Might as well check out one other day.
The computer cousins had seen Gilbert with a woman on the weekend before Christmas, probably Sunday, the twenty-first. She found the day and started the recording, expecting hours of nothing. But instead, the monitor went right into Gilbert settling into the chair. This time he had a tea service with him, and he poured a cup out of the flowered pot, added milk and sugar, and picked up his book. According to the clock, it was four in the afternoon, and instead of a suit jacket, he was wearing the velvety smoking jacket she’d noticed in the second-floor cupboards.
He sipped his tea, read his book, and Kate told herself to shut the thing off, but then the figure in the chair looked up, his attention caught by the doorbell, it would seem. He put down his volume and walked out, turning right. His feet disappeared, and Kate waited to see if one set of feet or two came back down the hallway. Suddenly the scene jumped. The sunlight that had been coming through the window was gone, the lights were on, and Gilbert was walking through the doorway wearing his suit jacket instead of the velvet one. The clock said it was the next morning.
Kate backtracked and examined the archives for the missing hours, but they were gone, with no sign of the women’s shoes that Pandi claimed to have seen. And when she went on with the recording, she found almost none of the staring-at-the-empty-room times. Instead, the scene jumped ahead, hours at a time, and nearly always had something happening onstage.
Gilbert edited the recordings. It made sense, she figured; few viewers would be interested in accessing huge files of nothingness, and storing them would burden a server’s mainframe, so perhaps every so often he would go through and dump the long hours of live-action scenery, leaving only the times when people were moving about. Going forward, she found a chess game with Thomas Rutland made up most of the recording for December twenty-second, and nothing at all on the twenty-third. She was going ahead to the following day, but suddenly dreaded seeing what the man had resorted to for the Christmas festivities, and shut the link down.
The house was silent, the street outside empty, the only sound a faint click of the hard drive going cool. She stood up, stretched hard, then paused to look at the printouts she had made.
During the toast, there were ten faces, Gilbert with his side to the camera and the others with expressions ranging from serious to distracted. On the far left, Thomas Rutland, attentive to the toast and with his glass already half raised. Beside him a Chinese man, no doubt Soong Li, frowning with concentration: Kate wondered if he had some problems following English conversation. Geraldine O’Malley came next, looking not at Gilbert but at Jeannine Cartfield, at the far right. She was wrapped up, not in Gilbert’s toast, but in her own thoughts; her glass tilted, half forgotten in her hand.
Looking over O’Malley’s shoulder was a man with gray-blue eyes and reddish hair, slicked down like most of the other men wore theirs. Only part of his face was visible, as he was not much taller than the woman in front of him, but his eyes seemed to be fixed on Gilbert, his mouth half-open in preparation for the “Hear, hear!” Next to him stood the two Indians, seriously attentive, and to their right two young men, one of them the pudgy boy who was not very good at the quizzes, the other a quiet, even younger man who had spent the entire evening in the background, looking a little lost. Finally, Jeannine Cartfield brought up the right.
Now, there was an interesting woman. Dressed like a schoolmarm, her face and posture might have suited a crown. She looked strong yet moved with an easy grace, at home in her body as in her clothes. The outlandish hairdo (it had to be a wig) disturbed her not in the least, and when she stood, she did not fidget as the others did, merely took up a position and held it.
Cartfield listened to Gilbert calmly, neither fixed on his words nor distracted. Was that the attitude of possession? Or simply knowingness? Kate was not sure. But she wanted to know more about this woman, who she was, what she did.
If she had the muscles to carry a dead man up a hill.
She leafed through the other prints she had made, seeing a handsome group of well-off individuals having a good time.
Except, she saw, for Philip Gilbert himself. Three of the six shots she had made included the host, and in each one, he was standing slightly apart, looking on. In one, Jeannine Cartfield, Geraldine O’Malley, and the redheaded man were laughing together over something one of them held—a picture of some kind. Behind Cartfield’s back, Gilbert watched them, one corner of his thin mouth turned up in a wistful smile.
