The Lonely Dead (12 page)

The deputy would come to check on him again soon, and then maybe he'd get into it. In the meantime, he sipped a little more soup. It had cooled, and could do with a little salt, but otherwise was very good. It was making him feel better.

His vision slowly went white.

—«»—«»—«»—

The voice came from behind him.

'Sir?'

Tom shook his head, knowing that he wasn't going to be able to get away from this. But still, he shook his head. There was red on him. There was crunching underfoot. He finally turned, and he already knew what the news was going to be, but he did not know how it was going to fit in his head.

'Sir?'

Then everything was different. He jerked his head up woozily and saw he was still sitting in his chair in a police station, a very long way from LA. It was bright, and he was swaddled in blankets and there was a small heater sat on the floor about a yard away, shoving a thin stream of warm air at him. That was new, he thought. Don't remember that.

New too was the man standing on the other side of the table. Tom blinked at him. 'What time is it?'

'It's a little after three, sir,' the man said. He was much older than the one called Phil. He was taller, and broader. He was bigger in every way. He sat in one of the chairs opposite.

'Who are you?'

'My name is Connolly,' the man said. 'I work here.'

'Okay.' Tom's voice came out a little petulant, and he suddenly yawned massively. 'I'm actually kind of hot, now.'

'My deputy says the doctor said to keep you warm. So that's what we're going to do. That is, unless maybe you think it would be better for you to spend the night over in the hospital. Seems to me there's at least a couple reasons why that might be the case.'

'I'm fine,' Tom said.

The man leaned on the table and looked at him. 'You sure?'

Now that he was a little more awake, it was becoming clear to Tom that Connolly didn't seem to be in any hurry to be his friend. He was not treating him like someone who'd made a miraculous and welcome escape from a snowy wilderness.

'I'm sure,' he said, reaching for the voice he used in meetings, when a client needed convincing that the web design work they'd received was exactly what they wanted, despite its apparent lack of similarity to what had been discussed in the briefing. It felt a long time since he'd used this voice, but it was less than two weeks, and while rusty, it did come. 'Thank you for your concern.'

'Okay. So why don't you tell me your story?'

'Al, he's kind of been through that.' This was Phil, entering the room with two cups of coffee.

Connolly ignored his deputy, sat back in his chair, and kept looking at Tom.

'My name is Tom Kozelek,' the man in the chair said. 'I'm… on vacation. Three days ago, I guess it was, I went driving up into the mountains. I parked up at a trail head, I don't remember the name.'

'Howard's Point,' the policeman nodded. 'Your car was towed back from there yesterday afternoon. You turning up has solved that little mystery, at least.'

'Right. So I parked up there, and went for a hike.'

'A hike,' the man said, nodding to himself. 'What exactly did you take with you in the way of provisions?'

'I assume you know,' Tom muttered, coldly. 'I can see my bag out there on the table.'

'Yes. I know,' the cop said. 'Don't know whether you've had a chance to catch any TV while you've been here, but at this time of year there's an advertisement which runs every hour or so. It suggests that people stay the hell out of the mountains unless they know what they're doing and have the equipment to do it with. You not watch much television, Mr Kozelek?'

'I was in a confused state of mind.'

'Right.' The man nodded again. 'And so where have you been since?'

'Walking back here,' Tom said. 'I got lost. I had maps, but I left them in the car by mistake. I was a little drunk when I started out, and usually my sense of direction is pretty good but it snowed and I fell down a gully and to be honest I just got really, really lost. I tried to find my way back to the road but by then I'd gotten turned around and evidently I just kept heading away from it. Then I found something that looked like a trail and followed it, but it didn't seem to go anywhere and kept cutting in and out.'

'Old logging track, probably,' Phil said. 'Could even have been a bit of the old mountain road itself. Most of it you can only tell something used to be there because there's a line of trees that are a little thinner.'

Connolly turned his head slowly to look at him. The deputy shut up. The sheriff looked back at Tom.

'Look, what's your problem?' Tom said.

'Me? I don't have one. Please continue.'

Tom deliberately took a long time over a sip of coffee. The guy was really beginning to piss him off. They were all like this, in the end. Every one of them so full of their special status, pretending they'd never been in a difficult situation in their own lives.

