This Is Not a Game (35 page)

Bj

PS Ai haz spent all mai dollarz. Kin I haz a raze?

 

 

Dagmar laughed, saw that the email had been sent at 4:42 A.M., and figured she wouldn’t be hearing from BJ till midafternoon at the earliest.

At least some people in Great Big Idea were having fun.

 

Hi. I’m attaching the second version of the patch. I’ve tested it on
my own machines and it works.

 

I’m also attaching files from an assortment of online
brokers giving the IP addresses of computers making suspicious
trades.

 

Talk to ya soon!

 

Charlie

That email had been sent at 5:08, so BJ wasn’t the only person having an all-nighter.

It’s like they’re undergraduates again,
Dagmar thought.

She shifted in her seat, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a familiar piece of downtown Los Angeles on the television screen.

The brick facade of the Figueroa Hotel.

Her mouth went dry. She lunged for the television remote to bring up the sound.

“—believed to be one fatality in the early morning blast,” said the reporter. “It has not been officially stated whether the explosion was an accident or the result of a bomb, but sources report that Homeland Security has been called in.”

Dagmar’s heart sank. The reporter hadn’t said where in the hotel the explosion had been, or given the name of the casualty, but Dagmar already knew.

She knew.

The Russians had found Charlie.

She looked at the screen of her laptop and saw Charlie’s emails, with the attachments listed.

This might be the only copy left of Patch 2.0.

She turned back to the television and listened. The explosion had occurred just before six o’clock, a short time after Charlie had sent her the email. The hotel had been evacuated and the fire department called, but the fire had been minor and easily put out. One body had been found, and there were believed to be no further casualties.

She should find out, Dagmar thought. She should try to confirm what she felt she already knew.

Dagmar turned to the laptop, took it from the kitchen table, and connected it to the cable modem on her desk. She found the Figueroa’s home page, got the number for the front desk, and called it.

“Figueroa Hotel.” The desk clerk’s voice was hoarse. He’d probably been answering a lot of phone calls in the past few hours.

“Can you connect me to the Medina Suite, please?”

There was a moment’s hesitation.

“I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” the clerk said.

“The accident was
in
the Medina Suite?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes.” Another hesitation. “May I know the name of the person you wished to contact?”

“By ‘accident,’ ” Dagmar said, relentless, “you mean the bomb, right?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” Dagmar pressed End.

She stared at the phone for a long moment while CNN ran a commercial for Viagra.

Her mind seemed to have nothing in it. Just a big empty warehouse space, with fading footsteps echoing.

Both her fingertips and her mind seemed to be numb as she downloaded Patch 2.0 to her computer, then copied both it and the broker files to a memory stick.

Now there were three copies. She put the memory stick in the pocket of her jeans.

She gave a galvanic leap as the phone began to ring in her hand. The number on the display was area code 818, but she didn’t recognize it.

She muted the sound on the television, then pressed Send and put the handheld to her ear.

“Yes?”

“Dagmar.” Joe Clever’s voice was breathless. “I’ve found the Russian!”

Dagmar let breath whisper from her lips in a sigh. If only Clever had found Litvinov twenty-four hours ago.

“He’s in the pool, swimming laps!” Joe Clever said. “I’m watching him now!”

“Where are you?” Dagmar asked.

“Oceanside Motel, in Santa Monica. Near Pacific Palisades.”

That wasn’t anywhere near downtown Los Angeles, but then of course the bomb could have been carried to the Figueroa from wherever Litvinov had assembled it.

“Charlie Ruff lives in Santa Monica, right?” Joe Clever said. “I think the Russian was probably still trying to stake out Charlie’s house.”

“Yes,” Dagmar said. Her mind turned in sluggish circles. She didn’t seem to be processing this at all.

“Man!” Joe Clever said. “I thought I’d never be able to get back to my cell phone! I’ve been watching his door since six thirty last night, and I had no way of contacting you!”