Kate laid the pictures down on the desk and turned out the lights, feeling oddly self-conscious, as if she had Gilbert’s audience looking over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, unable to shake the sensation, and went about the rituals of tooth brushing and face washing with more vigor than usual. She tossed her clothes into the hamper, pulled on the T-shirt and shorts she wore to bed, and climbed in between the cold cotton sheets.
Lee’s side of the bed radiated warmth; gently, Kate eased herself in that direction, but despite her care, Lee abruptly raised her head to glare at the clock and murmured something unintelligible but disapproving.
“Sorry,” Kate said.
Lee dropped her head back onto the pillow, but then reached around and pulled Kate’s free hand around her. Needing no further invitation, Kate scooted into the warmth and wrapped her arm around her lover, feeling Lee slide again into sleep.
Kate couldn’t, quite.
As a homicide detective, Kate rarely had any real contact with the victim before his or her death. Her perception of the living person was secondary to that of the dead one, and her interest in the victim’s life confined to how that life might have led to that death. The victim was largely two-dimensional, a thing pieced together out of static images and pieces of information: letters, photographs, the memories of family and friends, memories that became increasingly detached from reality with each passing day. Occasionally, the victim’s family would have a video they wanted to play for the investigators; almost always, Kate avoided looking too closely at it. Far better to work with a dead victim, who did not intrude into the emotional world of those charged with solving the murder. Far better to remain aloof—committed, determined, passionate, but aloof.
With this victim, too, the protective distance had held, until that evening. She’d been quite content to know that her victim was comfortably well-off, that he was a nut about the Sherlock Holmes stuff, and that he was friendly enough on the surface, although it rarely went any further. She would work no less determinedly just because his friendship had been tepid, his life verging on, well, silly.
The wink had changed that. With one infinitesimal droop of the eyelid, Philip Gilbert had transformed himself from a nut to an actor. From someone with a decidedly peculiar fixation, to a man inviting his audience to play along with him. A man who sat in his chair after his only friends had left him, and looked desperately tired.
She liked him, damn it.
And she didn’t want him to have died.
FIRST thing Tuesday morning, sitting at her desk while Hawkin battled the morning traffic, Kate made two phone calls. The first confirmed that the San Francisco Medical Examiner had finally received the body of Philip Gilbert, and their victim was now in the system. The second was to Lawrence Freeman at the crime lab.
“Hey Lo,” she said. “I found out what that connection was on the Gilbert computer—it’s a webcam.”
“Yes, I was just about to call you about that. When did you find it?”
“Last night,” she told him, fudging a little. “Late. By the time I got the details, it was too late to call you. I hope you hadn’t spent a lot of time on it.”
“Not a lot. Thanks for letting me know.” Freeman hung up, clearly miffed, not that she had wasted his time, but that she had figured out his puzzle first. Lo was a man who loved his work.
She switched on her computer and started working on the reports she hadn’t finished the night before. Twenty minutes into it, Kate Marti
nelli’s phone rang. As she was short on sleep, needed another cup of coffee, and paperwork wasn’t exactly her favorite part of the job, she probably sounded a bit terse as she answered with a “Yes?”
“Um, I beg your pardon,” said a pleasant English voice. “I’m trying to reach an Inspector Martinelli?”
“This is she.”
“Ian Nicholson here.” When she failed to respond, he prompted, “You left a message on my machine yesterday morning, asking urgently that I call you back?”
Ian Nicholson: missing friend of Pajama Man Philip Gilbert. She shoved away the papers and leaned back in her chair, gazing at the cloudy window. “Yes, thanks for returning my call. Mr. Nicholson, I’m with the San Francisco Police Department, and we’re working on a case in which your name came up as a possible witness. I wonder if we might meet and talk about it?”
“Witness to what?” the Englishman asked warily.
“Perhaps if we could meet?”
“What kind of a case is this?” His voice took on an edge; Kate gave way.