'So I just walked,' he said. 'I don't know where I was. Then last night I finally found a road. I stood by it for a while, thinking surely someone must come along and give me a ride, but it was snowing and nobody came. So I walked. And I got here early this morning.'

'Quite a little adventure, Mr Kozelek,' Connolly said. 'You must be glad it's over, and looking forward to going back home.'

'Not just yet,' Tom said, shrugging off the top two blankets. Not only was he too hot now, but he sensed the 'little boy lost' look wasn't helping the sheriff take him seriously. 'There's things I have to do here first.'

'What could those possibly be?'

Tom looked him in the eye. 'I'm going back into the forest.' He took a deep breath, and prepared to say something he knew he was going to remember for the rest of his life. 'I saw something when I was in there. Something pretty amazing.' He paused again, savouring the moment.

'This would be Bigfoot, right?'

Tom stared at him, side-swiped. 'How did you know?'

Connolly smiled, gently. 'You mentioned it a couple of times to my deputy when you first got here. To the doctor too, I believe. Matter of fact, from what I hear, it was the very first word you said when you came staggering into town. Before you fell down.'

Tom's mouth felt dry, his face red. He didn't remember telling them about it. Shit.

'Okay,' he said. 'I knew that. But I saw it. I saw Bigfoot. It was standing right over me. I
saw
it.'

'What you saw was a bear, Mr Kozelek.'

'No it
wasn't.
I thought so at the time, but it wasn't. It didn't look like one. And what do bears smell like?'

'Can't say as I've ever been close enough to find out. They're picky like that.'

'This one smelt awful. Really, really bad. Not only that, but I also saw footprints.'

'Is that so?'

'Yes it fucking well is so. You want to pretend it was a bear I saw, fine. But I saw footprints. A line of them, leading away from where I'd been.'

'They weren't your own? From when you ran from the bear?'

'No. I was scrabbling all over the place. The shape would have been all messed up. And also, you could see the fucking toes. Five big round toes, at the front. Look, I
saw
this.'

'Sure you did.' Connolly turned to Phil. 'You want to get Mrs Anders in here now?'

Confused, Tom watched the younger policeman as he went out to fetch a woman he now saw was sitting on the other side of the main room. Connolly meanwhile drank his own coffee in one long, slow swallow, looking coolly at Tom.

Phil returned with the woman. She was in her mid sixties, grey hair gathered in a loose ponytail. One hand was thrust down into the pocket of a yellow all-weather coat worn over a thick fleece. The other was clutching a large plastic bag. She looked apologetic and embarrassed.

Tom began to have a sinking feeling.

'This here is Patrice Anders,' Connolly said. 'Patrice lives out a few miles past Howard's Point. Don't know if you noticed it from your maps, but there's a little subdivision around from there, up off the next highway over the mountains. Was going to be the next big thing. Present time, Mrs Anders remains the only occupant.'

'It's nice to meet you,' Tom said. 'But I don't understand what this is about.'

Connolly looked at the woman, and raised his brows.

'It was me, in the forest,' she said.

Tom stared at her. 'What do you mean?'

She shook her head. 'I'm
so
sorry about this. I go walking a great deal. I belong to a couple of national programmes that monitor wildlife, and I keep an informal tally of what's around at each time of year. I don't know whether it's of any real use in the long run, it's not very scientific, I don't suppose, but…' She shrugged. 'Anyway, it's what I do. And the other morning I was out there, quite early, and I saw something lying down by the gully. It's actually not too far from the edge of my land, as the crow flies. Well, it's a distance, you know. I like to walk. Anyway, I went down there, and I saw it was a backpack. I didn't know whether someone was coming back for it, so I just left it there.'

Tom looked at Connolly. 'Okay. So what?'

'The footprints you saw belonged to Mrs Anders.'

'Bullshit. Are you not listening to a word I say? These were huge.'

'Give the sun an hour and the edges will melt. They're going to look much bigger than they ought to be.'

For a second Tom thought he was going to throw himself over the desk and grab the man by the throat. He knew it would be a bad idea, and not just because he was the law. So instead he kept his voice very level. He had the clincher, after all.

'Right. And the sun will also make footprints look like they've got five big toes, correct? Weird sun you've got around here, if so.'

