Capture (38 page)

There is nothing for it but to move from one tile to the next, getting in with the hairs of the brush. Knee-and backbreaking work and she’s getting a contact high from the ammonia in the cleaning solvents.

Nick comes through from his studio, stretching, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. He blinks, taking in the room. “Christ, Dawn, you must be exhausted.”

She shrugs and stands, her back cramping. “How you doing?”

“Okay. But still a long way to go.”

Nick puts his arms around Dawn, her gloved hands hanging limp at her sides. She steps out of the embrace, staring at him.

“What?” he asks.

“I’m thinking that some bad shit went down involving you and Vernon? That he had something over you?”

He hesitates, looks away, out at the storm. “Yes.”

“Something that you did?”

“Yes.” Eyes back on her now.

“Okay, Nick, I want you to make me a promise.”

“What?” he asks, and she can see him tensing up.

“I want you to promise that you’ll never tell me a word about it. Ever.”

He releases his breath and finds a tired smile. “I promise, Dawn. I promise.”

Exley’s running out of time and his body is failing. His vision is blurred and some fucker has injected pool acid into the rods and cones of his eyes. His nerves are a fester of barbed wire spiking beneath his skin. Tension pumps out as sour sweat, filling his nostrils with his own stink.

The carpal pain in his thumb spasms to his right elbow as he grips the mouse, the little curve of plastic all that anchors him to the work station and reality, rotating the evolving model in three dimensions, creating texture maps from his blood-rich reference photographs, teasing, finessing, tugging this rough beast into some approximation of Vernon Saul.

Exley is fighting the clock, yes, but he’s fighting something else too: a fear that if he does this too well, makes the sick bastard too lifelike, he’ll somehow reach across to the dark side and bring him back, with his killer eyes and his withered leg, trailing blood and salt water.

Exley modifies a freebie mesh of an American Marine he found in a public domain library online—couldn’t risk using his credit card to buy a more sophisticated model from one of the Hollywood effects houses.

The thing he’s working with lacks detail and the hands are crude mitts, but (after he tears off the helmeted head and replaces it with Vernon’s) he’s left with a chunky, brown uniformed man in boots and a Kevlar vest.

Exley grabs the left leg and with a few mouse clicks shrinks it on the horizontal axis, until it resembles Vernon’s withered limb. When the figure moves there will be no flapping of the cloth of the trousers around the scrawny leg the way it would in real life. Slave to time, Exley can’t afford this luxury.

He finds the motion-capture data of Vernon from the session after Sunny’s funeral and loops a stream of him walking, that thump and drag perfectly duplicated. Exley marries the mo-cap data to the 3D model, positions the virtual camera so it looks down at Vernon from the angle of the surveillance cams and sets the figure in motion. And there he is, Vernon Saul, with his bouncer’s shoulders and his lurching walk.

Suddenly the room is thick with the odor of cheap hair gel and sweat, and Exley sees the dead man deep underwater, hovering near the seabed, arms floating away from his body, hair waving as the current strokes it, the stained bandage swimming away from his arm. Then Vernon’s body jerks as if his heart has been hit by the paddles of a defibrillator and his eyes flicker and his fingers flex and his legs start to kick, the strong one moving powerfully, the runt flailing at it its side, and he churns upward through the water, breaking the surface, drinking air, looking for land.

“My God,” Dawn says, “it’s him.”

Exley didn’t hear the door slide open and he drops the mouse in fright before he sees that Vernon is still safely trapped on the monitor.

Dawn, her face drawn and shrunken—all huge eyes and cheeks hollow with exhaustion—looks from the screen to Exley. “Hey, you okay, Nick?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says.

Dawn leaves a Coke beside his keyboard and backs out of the room, saying, “Fucken scary, Nick. Wow,” and he’s not sure if she’s talking about him or the animated Vernon, limping on a treadmill.

Exley hits the pause bar and levers himself from the chair, takes the Coke and walks out of the studio and sees the first faint blue light of morning bruising the sky out over the ocean. The wind is still whipping, hurling spray and spume at the house.

The living room is blindingly clean, the tiles kicking back the hard halogen spots. Dawn’s near the kitchen, filling a garbage bag with paper towels and dirty cloth.

