'Charles Monroe's office.' The voice came out of the speakerphone loud and clear.
'It's Nina Baynam,' Nina said, rubbing her eyes. 'I got a message.'
The person on the end didn't answer, but no more than three seconds later the voice of Nina's boss came on the line.
'Nina, where the hell have you been?'
'Out,' she said, evidently surprised at his tone. 'Why didn't you call my cell?'
'I did. Three times.'
'Oh. Well, I was somewhere loud.' She looked pointedly at me as she said this. 'What's the problem?'
'I've just had a phone call from the SAC in Portland.'
Nina immediately looked more serious. 'Another killing?'
'Yes, and no. Not another hard disk. Not another girl.'
'Well, then what?'
When Monroe spoke again, it was carefully and slowly. 'A prostitute named Denise Terrell — working name Cherri — walked into a police station there the night before last. She was disoriented. She claimed she'd been on an afternoon out-call and 'something happened'. Next thing she knew it was night and she woke up propped against a dumpster. Eventually they worked out she had serious concussion and took her to a hospital. The next morning she had remembered some more and started saying she'd been booked to one of her agency's regular clients but had struck a deal with another man, who somehow knew they had dealings with this particular john. This man had contacted her direct and offered her money in exchange for her letting him know when and where the meeting was going to take place. Said the guy owed him a lot of money and he wanted to catch him somewhere private, when his guard was down. The girl agreed.'
'Charles, is there a bottom line here?'
'The Portland cops went to the address she supplied. They found a dead man. His name was Peter Ferillo. He owned a restaurant and used to have ties to organized crime down here in LA. He was naked and messed up and had been shot in the head and left sprawled in a chair. They dusted the room floor to ceiling but found nothing. But then a patrol officer found something in a flowerbed thirty yards up the street. It was a bottle opener, with traces of blood on it. Ferillo's blood. They got a print off it. A good, full print. They matched it.'
The wine in my system seemed to have disappeared. Nina and I were staring at each other.
'Nina,' Monroe said, 'the print belongs to John Zandt.'
16
As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with its email address private driveways, its dotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands like a god. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. It's about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down; our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work. Sometimes things need to be taken out. Finding Jessica there had been the new beginning. Of course there are many Jessicas; but there was also only one. Once found, you could open the window into her life, confirm her existence; but you could shut it also. You could close the program down, make it unborn. You could quit and reboot, and then the past was gone and everything was clean. The DELETE key is there for a reason. Sometimes you just have to start fresh.
One of his favourite series of webcam pictures was of Pittsburgh, a city to which he had never been. The series consisted of three shots covering the period from 5.43 to 6.14, one morning in late May of 2003. All were taken from the same camera, though one which altered its direction and degree of zoom between shots, rather than giving one constant view. In the first picture the dawn sky took up the top half of the frame, all blue and red and swirled with epic cloud. Below, the Allegheny River curled up left from the centre, the 6th, 7th and 9th Street bridges and their lights reflected back up from the dark mirror water below. Everywhere, down the streets, along both sides of the river and in a circle around the fountain and pool at the end of Point State Park and the Gateway Center, there were more lights. Little points of white, made golden or rosy by the fading darkness and the limitations of the webcam. The second shot was much closer range, and in the intervening quarter-hour the camera had zoomed heavily and pivoted in an entirely different direction. It was impossible to tell how this little section fitted into the city as a whole. The frame was largely filled with trees, a glimpse of a curved highway cutting through them into the city, a few early birds on their way to work. In the final picture you were back out on the confluence of the rivers, and in wide shot. The angle was slightly different from the first. You were turned a little to the south and looking up the Monongahela just as it joined the Allegheny, the Fort Pitt Bridge still dark. There were no points of light anywhere now — either the city turned them off at six sharp, every single one, or dealing with a now brighter stretch of sky had caused the webcam to over-compensate in all the terrestrial areas.
He had spent time studying these images, understanding what the web was saying about the people it watched. It showed you could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house: it was their address, but that didn't mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren't fair game for cats or traps. Similarly, you could sit in a restaurant all day without ever becoming more than just some guy temporarily taking up space which belonged to someone else, space you hired by handing over money for coffee and burgers. Even if you had your nice house in the suburbs you paid tithes in every direction; you chipped away at the loan you took to buy the property, you hacked at the vig for your son's dentistry and the money pit of your daughter's someday wedding, you paid the insurance that might cover your parents' tumour care but wouldn't save their life. You took your days and handed them over to other people, who did things with them, who made stuff with your days, who sold their products with your life. Your days, your time, were their secret ingredient, their twelfth herb or spice; your life was given away free in the bottom of their packets like invisible jack-in-the-box treats. In return they helped you pay off some of your debts to the banks and the hospitals and fate: and so you went back and forth, every day, riding the rail between your house and your place of work, driving in a machine you were paying off in instalments and which someone would tow off your driveway, no matter how manicured, within days of a payment not being made.
You kept doing this until you got old and your life started running in reverse, and you went from having a whole house to just a room in one of your children's houses, assuming they'd take you; and finally to a stranger's building, some rest home, surrounded by old geezers you'd never met before and might not have liked even if you had: the young don't understand that the physical similarities of old people do not mean they're the same inside. They don't all got rhythm either, as it happens. Even more acutely than failing health, this progression makes it bluntly clear that life is going in very much the wrong direction. All that time spent owning a house, all those loans and aspirations, are erased, wiped off the disk of your life. It lifted gently out of your hands like a kitchen knife taken from someone too young. The things you acquired and which have helped define you are given or sold or thrown away, and you are squeezed again into a little room, as if you were twelve once more — but this time, instead of feeling at one with the outside world, by now the whole thing has long ago stopped making sense. You sit in quiet places and look out of windows and try not to panic as you notice both how much you are forgetting these days, and how little of value there is to forget. The layers of self you spent decades accreting are dissolved, reducing you once again to dependence, and there's no kidding yourself that this is a mere stage to be got through, that your time lies ahead. It doesn't. You've had your time. Your time has been and gone. Now you are merely colour in the background of someone else's time, and even that probably won't be for long.