There was quiet for a moment, and then a rustling. The woman called Patrice pulled something out of her bag.

For a moment Tom couldn't make out what he was seeing. Then the back of his neck started to buzz.

'You can buy them over in Cle Elum,' she said. 'Kind of stupid, I know. But, you know, kind of fun too. My husband bought me them for a joke.'

Tom kept staring at the pair of novelty boots, with their furry top halves, and their brown plastic feet, complete with five big toes.

—«»—«»—«»—

Phil took the woman away. It might have been his imagination, but Tom thought he sensed that the deputy was feeling a little bad for him. He hoped so, anyway. There weren't going to be any other candidates for sympathy within driving distance.

Connolly glanced up at the clock on the wall. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes, and lit up.

'Strange old day,' he said. 'More excitement than I was bargaining on when I got up, that's for damned sure.' He tapped a little ash onto the desk. 'Not a huge amount happens around here, as I'm sure you've guessed. Bet you've worked out I like it that way, too.'

Tom shook his head. 'I still know what I saw.'

'You saw jack shit, Mr Kozelek.' The policeman's grey eyes were cold. 'You went out into the woods with a bad purpose in mind, and I'm not even going to talk about how irresponsible that is when it's other men's jobs to come out and find you regardless of why you went. You got yourself screwed up with booze and pills and you either saw a bear or you hallucinated one or what the hell else.'

Tom just shook his head.

Connolly ground the cigarette out. 'Suit yourself. I'm not going to tell you to ship out tonight, because you've had a rough couple days and despite what you might think, I'm a reasonable person. You look like shit and you need to eat and get some sleep. So why don't you go do those things, and then maybe tomorrow morning think about sampling some of the other nice little towns we've got around here. Snohomish, for example, the antiques capital of the North West. Or maybe even Seattle. They have an airport there.'

'I'm not going anywhere.'

'Yeah, you are.' Connolly stood up, stretched. Bones cracked. 'Soon. You want my advice?'

'Not even a little bit.'

'Just be grateful you got away with it. Be happy you didn't get attacked by that big ole bear, and that you didn't die out there out on the mountain. Leave it at that. Because here's something else.'

He glanced out through the glass, and saw his deputy was putting his coat on at the door, ready, as instructed, to help Kozelek find somewhere in town to stay for one night only. Still, he lowered his voice a fraction. 'On my way back here, I checked up on you.'

Tom stared at the man's back, suddenly realizing that while His Time Away might have changed him, it had made no difference to the outside world. There'd been no mid-season culling of the parts of his life he didn't like. Out here, the dreary, long-running series he lived was still going strong, despite the fact its primary audience — himself — believed it majorly sucked.

Connolly looked back at him. 'I know what you did.'

11

A package from Nina was waiting at the desk first thing. I told the restaurant to round up all the coffee they had and send it to my room, and headed back upstairs. I didn't have a lot of optimism that I'd be able to do anything for her — both LAPD and the FBI would have grown-ups on the case — but it was something to do while waiting for Zandt.

I laid my gear out on the table, and got to it. When I opened the package I found a small, shiny, semi-transparent plastic bag designed to combat static, which is the main way of screwing up delicate electronic equipment. Other than dropping it, of course. Inside was a small hard disk. Stuck to it was a note from Nina.

'Be VERY, VERY careful with this,'
it said.
'It's the original. Find something on it for me, then get it the hell back.'

Before I did anything else, I rang Nina's cell. She sounded hassled and distracted. 'I'm glad it arrived,' she said. 'But I don't think it's going to lead anywhere. LAPD just got done tracing the history. They found the guy who bought the original laptop, some movie industry bottom feeder called Nic Golson, but he has a receipt proving he sold it on to a second-hand store in Burbank in July last year. He thought he was going to get some big script job but then didn't so he couldn't afford to keep the machine. After that, someone bought it cash, then stripped this part and dumped the rest somewhere we'll never find it. The store's employees are being interviewed right now, but this killer strikes me as brighter than that.'

'So how come I've got the original disk?'

'I used my feminine wiles.'

'You have wiles?'

