“Well, if you’re short of cash, Michael, why don’t you just sell it?”
“They won’t let me, until the question of inheritance has been settled in court.” He held up his glass to the sky and saw it flush pink in the sunset. “This is the first bottle I’ve opened since she died. But I don’t see any reason why it should be the last.” If he couldn’t sell it, he could at least drink it.
Angela slipped a hand around his upper arm and turned him gently toward the door. “Come on, let’s get started.”
She pulled up a chair beside him at the computer and told him to enter the Second Life URL. Up came the welcome page. A sequence of photographs of young, beautiful avatars in a variety of settings. An orange banner urged him to get started.
In the top left-hand corner of the screen was the Second Life logo. A pale green hand held up, palm facing out, fingers spread. It doubled cleverly as an eye, with the pupil in the centre of the palm, the raised fingers like eyelashes. Michael thought there was something familiar about it. He knew he must have seen it before. But where?
“Just click on the Get Started banner and you can choose a name.” Angela sipped on her wine as he followed her instructions and chose the surname Chesnokov. Something to do, perhaps, with his Eastern European ancestry. Then he tapped in C-H-A-S. Charles had been the name of his Scottish great grandfather. “Chas Chesnokov,” Angela said out loud. “I like the alliteration. Now you can choose your avatar.”
Michael chose a poser with a black shirt and charcoal jeans, and a mop of long, dark hair swept across his forehead. He clicked to the next page to activate his account.
WELCOME, CHAS CHESNOKOV
It took only a few minutes for the software to download and establish its icon on his computer desktop. The small green hand/eye. He sat looking at it, that strange sense of familiarity striking him again, accompanied this time by an odd feeling of anticipation. This would, after all, be another world. A world he had never shared with Mora. A world where she had never existed and never would. A world where he could be someone else altogether. And there was a feeling of comfort in that, of freedom, and escape.
“Don’t go in right now.” Angela’s voice broke into his thoughts. “It’s a disorienting experience at first. It’s something you need to do alone. Set aside some time, and enjoy the experience.”
She drained her glass and stood up.
“I have to go. Let me know when you’re in and found your feet, and we’ll arrange a session. My AV name is Angel Catchpole. Do a search for me and send me an IM.”
Michael stood up. “IM?”
“Instant Message.” She smiled. “You’ll pick up the shorthand in no time. SL, Second Life: RL real life; OMG, WTF... ” He grinned and she said, “See? You’re catching on already.”
By the time she had gone, so had the light. Michael sat in the dark with the remains of Mora’s bottle, sipping on the wine she had so carefully chosen and never tasted. The computer screen cast a pale, ghostly light around the room. He turned toward it and wondered about taking his AV into Second Life straight away. But decided to do a little research first.
Google presented him with a choice of thousands of articles and blogs on SL. He picked a couple at random and set them to print, then searched his desk for his reading glasses. They were small, round tortoiseshell glasses that Mora had bought him. She said he would get prematurely wrinkled if he kept screwing his eyes up to read. He had never even noticed that he did. He had no idea what they might have cost, but Mora had expensive tastes. She would never buy anything at a knockdown price if there was something more expensive available. He hadn’t liked to tell her that he didn’t much care for them. Especially when she told him that they made him look cute, a young intellectual. And so he had kept his mouth shut and always used them when she was around.
Now he couldn’t do without them.
But he couldn’t find them anywhere. They were nowhere to be seen on the desktop, and not in any of the drawers. He frowned, wondering where else in the house he might have laid them down. He had just stood up to go and look when the phone rang. He checked the time. It was after eight. The Caller ID panel told him it was his office. He lifted the phone and hit the green button.
“Yeh, it’s Michael.”
He wandered off into the hallway. Lamps in the courtyard, operating on a timer, spilled light through all the glass into the front of the house. He headed for the kitchen, wondering if he had laid his glasses down in there.
“Mike we got a shooting in Laguna Beach. One fatality. There’s a team on the way. Can you meet up with them?”
“Sure. What’s the address?” He switched on the kitchen lights and blinked in the sudden brightness. Then froze where he stood as the dispatcher read out the name and number of the street.
“Fuck,” he said. And his voice was smothered by the emptiness of the house. “That’s where Janey lives.”
Chapter Nine
A phalanx of police and forensics vehicles was parked in the street at the foot of the steps leading to Janey’s bungalow. This suburban street ran parallel to the highway that followed the line of the ocean, but several streets back and well up the hill. There were more vehicles than he would have expected. Several unmarked cars and only one patrol car. Three forensics vans were drawn up side by side, which was unusual. But, then, maybe not, given whose address this was.
The van hadn’t yet arrived to remove the body, which gave Michael fleeting hope that perhaps it wasn’t a fatality after all. He grabbed his gear from the trunk and leaped up the steps in twos, breathless by the time he reached the wooden veranda that ran along the front of the bungalow.
Two uniformed cops stood smoking just outside the front door. They turned as he hurried up the last few steps on to the veranda. “What’s going on?”
“Looks like murder, Mike.” The cop regarded him grimly.
“Who?”
The officers exchanged uneasy glances. “You better go take a look.”
Michael felt sick now as he hurried into the house. He had been here often. Everything about it was familiar: the worn carpet, the scuffed kickboards, the smell of stale cooking that came from the kitchen. The hall seemed to be full of people, but he was barely aware of them. He heard someone say, “Take it easy, Mike.”
He turned into the doorway of the sitting room at the front of the house. Someone had already rigged up lights, and the scene was thrown into sharp contrast by the glare. More people congregated here. Faces he recognised, some half obscured by surgical masks. The deputy coroner was crouched over a body, and stood up as Michael came in. A silence fell on the room.
The body of a young woman lay twisted in the middle of the floor, hair fanned out across the carpet. She wore jeans and sneakers, and her white tee-shirt was soaked in blood. It was Janey.
Michael felt his legs almost give way beneath him. A wave of nausea rose from his stomach. Someone grabbed his arm. And he knew there was no way he could take photographs of her. He had known Janey for nearly fifteen years. They had started the same week at the FSS offices at Santa Ana. She was a couple of years older than him, and they had become good friends. Not in any sexual way, although it had been clear from the start that she found him attractive. There was, however, nothing attractive about Janey except her personality. But few men had got to know her well enough to find that out. Her hair was a straight, mousy brown, plain cut, usually drawn back in an untidy ponytail. She had a thin face with a nose like a blade and eyes set slightly too wide behind her thick glasses. She had a boy’s figure, with no waist, and an almost flat chest. There was nothing very feminine about her. She wore no make-up, and Michael had never seen her in a skirt, only jeans and sneakers and, when she was working, a pair of plain, dark-blue pants. Almost from the start her co-workers had dubbed her Plain Jane. Except when Michael was around. Everyone knew he had a soft spot for her.