The Decoy (28 page)

'Are you a necrophiliac, Glenn?'

The young man leans back even further and speaks directly to the ceiling. 'I'm prepared to explore my dark side,' he says languidly.

The lawyer, Truman, leans across the table. 'Do you people actually have any charges? Or any evidence of any crimes committed by my client? Because if this is just a fishing expedition, I'm going to advise Mr Furnish not to answer any more questions.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'This isn't right,' Connie says in the observation room. 'This guy is way too calm.'

'Wait till the techies are done with his laptop,' someone says in the darkness. 'That's when he'll start to crumble.'

'But he knows you've got the laptop,' Connie says. 'He must know time's running out. Why isn't he getting nervous?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The answer to her question is over in computer crimes, where Rob Fleming is prising the secrets from Glenn's computer. In a dust-free air-conditioned room as sterile and bright as an autopsy lab, the laptop is being dissected piece by piece.

'This is a lot easier on a laptop than on a desktop computer,' Fleming is saying. 'These laptops are pretty modular; everything just clicks out.' Carefully, he lifts the hard drive out and places it in a laptop of an identical make and model, then boots the machine. 'We'll copy it before we go in, just in case it's password protected.'

'Would that be a problem?' Weeks asks.

'Not really. It would just slow us down. If the information's on there, we can get at it.'

A few minutes later he says: 'Right. Let's see what we've got.' He types a command on the screen.

'Is that DOS you're using?' Weeks asks.

'That's right. Most people put their energies into hiding stuff from Windows. They forget that Windows isn't the computer's real operating system. It's just the pretty stuff on the surface. If you want to talk to the BIOS, you've got to do it the old-fashioned way.' While he's talking white text is appearing on the screen, line by line. 'This looks pretty straightforward, though.'

'We're particularly interested in picture files or movies.'

'There's only one. A picture file. Want me to bring it up?'

'Sure.'

After a few moments, the hard drive whirrs softly and a picture appears on the screen.

It's a cartoon, a crude computer graphic of a skull on a black background. A joker's painted smile has been superimposed onto the skull's mouth. Underneath it, some words in Gothic script say:

Kiss me quick

'Shit,' Weeks says. 'You sure this is all?'

'That's all,' Fleming confirms. 'There's virtually nothing else on here. No documents, no organizer, no address book. Just an Internet browser and a word-processing program.'

'Could this son of a bitch have switched the hard drive?'

Fleming nods. 'That's certainly possible. It wouldn't take more than a few minutes on a machine like this. And, so long as you kept it dry, you could store the other hard drive almost anywhere. Even underground, if you wrapped it in plastic.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Fuck,' Durban says when Weeks phones him with the news. 'OK, here's what we do. We'll charge the bastard with credit card theft, get a high bail set and then start digging up every location we can link him to, starting with the area around the house he was renting.'

'Everything we have been doing together up to now has been focused on developing your abilities as actors. Now it's time to bring those techniques to the service of a play'

Claire, standing at the back of the group, closes her eyes in order to concentrate on what Paul's saying.

'So, what is a play? It's a story. But what sort of story? Our improvisations are stories, after all. The difference is that, in improvisation, we accept whatever is offered to us. In a play, one character may not necessarily accept what another one wants, resulting in conflict.'

Claire opens her eyes. Paul is looking directly at her. Then his gaze moves on, circling the group. Just for a moment, she thinks she caught a glint of coldness, an anger directed at her. But it was such a quick look, it's impossible to be sure.

'Stanislavski described the essence of a play, the goal of its primary character, as the play's "superobjective". Often the superobjective remains hidden from the audience until the last curtain is about to fall. But
you
must always know it. Only then can you define how the individual scene, or as Stanislavski put it, the "through action", fits into the theme.'

'What about the writer?' someone asks. 'Don't the words define the play?'

'Screw the writer.' There's a laugh, but he goes on seriously: 'For the words to have meaning, they must have truth. Your truth.'

Nobody has any more questions.