'You'd be surprised. Actually, so would I. Probably just rank.' She admitted she'd leaned on an LAPD lab rat after I'd made it clear a copy was only that. The guy was willing to cover for her, not least because they'd done everything they could with it. It had already been fingerprinted, so touching it was no problem. But…

I said I'd take good care of it.

Then I put the phone down, and looked at something I now knew had spent a while inside a dead woman's face. It was hard to work out whether it was that, or the risk Nina had taken, which was the more unnerving.

Coffee arrived. I drank some with a cigarette. This had the usual result of making the world's challenges seem more feasible. I pulled out a cable I owned which had a Firewire plug on one end and an Oxford Bridge on the other and carefully inserted the disk's connectors into the latter and the plug into the back of Bobby's laptop. The disk appeared on the desktop.

I opened it and confirmed what I'd been told. There were two files, a piece of music stored as an MP3 file and the message. Nina had told me that the quote at the beginning of the text had been nailed to a German writer called Heinrich Heine. The recording of the Fauré Requiem was from a well-respected issue of the early 1960s, which didn't necessarily mean anything either. There's a timelessness to classical music performance. Most recent is not necessarily best. The most I could take from the music was to note it had been digitized at 192 k/sec in joint stereo, a high-quality setting. Given that most people can't hear the difference between 192 and 160, that
maybe
suggested either it had been designed to be played through a quality audio system, which could reveal the deficiencies of a lower sample rate; or more simply — and more obviously — the music was of importance to the person who had put it there. So, big deal either way. I listened to it several times while getting on with the next part, and noted what sounded like a little channel hiss, and a fairly certain click or two. It was possible the MP3 had been recorded from a vinyl source. It seemed unlikely that someone computer literate would disdain CDs entirely, so this maybe suggested the person owned an LP of the music that had some kind of sentimental value. Big deal again.

I fired up a piece of industrial-strength scanning software, and waited while it went about its business. A lot of people seem to think computers are just machines, like vacuums or the VCR. They're wrong. Right from the start, from the jumped-up abacuses of the Amiga and Apple II, we've had a different relationship with computers. You knew right away that this was something that had rights. If your washing machine stops working or TV goes on the fritz then you get it repaired or take it to the dump. These are pieces of old, transparent tech. They have no magic any more. If a computer messes you around, however, you're never really sure whose fault it is. You're implicated. You feel vulnerable. It's like the difference between a pencil and a car. A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model (too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rustbucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be
dealt with.
Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by the things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.

A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousandfold. It has fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser's history log and in the disk cache — not to mention all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a co-worker but carefully throw them all away, you've still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually
empty
your software's trash.

Even if you think you're being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren't out of the woods. All that happens when you 'delete' a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it — like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It's like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can't put his finger on them, can't show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files, making it impossible to return to what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real — the computer's earlier experiences; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We're like that.

It took half an hour for the software to do its pass. This brought up nothing, and merely proved what Nina's pet tech had already established: the disk had been very comprehensively wiped before the two files were copied onto it. Not only had the note-writing man been blinded, he'd then been taken out and shot.

The jug of coffee was cold. I set one of Bobby's proprietary pieces of pattern-matching software working on the disk. This would trawl over the surface looking at the junk which had been written over it, checking for any irregularities — or unexpected regularities — in the binary stew. Short of physically taking it apart and going in with tweezers, this was as deep as man could go into the shadowy childhood echoes of the digital mind. The past resists intrusion, even amongst the silicon-based.

A dialogue box popped up on the screen and told me the process would take a little over five hours. It's not very exciting to watch. I made sure the power was plugged in, and went for a walk.

—«»—«»—«»—

At three o'clock Zandt called from the airport. I gave him directions to L'Espresso and headed back over there to wait. Forty minutes later his cab pulled up. John got out, glared at the guy in costume in front of the hotel, and walked up the street to me. He came at a moderate pace and very steadily. I knew what that meant.

He told a passing waiter to bring him a beer, and sat down opposite me. 'Hello Ward. You're looking kind of lived in.'

'Me? You look like a crack house. How's Nina?'

'She's great,' he said.

He waited for his beer. The beard had gone. He didn't ask me how I was or what I'd been doing. In my limited experience of Zandt, I'd learned he didn't do small talk. He didn't do tiny talk or big talk either. He just said what he had to say and then either stopped or went away. He was drunk. You'd have to have spent time with a drinker to know — as I did, for a year, once — because there were few external signs. The bags under his eyes were darker, and he reached for his glass the moment it was put down; but his eyes were clear and his voice calm and measured.