Dagmar suddenly found herself in a timeless space, the long, soft period between two of her heartbeats extending to infinity in all directions while Joe Clever’s words echoed in her brain.

“You’d better tell me,” Dagmar said.

“I’ve been going to every hotel and motel in Greater Los Angeles,” said Joe Clever. “I’ve got pictures I made of Litvinov, and I show them to the desk clerks. I photoshop beards and so on in case he’s trying to disguise himself.” He laughed. “It’s old-fashioned detective work! I tried emailing the pictures, you know, but the hotels don’t always respond, so I have to go in person. And the desk clerks work in shifts, you know, so I don’t always get them all, and I have to come back.”

Dagmar tried to picture Joe Clever driving his old van from one motel to the next, talking to one bemused desk clerk after another. How many thousands of hours would it take to hit every motel in the Los Angeles area? Even LAPD didn’t have that much manpower, that many hours.

“Good work,” Dagmar said. It seemed inadequate praise.

“I keep coming back to the motels around Santa Monica,” Joe Clever said. “I checked the hotels in the Valley, too, but I figured Litvinov wouldn’t go back to AvN Soft, not after you increased security the way you did. Anyway, I got lucky ... Yesterday around dinnertime I got to the Oceanside just an hour after Litvinov checked in.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

“Oh yes, once I got a look at him! When the clerk told me he’d checked in, I got a room across the motel court from his. Then I ran to the van and got my Big Ears and video camera and went to my room to set up.

“I was going to call you, but I realized I’d left my cell phone in the van, and I didn’t dare leave until I was sure that it really was Litvinov. I didn’t want him to disappear the way he did last time.

“I didn’t have your number with me, so I couldn’t use the phone in the room. So I employed the Big Ears and I got some conversations of Litvinov talking on the phone.”

“When did you confirm it was really him?”

Joe Clever was so excited that his words began to stumble over one another. “Just this morning! S-someone came to the door to give him a package, and I got a good look!”

“Who was the messenger?”

“Just some guy. They talked in Russian! I got some good pictures of him.”

“And you’re sure that Litvinov didn’t go out all night?”

“That’s right! I was awake the whole time! And even if I fell asl—if I drowsed off, I was wearing my Big Ear headphones and I had my camera running, so if his door had opened, I would have known it. He stayed in all night and watched the
CSI
marathon on the Crime Channel.”

Doing his homework, no doubt, learning about all the forensic science that might trip him up when he committed his next murder.

“Anyway,” Joe Clever said, “I didn’t want to lose him, so I stayed in the room until he came out and started doing laps. I figured he wasn’t going to run off wearing just a pair of swim trunks, so I snuck out to the van and got the cell phone and came back to the room and called you. And the Russian’s still doing laps.”

“Oceanside Motel,” Dagmar said. “Which room?”

“One one four. Or do you mean Litvinov’s?”

“His.”

“One one seven. Are you coming over?”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“Well,” Joe Clever said, “tell them to hurry and not screw up like last time. Litvinov isn’t going to stay in the damn pool forever.”

He sounded disappointed that Dagmar wasn’t driving to Santa Monica to take down the Russian herself, with his help.

“I’ll call you right back,” Dagmar said.

Dagmar called the North Hollywood Station and asked for Lieutenant Murdoch. The receptionist said that he was away from the station, and asked if she wanted his voice mail.

Dagmar’s body shivered with anxiety. This was taking too long.

“Tell Murdoch,” Dagmar said, “that I’ve located Litvinov, the murderer of Austin Katanyan. Litvinov is in the Oceanside Motel in Santa Monica, room one one seven. But he might not be there long, so the police need to respond quickly.”

“And your name, ma’am?”

“Dagmar Shaw. He knows who I am.”

“Stay on the line,” the receptionist said quickly. “I’ll contact the officer.”

“Good idea,” said Dagmar.

Dagmar couldn’t sit still any longer and got up to march back into the kitchen. She looked down at her cold bowl of oatmeal and then turned and marched back to her desk again.