'Right. The play we're going to do is
Hamlet.
Chris, you're the prince. Keith, the King. Ellen, Gertrude. Claire, you're Ophelia.'

Again the cold look. And why Ophelia? Given Paul's insistence on reliving one's own experiences through Affective Memory, the part of a suicidal madwoman is hardly one she'd have chosen. Leon, the student who walked out, had been right: there were a lot of mind games here. She wonders if Paul's casting is some kind of punishment, and if so, what on earth she's being punished for.

===OO=OOO=OO===

A dozen or so men are brought up from the holding cells into the largest of the seven New Jersey courtrooms. The area they're shown into is enclosed by glass and walled off from the rest of the court, although there's a slit at head height for the defendants to speak to their attorneys.

A lawyer gets up from the attorneys' tables and walks to the glass booth. 'Mr Felstead?' he asks, scanning the faces expectantly.

One of the defendants goes over to the opening. 'Are you Brook?'

The lawyer puts his hand through the opening. 'Michael Brook, that's right. How are you?'

'I didn't get much sleep. The cells were kind of noisy.'

'Of course,' Brook says. 'Look, we should have you out in no time. The question is, are you going to enter a plea today or leave it until later? It's really up to you, but it might have an impact on the bail.'

'In what way?'

'Well, I spoke to the prosecutor. Your wife is definitely going to press the assault charge, but so long as you agree to be bound not to go near her, I don't see how they can refuse bail. It might be that if you plead not guilty the judge will set bail a little bit lower on the basis of presumed innocence. But I wouldn't count on it.'

'OK. Not guilty. Just get me out of here.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

New Jersey municipal judge Harvey Chu works his way through a long list of arraignments. He checks his list. 'Peter Felstead,' he says.

The lawyer, Brook, approaches the judge's desk, as does the prosecutor. Because of the muttering and whispering, it's virtually impossible to hear what they're saying from the glassed-off area. Eventually the judge looks up and says, 'Ten thousand dollars' in a bored voice.

Brook returns to the defendant. 'OK, Mr Felstead. We should have you out of here in half an hour or so. Then we'll go to my office and sort out this bail bond.'

'Thanks, man. I just have to swing by my own office to let them know something's come up.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

They've broken for lunch and resumed again before Judge Chu nears the end of the arraignments. 'Furnish,' he calls wearily. He looks up. A man in a white jumpsuit is the only one left in the holding area.

Positano, sitting behind the attorneys' tables, whispers to the prosecutor, 'Where's Furnish?'

She glances back at the holding area. 'There.'

The detective feels his chest tighten. 'That's not Furnish.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure.'

'One minute, your honour,' the prosecutor says to the judge. She makes her way back to the holding area.

'Who are you?' she says to the remaining defendant.

'Felstead. Peter Felstead.' The man stares at them defiantly. 'Is something wrong?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Ellen Saunders and her new friend Jake Fincher have had a really great lunch. They had to stand in line for a table at Flint's, sure, but frankly they were lucky to get a table at all. The place is heaving, as it always is on a weekday, though the two of them have been so busy talking they've hardly noticed the slightly chaotic service and the long wait between courses.

Finally Ellen looks at her watch and says, 'Oh my God, Jake. I'd no idea it was so late. We'd better get the check.'

'Fine. But this is my treat.'

'Let's go Dutch, then. I insist.' But when the check comes, Jake settles the argument by pulling out his credit card and pushing hers away. He holds out the plate with his card and the bill on it, waiting for a waiter to take it.

'I hope you enjoyed your meal, sir.' A waiter has appeared next to him, not the one who brought the bill, but Jake's in a hurry now. 'It was fine,' he assures the waiter.

'Sure you wouldn't like some coffee?'

'No. We have to get back.'

The waiter nods and takes the plate with the card on it. Five minutes later, an exasperated Jake beckons to a passing waitress.

'Are you ready to pay?'

'What do you mean, ready? I've been waiting to sign my slip for five minutes now.' As the waitress goes off to sort it out, he mutters to Ellen, 'And
she
can forget about a tip.'

