That Nietzsche Thing (4 page)

The view from the window was pretty
spectacular. The Space Needle stood directly before us, with the
skyline of downtown beyond.

It was certainly no Genie flop.

It was warm, the radiator under one window
still pumping out heat. A small flat screen stood in one corner,
before a futon and a rickety looking chair. It wasn’t fancy, maybe
a little dirty, but it wasn’t anything like the thousand Genie
flops I’d seen in my days.

This wasn’t the apartment of someone who
didn’t give a shit. It was...homey. At least, I felt instantly at
home. As if I’d been in the room before.

There was well-used ashtray on the coffee
table before the futon. I put out my cigarette as Constantine
holstered his gun.

“This is it?” he said, somehow
dissatisfied.

“This is it,” I said. What did he want?

“We’ll get the Forensics guys in,” he said,
pointing at the ashtray. “So, maybe you don’t want to contaminate
the crime scene too much.”

Crime scene? “It’s just the girl’s
apartment,” I said. “There’s no reason to believe she was killed
here.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Constantine dismissed.
“We’ll still have Forensics give it a sweep.” He looked around,
hands on hips, examining the small, cozy living room. The art on
the walls was eclectic, like it’d been built up from thrift store
shelves. There were a few nick-nacks and a whole wall of books. I
could tell by watching Constantine’s stance, he had no idea what he
was doing.

I just wandered around, getting a feel for
the place.

I don’t know if it’s how most cops do it, but
I always tried to get in the head of my victim first. Accepted
wisdom probably considered murder cases about the perpetrator –
method, motive, opportunity and all that – but I never subscribed
to that theory. Nine times out of ten, I’d always found, people get
themselves killed for some reason. Murderers hardly ever hang out,
hiding in bushes to leap out at random victims. More often than
not, the corpse did
something
that caused their life to
collide with that of the murderer: pissed off the wrong asshole at
the wrong time, humped the wrong guy’s woman, or snorted the wrong
dope. Facts about the victim were always a hell of a lot easier to
uncover, too. Chiefly because they were conveniently dead and
couldn’t interfere with the investigation.

And if you could figure out what the victim
did
, what positive action they took that inextricably sent
them down the path to oblivion, you were a whole shit-can closer to
figuring out who killed them.

Sometimes that small detail came along almost
as an after though.

What had Vivian Montavez been into that’d
gotten her beaten and thrown into a dumpster?

It just didn’t add up.

Nice girl. Rich, powerful family. Artsy,
beatnik apartment. Kitchen full of food, bathroom full of perfume.
No, Vivian was no Genie. But according to the labs from the corpse,
she’d tested positive to the genetic markers of Geneing. Her DNA
was altered. Was she that weird border case of people who could
actually handle the dope? Use the triggers to successfully turn it
off? No, they didn’t exist. All my time on the force, and I’d never
met one. Sure, you’d find a husband and father who said he could
turn it on and off when he wanted to, but dig a little deeper and
you’d always find a rotten core. A life about to implode on itself.
But I didn’t smell anything rotten about Vivian’s apartment. Just
that slight scent of lavender from the bathroom.

Then I saw it on a side table. It took all my
physically effort not to react for it and tipoff Constantine.

“Perhaps the Senator will want her personal
effects,” Constantine said across the room, he’d picked up a
tchotchke off a table. “At least, we can give him that.”

“You should get the number off the land
line,” I said, thinking quickly. I was making it up on the spot,
but it was not a half-bad idea. “Run her calls. We should do a full
canvas of anyone she’d had contact with.”

Constantine turned to the classic handset
hanging in the kitchen. He picked up the phone and looked at the
number scrawled on the receiver. His momentary distraction was all
I needed. I reached for the side table, scooped up the e-reader and
slid it into the pocket of my bomber.

Constantine read aloud the phone number. I
wrote it down on my notepad, tore out the page and handed it to
him.

“We’ll see what this turns up,” Constantine
said, looking at the slip of paper. “And what Forensics finds—” His
phone interrupted him, ringing deep with his suit. At least, I
thought his phone was lost somewhere in the pocket of his suit. He
didn’t reach for it, he simply tapped behind his ear. I didn’t see
any device.