“Have you slept?” Exley asks.

“I’m going to now.”

“I’ll come up when I’m done.” He steps toward her, awkward and disconnected as he embraces her, feeling the cords of tension in her neck and shoulders. He brushes his dry lips against her forehead—her hair ripe with the smell of cleaning fluids—and dives back into the studio.

Exley takes the rendered model into his compositing software. Matches the camera angles. Bleeds the color on the digital Vernon to resemble the near-monochrome of the surveillance footage. Applies an effect to the model that creates the staccato, jerky movement of the video. Shrinks Vernon as he walks, to duplicate the perspective of the cameras.

Finally he lays a mist of noise over the whole thing, digital drop-out, swirls, banding, leaves it looking like a
Nine Inch Nails
video. Lots of distortion behind which to hide the imperfections.

He does a test render. It works. Exley needs to do some frame painting and clean up the motion when Vernon opens and exits the street gate, but what he has achieved in the last hours is near miraculous.

Exley finds a type font that matches the time-code window and sets the beginning of each camera view at fifteen minutes before they left for the Cape Flats. He does a final render and has to accept that he is done. Has manufactured evidence that before Exley and Dawn drove away in the Audi, Vernon Saul exited the house.

Alive.

Exley dumps the data onto his laptop and clambers out of the garage window, the sky beyond the mountain a blue velvet backdrop. The wind has died, leaving an eerie silence. Exley checks to see that the road is empty—no pre-dawn joggers or dog walkers taking a short cut to the beach—and retraces his route back to the Sniper box.

He gains access to the hard drive and connects his laptop, starts to dump his revised history of the night onto its memory, knowing that if his work is found wanting, he and Dawn are done for.

As he watches the progress bar crawl from left to right he sees headlights flare high on the road twisting down the mountain. A yellow roof light glows like melting butter and he knows he’s watching a Sniper truck switchbacking down to him.

He checks the progress bar: sixty-five seconds to go.

Exley watches the truck, tries to guess how long it’ll take to reach him. Knows he should rip out the USB cable, interrupt the transfer of information, lock the little door and run for cover.

His fingers are already on the cable, ready to uncouple it, when nervous exhaustion, terror and the residue of Port’s designer drug still sloshing around his synapses feed him a premonition so pungent it is impossible to ignore: that the Sniper tech—the somnambulistic Don—is in the passenger seat of that truck, being ferried down to plunder this hard drive of its secrets.

Fifty seconds to go.

You’re fucken crazy man. You’re tripping. Get the fuck out of here.

But Exley stays his hand, lets the transfer continue, knowing if he aborts it he’ll leave evidence of his tampering, leaving him as exposed as if he’s been caught red handed.

Forty seconds to go.

The truck is closer now, and he can hear the whine of its transmission as the driver shifts down.

Thirty seconds.

The roof light disappears behind the dense bush and Exley has no way to measure the speed of the truck.

Fifteen seconds.

Exley stares at the progress bar, willing it on, and suddenly it accelerates and flies to its finish, like a track athlete whose anabolics have kicked in. He can hear the engine of the truck getting louder.

He rips the laptop free and slams the metal door shut, battling to hold the computer under his arm while he finds the keyhole and locks it.

Then he runs, praying that in his haste he’s holding the line that’ll keep him free of the motion detectors. He plunges to his right, then races across the open ground—surely to Christ he’s levitating—and dives through the garage window, hitting the cement hard, chipping his tooth on the metal of the laptop. Looks up and sees the bloom of headlights on the window that still swings and squeaks on its hinges.

The truck growls its way along the road. Exley can hear the mutter of the radio and the moan of brakes as it stops outside his house. He flips open the laptop, selects the fake Vernon data and hits delete, slides the computer along the cement, hiding it under the Audi as the hard drive starts to whine and crunch.

Exley sprints up the stairs and peers out at the street. His sixth sense was on the money: Don, a halo of sunshine outlining him as the first rays creep over the mountain, unlocks the door to the Sniper box and slides his laptop from its pouch. A starburst flare drags Exley’s eyes up the slope. Another car on its way down and it doesn’t take a psychic to divine that this will be the cops.

