guy, anyway?”
“Apparently, he’s a writer.”
“Well, either he has some strange fans, or he’s working out writer’s block in a very active fashion. Find out more about him, would you? And keep trying to reach him.”
“I will.”
She looked at the screen again. “Judging by the rate at which the camera is exposing our friend here, we might have the whole face by morning. It’d be nice to know who it is.” She touched the screen with her finger. “What do you think the shadow behind the chair is?”
“I can’t tell,” said Wingate. “It tapers a bit as it approaches the ceiling. It could be a person. But it’s pretty still for a live person.”
“It’s not hard to stay still for as long as we’re seeing this.” She turned off the browser and pushed the chair back. “So,” she said, “someone sinks a mannequin in Gannon Lake so we can watch their mystery show. Is this an elaborate prank, or not?”
“I’m leaning toward not a prank.”
“When you talk to Spere about this upload, give him those black pictures you showed me, too. I’m getting a bad feeling about all of this.”