Her heart throbbed like a racing turbine in her chest. She felt charged with energy and wondered why her knees felt weak.

Charlie hadn’t been killed by Litvinov. Joe Clever had just provided him an alibi.

And he hadn’t been killed by anyone else in the Maffya, either. Probably there were plenty of Russian gangsters in Los Angeles who were willing to kill people, but bombing the hotel room was too awkward a plan, not when they could have gunned him down on his way to dinner or simply kicked down the door and shot him in his bed.

There was some reason it was a bomb, and some other person who had planted it.

Dagmar was absolutely certain that, when it came time to fill out Charlie’s death certificate, the cause of death should be listed as Patch 2.0.

 

 

 

 

Litvinov submitted quietly to arrest when the Santa Monica police used their battering ram to knock his motel room door off its hinges. Dagmar was sorry to hear it: she had hoped he’d resist and be shot full of holes.

Unless the Russian pleaded guilty, there would be a trial, and Dagmar would testify. And so she was asked to come to the police station and give a statement.

Murdoch was interviewing someone else, so Dagmar was given a ten-ounce foam cup of coffee and a white and red plastic stir stick and then asked to wait on a chair of shiny tube steel and gray plastic. She did so.

The North Hollywood Station was quiet on a Wednesday morning. Doubtless the drunks and other flotsam of the previous night were sleeping it off or being processed somewhere else.

Find out who knew Charlie was staying at the Fig,
Dagmar thought,
and you find the bomber.

Phones rang. Detectives answered. Fingers tapped keyboards.

She called AvN Soft and asked for Karin, Charlie’s secretary.

“Hi,” she said. “This is Dagmar.”

“Hi, Dagmar,” Karin said. “Charlie still isn’t in.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she added, “I’m not sure if I can tell you without his permission.”

Apparently she hadn’t heard the news that morning. Dagmar lacked the energy to tell her.

“That’s all right,” Dagmar said. “I was wondering if anyone besides you knows where he’s at.”

She could hear the uncertainty in Karin’s voice.

“I haven’t
heard
that he’s told anyone else,” she said.

“
You
haven’t told anyone?”

“No. The only reason I know myself is that I have to drive down every few days to bring him paperwork he needs to sign.”

“Okay, I just wondered. Thanks.”

After she ended the conversation, she considered Karin. She’d been Charlie’s secretary since the early days of the company and, like Dagmar, was in her early thirties. She seemed to be deeply competent, and Charlie had always praised her.

Karin had just returned from maternity leave. She had bleached-blond hair, a rectangular butt that jutted out like a Lego block beneath her jackets, and wore a nursing bra. She just didn’t seem bomb-thrower material.

Well,
she thought.
That leaves me as the only remaining suspect.

She didn’t seem to be prospering as a detective.

A door opened and Murdoch came out with Joe Clever and a woman in a gray pantsuit. Joe Clever seemed a little more wild-eyed than usual.

“If you can wait for a few minutes,” Murdoch said, “we’ll have your statement printed for you, and you can check it.” He looked up at Dagmar. “Miss Shaw? Can you speak to us now?”

Joe Clever grinned. “Hi, Dagmar.” He gave a thumbs-up. “We make a good team, don’t we?”

“We sure do, Andy,” Dagmar said. Joe Clever’s expression clouded.

Finding out Joe Clever’s real name had been an unanticipated bonus of this adventure.
She could find out where he lived.

Let him misbehave again, and she’d send Richard the Assassin to throw bricks through his windows.

Dagmar went with the detectives into the interview room. It had functional furniture and an official poster telling suspects of their rights. The metal desk was bolted to the floor and had shiny steel loops for handcuffs. There was an antiseptic smell.

Murdoch introduced the woman, who was a detective from the Santa Monica PD. Dagmar, Murdoch, and the woman were given lapel mics, and as they spoke, a computer turned the words into letters and projected them on a monitor.

Dagmar simply answered questions. She still wasn’t processing very well and felt that her answers, while factual, lacked the concrete specificity that she preferred in her prose.