After a moment the waitress returns. 'Which waitress did you give it to?'

'It wasn't a waitress. It was a man.' Jake scans the tables, but he can't see the man who took his card anywhere.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Gone?' Frank stares at the other detective. 'What do you mean, gone?'

'He switched with another prisoner. Some asshole who was still half-drunk from the night before. Furnish seems to have convinced him it would be a good joke to play on his ex-wife.'

'What about the lawyers? They must have known.'

'The drunk's lawyer had never met him before; he had legal insurance and dialled the helpline from custody. But Truman should have spotted that his client wasn't in the holding bay. He's happy to be rid of this one. Too happy, if you ask me.'

'Doesn't like the smell of it?'

Positano snorts. 'Since when did that put a lawyer off a case? Usually, the bigger the headlines the more they want it. No, if you ask me, Furnish had something on Truman.'

'Check it out. Anything else?'

'We asked to be copied on all police call-outs within a ten-mile radius of the courthouse. About twenty minutes ago someone phoned in a credit card theft. Weeks is down there now. It sure as hell sounds like Furnish. Not that he's probably even called that. There's no trace of that name at the places he said he worked. Records are phoning all the mortuary schools to see if we can find out who he really is.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Weeks calls in from the restaurant. 'It's him all right. Cool as you like. The victim can't even remember the card number, only that it's Amex.'

Frank groans. 'Don't tell me. Gold?'

'Yup. He thinks his credit limit —
sorry, the amount he's shown Amex he can afford to pay —
is about fifty thou.'

'Great. OK, get back here. I'll get Rob to phone American Express straight away.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Twenty minutes later, the stolen card has been traced to a cyber cafe off Second Avenue. The patrol car that races there, its sirens screaming, reports that the user of the computer in question downloaded a virus after concluding his on-line purchases. By the time the cops reach the machine the bug is already munching every last byte of information on the hard drive.

Of the man who has been using the computer, there is no sign.

The cameras are back.

Claire paces up and down the apartment, a muscle in her jaw working dangerously. Christian sits in one of his big leather armchairs, his face expressionless.

The police technicians ignore them. They've brought their own ladders. Tiny wires hang from corner to corner of the high loft ceiling. As one technician glues the wires carefully to the join of ceiling and wall, another follows behind with a can of paint.

One of the technicians is a Korean woman. The same one who pretended the police apartment belonged to her husband's company.

Durban, watching from his post by the door, says, 'Listen, Claire. There's still time to replace you both with cops.'

'No offence, Frank, but that's going to be about as convincing as a Hasidic pope.'

Frank shrugs. 'Your choice.'

'Not in there,' Claire snaps at one of the technicians as he starts to walk into the bedroom. 'You're not putting those things in there.'

'It's only a panic button,' Frank says soothingly.

'I thought you said he couldn't get past you.'

'He can't. We've got observation points at both ends of the street. We've got an armed response unit stationed in the caretaker's apartment. We've got surveillance teams who'll be following wherever you go. The panic buttons are simply added reassurance.'

'What makes you so sure he'll come for us, anyway? Why wouldn't he just go somewhere safe and hide?'

'We're not certain what he'll do. That's why we have to cover—'

'He'll come for you.'

The voice belongs to the woman who has just appeared in the doorway —
diminutive, elegantly dressed, a pack of Merit and a lighter in her hand.

'Hello, Dr Leichtman,' Claire says coolly.

'Hello, Claire. I was sorry to hear you've been … unwell.'

'Save it, Connie.'

Connie shrugs and walks a little further into the apartment, inspecting the technicians' work. 'He'll come,' she says. 'I guarantee it.'

'You sound pretty sure of that,' Frank says.

Connie goes to the laptop on the desk. She brings up a search engine.

Despite herself, Claire watches over her shoulder. Connie types in, 'Blond+Baudelaire+ camera+address' before hitting Enter.

The first name on the list of results is Claire's.

'Click on the link,' Connie says.

Claire takes the mouse and clicks. Her own face fills the screen.