“I’ve got to show you my new car,” he said. “I’ve finally got rid of the Chevy.”
“We’ve got an update to do,” Dagmar said.
“I meant later.”
Around them, Helmuth and the technical staff were monitoring the progress of the players as they sampled one body of water after another-thousands altogether, on five continents. A running count was kept of the number of times the Tapping the Source units detected phenolphthalein, which Dagmar’s agents had added to streams, fountains, creeks, and ponds earlier in the day. The chemical itself was harmless, its chief property being to turn purple in an acid environment.
Every time six of the contaminated water sources were detected, another page was loaded to the Briana Hall site. Each led to other pages filled with clues to puzzles that would keep the players busy, it was hoped, for at least a few hours.
This played out over the latter half of the morning and most of the afternoon. Early in the day, eating a tasteless cruller from the box she’d brought in, Dagmar had announced that everyone was invited to dine at a nearby Italian restaurant that night, courtesy of the company. She had already called and made the arrangements; she only needed a head count.
No one was immune to the attractions of free food. She called the restaurant and finalized the number.
“Twelve people,” she said.
“Thirteen,” said BJ, “counting you.”
“Thirteen,” Dagmar said.
Food and soft drinks were free, she explained to her guests, but she knew Helmuth and a few of the others too well to offer free alcohol.
The restaurant was a decoy. She had no intention of being the thirteenth person at that meal, but intended to call in sick. She wouldn’t stiff the restaurant, which already had her business card number.
It was all a way of getting away from BJ so he wouldn’t follow her home.
At some point, civility required that she view BJ’s new car. Dagmar followed BJ to the elevator and rode with him in silence. He seemed aware that something was wrong, and she sensed wariness beneath the casual, pleasant pose. She looked at his hands and saw that a knuckle had been cut, but a cut could appear on a knuckle for all sorts of innocent reasons. There was a cut on one of Dagmar’s knuckles at that very moment, and she had no idea how it got there.
The killer might have used a club or a pipe or something.
Right. The thought of an angry BJ coming after her with a baseball bat sent a quaver along her nerves.
She turned her mind from nightmare imagination to analysis, a welcome shift. If, she considered, Siyed had cut BJ under the eye with a fingernail, would scrapings of that nail provide the DNA that could send him to prison?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The last thing she wanted was BJ investigated and then let go on grounds of insufficient evidence. That would be a triumph for him: that would be BJ killing Charlie and then rubbing her face in it.
The car was a Ford Phalanx, slightly used, with a locust-green low-slung monocoque body and a hard top that disappeared, on command, into what proved a surprisingly large trunk.
“Good lord,” Dagmar said.
“V-eight, turbocharged.” BJ was smiling as the wind tossed his fair hair. “The original owner put thirty-five hundred miles on it, and then his boss gave him a company car-a Bentley coupé, believe it or not, and this became redundant. Those thirty-five hundred miles cut the original price nearly in half.”
He had said “coupé,” not “coupe” as Americans do. She walked around the machine.
“It just screams, Fuck the environment, doesn’t it?” she said.
He laughed. “I thought that was the California state motto. Oh no, my mistake-the motto is I’ve got mine.”
She looked at him. “Aram must be paying you well.”
“So are you.” BJ opened the passenger door. “Want to go for a ride?”
“Maybe later.” She shaded her eyes with her hand and blinked. “I think I’m getting a headache.”
“Sorry to hear it.” His face softened into an expression of concern. He closed the door and approached her. “You’ve had a hard time.”
He offered a comforting embrace and she took it, thinking as she gazed blankly over his big shoulder that her rented Mercedes two-seater would probably not be able to outrun the Ford, not with its body designed by French aeronautical engineers and housing eight cylinders of Detroit iron.
The Italian restaurant deception would be necessary, then.
“Speaking of Aram,” he said as they returned to the office tower, “he’s flying into town tomorrow night. I’ve got a meeting with him on Monday, and then he and I will have our first meeting with the staff at the company on Tuesday. Then he’s throwing a welcome dinner and reception for me.”
“Where?” she asked.
“At Katanyan Associates. The dinner will be catered.”
She wondered about the meeting, if one of Austin’s partners would ask, Say, aren’t you the BJ that Austin always said was, like, the worst businessman in the history of the world?
How jolly the dinner would be afterward.
They could hear Helmuth’s fury as soon as they arrived at the third floor.
“Goddam it! What shit-head decided that HTML was going to be case sensitive!”
Upload not going well, Dagmar concluded.
The afternoon ended with all pages, puzzles, sound files, and videos loaded and available to the gamers, and with the computers at Tapping the Source bulging with useful data.
They were going to be very surprised, Dagmar thought, by what happened to their stock on Monday.
“I’ll meet you all at the restaurant,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got to do some shopping in the meantime.”
She waited in her office until she saw the green monocoque body cross the 101 and head toward Ventura, where the restaurant waited. She looked up, saw a familiar white Dodge van in the parking lot across the freeway. She got out her handheld and hit the speed dial.
“Andy,” she said when Joe Clever answered, “I’m looking at you right now. And if you damage my retinas with that laser, I’m going to cross the highway and rip out your fucking lungs.”
“I couldn’t get anything with the Big Ears,” Andy complained. “You’ve got too many computers pumping heat into the room.”
Quiet triumph sizzled in Dagmar’s heart.
“I got one of the puzzles on my own, though,” he said. “The one about what happened to Cullen’s hat.”
“I have some questions,” she said, “about the snoop-and-poop business.”
She’d claimed to have shopping to do as a way of getting rid of BJ, and now she did have shopping to do, buying the gear on Joe Clever’s list. Night-surveillance scopes, cameras, video recorders, little cameras on wires narrow enough to go down someone’s gullet.
She called Helmuth and told him to give everyone her apologies. She had a headache, and she was going home. She’d see them all on Monday.
“Get a receipt from the restaurant at the end of the evening,” she told him.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Helmuth asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
Then came the search for the perfect motel. She found it finally off the Hollywood Freeway, a place that looked as if it had been built as a Ramada Inn or a Travelodge but, in the decades since its construction, had probably been sold to Arabs, who sold it to Indians, who sold it to Chinese, who sold it to Koreans, who sold it finally to refugees from Bangladesh. The white building, with its rust-colored stains, sprawled around a series of courtyards, and there was nothing to stop anyone from walking right off the street to any of the rooms. The large swimming pool, where she might have done laps, had been filled with earth and turned into a rather shabby garden.