“It’s a homicide, Mr. Nicholson. When would be a good time for you?”
“A hom—Someone was killed? Who?”
“Mr. Nicholson, if we could just—”
“Inspector Martinelli, the machine is telling me that I have twenty-three unplayed messages following yours, and only three came in all of last week. I phoned you immediately I heard your message, as it sounded important. If the victim is someone I know, I should think that information will be the subject of most of those waiting on the machine.”
She sighed; an intelligent witness could be a real pain in the ass. “The body of Mr. Philip Gilbert was discovered over the weekend in—”
“Philip?” The man’s voice rose in disbelief until it sounded halfway to laughter. “You’ve got to be mistaken.”
“Sir, we need to speak.”
There was a moment of silence as Nicholson confronted the possibility; when he spoke, any trace of amusement had vanished. “Yes, certainly. Do you need me to come downtown?”
“I’ll come to you, if that’s convenient.”
He gave her the address and said he’d be there the rest of the morning. She told him she’d be there shortly, and called Al. He was in his car.
“Do you know what a bad idea it is to talk on the phone while you’re driving?” she asked him.
“Is that what you called to ask me?”
“No, I called because Ian Nicholson’s surfaced. You want me to say we’ll see him this afternoon, when we finish on the headlands?”
“Those headlands interviews are probably going to take most of the day. Why don’t I go start on them, you talk to Nicholson and join me over there when you’re through?”
“You sure?” she asked, although she’d anticipated his proposal. One of the great things about Al was his comfort with working solo.
“Why not? See you later.”
Nicholson lived in a freshly converted warehouse-turned-apartment-building in what had once been San Francisco’s industrial underbelly, an area now being mined for its square footage. This appeared to be an area whose zoning had only recently changed: For-sale signs stood on several of the warehouses she had seen, and the cross streets were quiet. The two-story building across the street from Nicholson’s freshly painted address was windowless and blank on its upper half, although the lower had been set with a symmetrical row of single-car-width garage doors. With the price of garage rental in the city, the owners of that warehouse probably didn’t need to convert to housing.
She left her car on the street and walked down the sidewalk to the expanse of glass that marked the entranceway. Inside was an impressive foyer, a thousand square feet of intricately patterned marble, mailboxes set into one wall, a lively mural depicting an Italian landscape with hill town on the other, and one large potted tree in a corner between them. All of it was brightly lit, readily visible from the street, and protected by the unbreakable glass. Kate stood beneath a security camera and located the name Nicholson set into the still-shiny brass plate, one of only seven labels among the twenty slots; she identified herself to the English voice. The speaker buzzed, and she pushed open the door.
The entrance foyer led into a bare and sunless courtyard clearly intended to host large parties, but as yet lacking so much as a plastic lawn chair. The surrounding walls had been painted various warm earth tones, and a fountain played in its center, the water splashing down its angular sides, but in that stark setting, in the absence of furniture, people, or even birds, the fountain looked like a sculpture that had been temporarily abandoned on its way into an actual living space. With all that concrete emptiness, appealing though the colors were, the walls seemed very high and far away.
A door across the courtyard was standing open, framing the redheaded man who had been standing behind Geraldine O’Malley during the toast, a man in his late forties dressed today in jeans, a much-washed green linen shirt, and dark socks but no shoes. He was not much taller than Kate, perhaps five feet eight inches, but sturdy as a rugby player. His was an interesting face, with a crooked nose, gray-blue eyes, and the texture of freckles beneath the weathered skin. It was an appealing whole, not just from the boyish features, but from the glint of humor that lay in face and shoulders, as if to say there wasn’t much he could do about the youth there except grin at it, and invite others to do the same.
Kate was not grinning, exactly, but she did feel her mood lightening as she approached. “Mr. Nicholson?” she asked; the surrounding walls bounced back echoes.