'So what do you have on Yakima?'

'Like I said, not much. I went back to LA and told Nina what we'd found. She reported it, and nothing happened. I basically started looking into it because…'

He shrugged. I understood. There wasn't much else. He had been involved in the investigation of the Delivery Boy murders, as a result of which his daughter Karen had been abducted and never seen alive again. His marriage fell apart. He quit the force. I believed he had been a very good detective: it was he who had worked out the Upright Man was running a procuring ring for well-heeled psychopaths up at The Halls, abducting people to order. But even if Zandt had wanted to go back to being a cop, which he didn't, LAPD weren't likely to be in the market. So what else was he going to do? Become a security guard? Go into business? As what? Zandt was as unemployable as I was.

'We could join the Feds.'

'Right. You were thrown out of the CIA. That's always impressive. Anyway. Do you remember the word on the door of the cabin we found?'

'Not really,' I said. 'I saw there were letters there, but they just looked like they were part of the general mess.'

He reached into a pocket and produced a small piece of glossy paper. 'One of the pictures I took,' he said. 'Printed at high contrast. You see it now?'

I looked closely. There certainly were letters hacked into the door. If you studied it hard, you could just make out the word or name 'CROATOAN'. It had been there a long while, too, and was partially obscured by later weathering and further marks. 'Meaning?'

'I thought it might be an old mining company name or something. But I can't find one. The only reference I could find to it is strange.'

He pushed a further thick sheaf of paper towards me. I saw a lot of words in a variety of very small typefaces, divided into sections, underneath the overall title 'Roanoke'.

'I'm hoping there's a precis.'

'You've heard of Roanoke, right? The one on the east coast?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Vaguely. Bunch of people disappeared a long time ago. Or something.'

'They disappeared twice, in fact. Roanoke was England's first attempt to establish a colony in America. The Brit explorer Walter Raleigh was granted a stretch of land by Elizabeth I, in one of her charters to try to grab a chunk of this New World. In 1584 Raleigh sent an expedition to see what he'd got: specifically, they checked out an area called Roanoke Island, on the tidewater coast of what is now North Carolina. They took an initial look around, made contact with the local tribe — the Croatoan — and wound up heading back to England. In 1586 a second group of a hundred men went out. They didn't have it so good. Didn't take enough supplies, ran into trouble with the locals through not treating them well, and in the end all but fifteen were picked up by a passing ship and went home. But Raleigh was keen to establish a working colony, and so the next year a further party was sent to make sure this new 'Virginia' got consolidated. He appointed a man called John White to lead them and be their governor. One hundred and seventeen people went along. Men, women, children — the idea being that family groups would make it more permanent. They were specifically told not to head for Roanoke Island, but … that's where they ended up. They found the fortifications the previous group had built, but no sign of the fifteen men who'd been left to guard it. Just gone. Vanished. White re-established contact with the Croatoan, who said an 'enemy tribe' had attacked the fort and killed at least some of the soldiers. White was ticked, obviously, and when one of the new colonists was found dead he decided to attack the local bad-boy tribe, the Powhatans. Except his men screwed it up and managed to kill some Croatoans instead, presumably on the time-honoured 'they all look the same to me' principle.'

I shook my head. 'Nice going.'

'So of course the Croatoans suddenly and reasonably retract all previous goodwill — and refuse to supply them with food. The colonists had arrived in summer, too late to plant crops, and what little they'd brought was going bad.'

'They were kind of stupid, the early settlers.'

'Stupid or brave. Or both. Either way, White decided to go back to England for supplies. There was no choice. It was agreed that if they ended up having to go inland, the colonists would leave markings showing which way they'd gone. Also, that if they'd left because of attack, they'd carve a cross somewhere prominent. Problem was, when White got back to England he found the country was at war with Spain — and he didn't make it back to Roanoke for
three whole years.'

I thought about that for a moment. Abandoned in an alien land with neighbours who hate you, the food running out. The leader pops home for a take-out and stays gone from 1587 until 1590. 'And when he returned?'