Exley heads into the bedroom and tears off his blood-and seawater-stained clothes, and finds a pair of boardshorts and a T-shirt. As he pulls the T-shirt over his head, he sends his glasses flying, and, nearly blind, has to drop to the carpet and crawl and fumble until he finds them.

He runs down the stairs, almost falling, and gets himself into the studio. Hauls up all the incriminating evidence of his deception on the workstation monitor and block-selects. Knows this purge will not stand up to forensic investigation, but it’s the best he can do for now.

As he hits ‘delete’ the buzzer sounds and Exley closes his eyes and breathes, fighting dizziness, before he pads along the pitching and yawing corridor to the intercom phone mounted near the front door and croaks, “Yes?”

Chapter 57

The black police captain steps through the gate. His face is so haunted and sleep-deprived that Exley, standing in the doorway of the house, feels as if he’s looking into a dark mirror. The Sniper technician is a motionless silhouette out on the sidewalk, still jacked into the surveillance camera hard drive.

Exley opens his mouth to speak but no words emerge. He swallows and tries again. The voice he hears is unconvincing. “Captain, you’re up early.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Exley,” the cop says around a yawn. “I just need to ask you a few questions.” Exley steps back and lets the man into the house. The captain surveys the sitting room, the sky already a hot blue rectangle framed by the glass doors. “Are you alone here?”

“No. A friend and her child are sleeping upstairs.”

“Was she in the house overnight? Your friend?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Then I wonder if I could have a word with her also, please?”

Exley is tempted to refuse but he sees lies like a ring of dominoes encircling him and knows what’ll happen if one topples, so he climbs the stairs and enters the spare room, where Dawn sleeps with her arms around the child, clutching her close. Exley kneels and strokes Dawn’s hair, whispering her awake.

Her eyes flicker open, clouded with fear and disorientation as she stares up at him.

“Dawn,” he says. “There’s a cop here. He wants to talk to us both.”

“Shit. What they found?”

“Relax. Just stick to our story, okay?”

She nods, clutching at his hand. “I’m scared, Nick.”

“It’ll be fine.”

Exley strokes her hair and fakes a smile, leaving the room as she slides from the bed trying not to wake the child. He goes back downstairs, to where the cop roams the tiled living room. The technician is inside now, setting up his laptop on the kitchen counter.

The captain says, “Vernon Saul came by here last night?”

“Yeah, he did,” Exley says. “Like I told the Sniper guy. It was in the evening, must have been around eight-thirty. Why?”

“How long did he stay?”

“Maybe a half-hour. My friend and I went out and he left before we did.”

Rubbing her face, her hair a mess of curls, Dawn comes down the stairs, barefoot, in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, and Exley feels doubly at a loss. He doesn’t know the captain’s name and doesn’t know Dawn’s surname. So he says nothing.

The cop nods at Dawn. “Good morning.” He introduces himself, giving a name so clotted with clicks that it remains a mystery to Exley.

Dawn says, “I’m Dawn Cupido.”

And the black cop gives her that look. The one that says: what you doing in this rich whitey’s bed, you colored slut, his wife not even cold?

The captain wanders across the tiles into the living room, stands by the sofa with his hands in his pockets, eyeballing her the whole time. Forces her to walk over to him. Little power game he’s playing. Fucker.

“Do you mind me asking where the two of you went last night, Ms. Cupido?” Just enough weight on the
Ms
. to diss her.

“To fetch my daughter from the babysitter,” Dawn says, keeping cool.

“And where would she be? The babysitter?”

“Goodwood.”

“Goodwood?” He raises his eyebrows and his mouth turns down at the corners like he ate something bad. “Long way from here.” Putting her in her place nicely.

She doesn’t reply and the cop just nods, hands in the pockets of his brand-name jeans. Too expensive for a captain’s pay scale, just like his shoes: little tasseled Gucci loafers, color of red wine. The real thing, not some Chinese knock-offs. Dawn wonders if he’s on the take, this cop, and if that makes him more dangerous.

Dawn watches him take a step backward, his heel landing with a sharp clack on a white tile next to something dark that oozes out from under the sofa, a smear the size of a tongue. Blood. Vernon Saul’s blood, gone thick as syrup. Somehow she must have missed it, in her frantic clean-up. How big is the puddle under the sofa?