“Thanks for coming down here,” said the English voice she’d heard on the phone. “I’ve been living in the car for the past week, hated the thought of having to climb back inside.” They shook hands, his hard and cool, and he stood back to let her enter.
“Nice place,” she remarked.
“The flats themselves are great, although that courtyard I find depressing as hell.”
“It does look a bit raw.”
“I think the designer had a sort of Tuscan village flavor in mind, but he overlooked the fact that the effect depends on a full complement of residents, preferably people who are home for more than a few hours a day, and a judicious sprinkling of aged grandmothers in black, small barefoot children, and dogs. To say nothing of bedding draped out of the windows and the occasional chicken. Of course, pets are forbidden here, half the apartments are vacant, what neighbors there are seem to be all between the ages of twenty-five and forty, and building regulations prohibit anything as offensively prosaic as hanging laundry. Perhaps it will be better when it fills up. Coffee? It’s fresh.”
During this monologue, which could have been a sign of nerves at the presence of the police or merely the genetic effusiveness of a redhead, Nicholson had led her into the apartment and up a set of polished wooden stairs; by pleasing contrast, the brick wall at her right hand was soft with wear—clearly the bricks were an original feature of the onetime warehouse. At the top of the stairs lay a light-washed space, one end a wall of glass, the other a sleek and modern kitchen filled with expensive equipment. On the wall beside the telephone was a small screen showing the apartment house’s entranceway. Nicholson turned toward the kitchen; Kate drifted into an open room with tan leather sofas and a fireplace.
“Yes, thanks,” she told him. “I’d like some coffee.”
She heard a cupboard door open and cups rattle as they were being placed on a tray—real cups, with saucers—followed by the suck of a refrigerator door and the gurgle of milk into a pitcher. The living room was a remarkably comfortable space for a modern apartment building, the expanse of glass warmed by the brick and the rich colors of an ethnic rug on the floor. The windows were bare of curtains, and high enough to overlook an expanse of urban life that stretched east nearly to the waterfront; it felt as if the apartment occupied the peak of a cliff above—well, a Tuscan village. A bright splash of paint on a large canvas, meaningless but cheerful, woke up the area above the fireplace; on the oth
er wall was hung a long, precise row of color photographs in identical black frames: a Mexican village market day; an expanse of snowy hillside with two leafless trees, nearly monochromatic; a young woman with blond hair, a beautifully even tan, and enormous gold hoops in her ears, grinning at the camera from her seat atop a stone wall, the sea in the background the precise startling blue as her eyes. A second picture of the woman—girl, really—in a more formal portrait gazed out from a standing frame on the left side of Nicholson’s desk, tucked under the stairs leading to the third-floor loft. On the right side was the fading snapshot of a redheaded teenager wearing mud and a rugby outfit: she’d guessed right about Nicholson’s sport.
Kate spoke over her shoulder. “Do you live here by yourself?”
“At the moment, yes.”
“Is this a friend of yours?”
Nicholson was coming through from the kitchen, accompanied by a tinkle of bone china, and he stopped beside her to look at the photograph of the grinning blond woman. “Something more than a friend, you might say.”
“That’s Baja, isn’t it? Cabo San Lucas?”
“It is, yes. Taken a couple of months ago. Have you been there?”
“Years ago. I hear it’s getting pretty commercial and touristy.”
“Some parts of it are, others are not too bad.” He resumed his path into the living room, and Kate followed, taking one of the chairs while he set the tray on the low table that stood between sofa and fireplace. Watching his masculine hands arrange the delicate cups and pick up the glass carafe, Kate smiled at the contrast, but when she looked at his face, she saw the man’s tiredness slipping through. His clothes were fresh and his short hair slightly damp, but he hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were bloodshot—he’d either driven through the night, or else fallen into bed late and slept badly.
“I was terribly sorry to hear about Philip,” Nicholson said. “As I guessed, most of the messages on the machine were about him. Not that anyone seemed to know anything, other than that he had been found in Marin over the weekend. His name must have been released after you phoned here.”