He nodded and muttered in his own private
conversation. “No, they have to file the complaint with the Circuit
Judge on Tuesday...” he said to the air. “No,
Tuesday
. I
know. I know Monday is a federal holiday. Why do you think we chose
this weekend?” Constantine turned for the door, still talking on
his phantom phone. “Well, then they’re shit out of luck, aren’t
they? No, no, I’m done here, I’ll be back at Command in fifteen
minutes. Can you wait here until Forensics arrives? Fonseca?
Detective?”

It slowly dawned on me that he was talking to
me again. “Oh, what? Sure?” I stammered.

That was enough for Constantine. He turned
and stepped out in the hall, continuing to berate the other end of
his phone call. He was leaving me high and dry on the top of Queen
Anne Hill, but I didn’t mind. Frankly, I was glad to see the back
of him.

I waited a full two minutes before I removed
the e-reader from my pocket.

I sat down in the rickety chair, pulled
Vivian’s ashtray closer across the coffee table, and lit another
smoke. I took a puff off the cigarette and relaxed into the
chair.

I felt oddly at home, surrounded by the dead
girl’s things. Perhaps my “getting into the victim’s head” shtick
was working too well, but I couldn’t remember ever feeling so
comfortable in a strange place.

Perhaps that was why the e-reader had stood
so sharply out of focus against the backdrop of the apartment. It
just didn’t fit. The wall of books, the thrift store art, the
nick-nacks, all screamed of a woman interested in the tactile
sensation of things. I’d never met Montavez other than touching her
mutilated corpse just long enough to drag her out of a dumpster,
but somehow I knew she wasn’t the kind who read books on a tablet.
The bookcase was so neatly organized, and its contents so obviously
a work of love that the e-reader had to belong to someone else.

Perhaps the murderer? It was quite a leap of
faith, but the e-reader in the apartment couldn’t just be a
coincidence. I smoked my Kools and flipped it on, hoping for pay
dirt.

If I could solve the Montavez murder myself,
recover her body, that would be quiet the slap in Constantine’s
face and his three C’s. It was the kind of thing that might save a
guy his civil service paycheck...

But the e-reader contained only one book. Its
title made me cough.

Q. Just Q. My finger hesitated on the select
button.

Could there be anything good inside this
document? Anything I really wanted to learn?

I told myself not to be such a pussy and then
hit select.

My disappointment was audible.

The document opened to show a screen full of
scrambled text. Page after page of random characters and
punctuations marks. It was encrypted. Fuck. I switched off the
e-reader and returned it to the pocket of my bomber.

It’d been a long shot, anyway. Now I was well
and truly up shit’s creek without a paddle.

I smoked my cigarette and mused, looking at
the view from the window.

I knew a guy at the university who might be
able to decrypt the file. He had the computing power and the
fan-boy interest in police work to put in the hours to help out a
cop. But did it really matter? I thought, looking at the skyline of
Seattle. If Seattle was now officially a Federal wardship, was any
of this really my problem?

Maybe. I looked around at the apartment, at
the comfortable but simple decorations and the small, kitchen table
set for two. Maybe, for the first time in my life, I should care
about something more than my next paycheck.

After all, people like Vivian Montavez
deserved better.

Chapter 6

I awoke to two phones ringing at once.

One was my cell, chirping like a disposable
little bird in my bomber. A sat up and dug around desperately for
it, my half-awake brain somehow sure the call was critically
important.

The source of the other ringing phone I
couldn’t quiet place. There was a moment of dislocation as I tried
to remember where I’d fallen asleep.

I looked around, pausing in the search for my
cell phone, to examine my surrounding: four walls and a heavy door,
the skirting of the walls curved to allow easy sluicing. That’s
right, I’d found an empty drunk tank and bedded down for the night.
The second ringing was from beyond the crack in the open door.

“Hello,” I said wearily into my phone. The
other phone continued to ring outside the jail cell.

“Funny, Sasha.
Really
funny,” the
phone said. Was it? I didn’t remember playing any jokes. Someone,
somewhere answered the other phone. I was eternally grateful.

“What? O’Day?” I asked my handset.

