The Lonely Dead

Then I worked through the stills. There were an awful lot of them. McCain had thrown them all into one big folder. I dropped this onto a graphics viewer and clicked through some examples at random. The images showed Jessica doing the same kind of things as the videos, but without the sex. Being naked or partially naked. Reading a magazine. Eating food. Sitting at a computer. Drinking coffee or Jack Daniel's. Sleeping. Smoking. Staring into space. The cumulative effect was strange, and I began to get a sense of Jessica's appeal to McCain. I was familiar with webcams myself, having spent some slow hours watching street corners in New Orleans, or the shore of Lake McDonald, or views out of computer stores on the main streets of nondescript towns in the Midwest. It had taken me a while to work out what I got from this. You didn't watch in the hope of seeing something exciting. Just the opposite. You watched because the very lack of discernible activity, of presented subject matter, made the view itself seem more real. If you watch something in particular, all you see is that thing happening. You see the moment, the event, and you are distracted from the long, slow tide of eventlessness which it overlies. If you watch nothing, then you see everything. You see the thing as it is.

These myriad accidental views of Jessica achieved the same effect. Not a single image was composed. In many she was partly out of frame, or out of focus. The effect was to show nothing in particular, and thus to reveal everything. Your view of her life became similar to her own, an endless series of uninflected, unintended and ultimately quite tedious moments. McCain's Jessica collection brought home the reality of the woman more clearly than anything else I could imagine, capturing and celebritizing her in pixels. This was her fifteen megabytes of fame.

Having glimpsed her life before the event, only then did I look at the Polaroids Nina had left me. These showed Jessica's apartment on the day when the LAPD had found it. They too were flat, blank views, but they were not uninflected. Every square millimetre said something quite direct: their very existence announced that the girl who had lived in this place was dead, which is why I had wanted to see the others first.

I looked at them closely for a while. Then I went back to the beginning of the files on the hard disk, set the system to order them chronologically, and looked at them again.

It took a long time before I noticed something.

— «» — «» — «»—

'See?'

Nina nodded. 'There's no picture that shows it better?'

'That's as good as it gets. I've blown it up but…' I switched to a window I'd hidden behind the first. 'We don't live in a movie, and so the blow-up looks like shit.'

Nina leaned forward and stared at the picture on the screen. She was looking at a grainy and blocky picture that showed Jessica lying on her bed, from the chest up. A man's face was over hers.

Neither of us were interested in the man. LAPD moved fast: they already had print-outs of the three men featured in McCain's movies, and were showing them to Jessica's associates, starting in Jimmy's bar. The barman there had said none of them looked much like the guy he'd seen the girl with the night she died. These had been amongst the things Nina had achieved before returning to the house mid-afternoon. What we were looking at instead was Jessica's bedside table. This was visible in a gap between the blurred faces and chests of Jessica and her temporary new best friend. On the table was a lamp, a cheap-looking radio alarm, a small pile of books whose garish spines suggested they had self-help titles, three coffee cups, and a small picture frame.

Nina picked up the Polaroid which showed the bedroom, and peered at it. 'You're right,' she said. 'It's not there. And I didn't see anything like it in the apartment.' As soon as I'd noticed the discrepancy I'd called her with a description of the frame, and she'd stopped by Jessica's to look for it. 'When is this grab from?'

'Just less than a week before she died.'

'Assuming the date stamp is accurate.'

'It is. The creation date of the file confirms it.'

'A week. So she could have moved it somewhere herself in the meantime.'

'You couldn't find it. If a picture is important enough to keep by your bedside, you're not suddenly going to decide you don't want it in the house any more.'

'You could if it was an ex-boyfriend.'

'True. But look.' I switched to a third image, which showed only the frame on the bedside table. 'This is it blown up even more. I used interpolation software which basically looks at the colour value of each pixel, compares it to the ones surrounding it, and tries to make an intelligent guess at increasing the size of the image. It looks like shit when applied to a picture of this low quality, but it does show something interesting.' I pointed at the centre of the picture. 'You can't make out any features, but you've clearly got two heads there.'

'Exactly. Jessica plus a former guy.'

'I don't think so. What's the colour on top of both their heads?'

'Grey.'

'The hair colour of older people, in other words. Parents, perhaps.'

'You think?'

'Jessica may not have actually made it back home very often, but I'd have been very surprised if there wasn't a family picture in the apartment somewhere. Nice photo of mom and dad, or if she had a problem with one or both, some idealized sibling or favourite niece. Some record of family. That's what girls are like.'

'Is that so? You found one here yet? Hidden amongst the sewing and the love letters to Justin Timberlake?'

'No,' I said. 'But I haven't looked hard. And you're not a girl.'

'Right. Just a scary woman.'

'Not just,' I said. 'But my point is that something is missing from Jessica's apartment.'

'You think the killer was there.'

'I do. And here's the proof.' I double-clicked on another file, one of the still images McCain had stored in the folder. It showed Jessica spark out on the couch in a somewhat inelegant pose. She was wearing floral pyjamas, pale blue, with little pink and white flowers. 'You said she was found…'

'That's them. Those are the pyjamas. Christ. You're right. He'd been there.'

'I think he had been closing in on her for a while — hunting her, as he probably thinks of it — and spent time in her space as part of the build-up to murdering her. He took the pyjamas and I think he also took a souvenir. He would have worked out that these were Jessica's family, and decided to take something that was close to her, something that mattered.'

'And she wouldn't have noticed?'

'Name me an object in this house that you look at every day. And look at the picture: the table is a mess. Also…'

'But what about the pjs? You'd notice if they were gone, surely.'

'Which is what I was about to say. He was most likely there during the day of the night before he killed her.'

'So why not just wait for her and kill her on home territory?'

'Because it was her home, not his. You know what these people are like. They want to sculpt the event. It has to happen on their terms.'

'Does this actually help us?'

'He found out where she lived. How? It means that on at least one occasion he could've been seen near her apartment. It means that he had to get in. Again, how?'