“Yeah, really funny Sasha. I always
appreciate the Seattle Police wasting time and computational
resources like that.”

Johnny O’Day. The Mick bastard. He was my guy
at the university. The guy with the computers and the time to
decode the e-reader I’d found in Montavez’s apartment.

Yesterday, while waiting on the Fed’s
Forensic team, I’d done the regular footwork and interviewed the
girl’s neighbors. Nothing out of line there. She was quiet,
well-behaved, no boyfriend, no loud parties. When the CSI guys
showed up, I’d hopped a bus and paid a visit to O’Day.
Uncharacteristically, I was in rush to return downtown to occupied
Seattle and submit my report to the Special Agent. Maybe I figured
a little brown-nosing couldn’t hurt.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember
playing any joke.

“Did you decode that e-reader?” I asked. “Was
it something stupid?”

“What?” O’Day replied. He faltered, now as
confused as I was. “No, of course not. I
didn’t
decrypt your
e-book, ass-hat.”

“Then, why are you calling me?”

“Because—” O’Day exhaled. “Are you kidding
me? Are you trying to tell me you have no idea?”

“No. What?”

“Wow, great work, Sherlock,” he said
sarcastically.

“Look, Day, you woke me up and now you’re
starting to piss me off. Do you want me to come over there and
start checking your pill bottles against prescriptions? ‘Cause I’m
betting your Oxy count doesn’t exactly add up.”

“Relax, relax,” O’Day said, defensively.
“Jesus, Sasha, calm down. I thought this was some stupid joke,
that’s all. If you’re saying it isn’t, it isn’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” I took a breath. “Now, Day, slowly
and in words of two syllables or less: Why haven’t you decoded that
e-reader?”

“‘Cause it can’t be decoded, Sasha. Everyone
knows that. It’s Dark’s Novel.”

“What’s that?” I asked. “A dark novel?”

“No—”

A head popped around the open cell door. It
was the Duty Officer. “Hey Fonseca, phone for you.”

I put my hand over the mic of the cell.
“What? Oh, thanks. Just a sec.”

“It’s one of those FBI douches.”

“What? Constantine?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“Thanks, tell him I’ll be right there.”

“He didn’t sound like the kind of guy you put
on hold.”

“Just...” I looked at my cell phone then at
the Duty Officer. “Just tell him to cool the fuck off, okay?”

“Okay.” The Duty Officer shrugged and
disappeared from the doorway.

“O’Day? Are you still there?” I asked my
phone.

“Yeah. Are you listening, Sasha?”

“No, what was that about a dark novel?”

“Not a dark novel,” the irritation in Day’s
voice could have climbed out of the phone and slapped me.
“
Dark’s
Novel. As in A.E. Dark. The novelist. Haven’t you
ever heard of him?”

Something in the back of my memory said
War of the Planets
, but I wasn’t about to swear to it.

“Didn’t he start some weird cult? Like L. Ron
Hubbard?” That I was more sure of.

“Rosicrucianism, right. But he didn’t start
it, he resurrected it. The Order of the Rose Cross dates back to
Dark Ages—”

“Okay,” I interrupted. I knew O’Day. If I let
him fly off on a tangent, it’d take half an hour. “So, Dark wrote a
novel, and it’s encrypted on the girl’s e-reader? Why is that
funny?”

“It wasn’t…” O’Day growled in frustration.
“It wasn’t encrypted on the e-reader. Well it
was
, but
wasn’t. The novel
is
encrypted, but not just on that
e-reader. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“No,” I said in all honesty, “what are you
talking about, Day?”

“The novel was encrypted by Dark, himself. In
1964. Pre-microchip, do you understand? He did it all by hand. No
one has ever been able to decrypt it. Nobody knows how he was able
to do it. It’d have taken forever, even with all the super
computing power we have today. It’s the biggest fucking mystery in
mathematics since Fermat’s Last Theorem. Are you seriously telling
me you’ve never heard of it?”

“What? No,” I said. What the fuck was he
talking about?

“And you, smart-ass, send it to me to decode
for you,” Day said, his voice dripping with irony.

“Okay, now I’m starting to get the joke,” I
said. But I wasn’t. “So, nobody has ever read the thing?”