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.
She reported that she’d seen Austin killed, and that she’d turned to the players— “programmed” them, in Murdoch’s words— to hunt for Litvinov.
The woman detective, who didn’t talk much, seemed surprised at all this.
Dagmar went on to state that Andy Claremont— which was Joe Clever’s real name— had located Litvinov the previous night and called her that morning, and that she’d called Murdoch right away.
She said that she had no reason to believe that Austin Katanyan had anything to do with the Russian Maffya.
The interview didn’t take very long. At the end, a printer in the squad room printed out the interview, after which Dagmar corrected the occasional spelling error and signed it.
“We got to him just in time,” Murdoch volunteered. “The accomplice who visited this morning seems to have dropped off Litvinov’s new ID. With that, Litvinov could have walked across the border into Tijuana and then flown from there to . . .” He shrugged. “To somewhere else. There are biometric scanners at the border that might have ID’d him, or they might not— and even if they did, he might have been in Mexico before the border patrol could react.”
“Do you know who the courier was?” Dagmar asked.
“We’re forwarding Mr. Claremont’s video to the Organized Crime Task Force, along with the sound recordings. We’ll get Litvinov’s cell phone records, so that might help us as well.” He paused, and then added, “We found a motorcycle in the parking lot that we think was stolen, probably by Litvinov. It wasn’t the same motorcycle that was used in the murder— but that one was probably stolen, too, then abandoned.”
Dagmar jumped again as her phone rang. She chided herself for being too nervous and glanced at Murdoch to see if he’d noticed.
His face retained the same bland professionalism it always wore. To give her privacy, he turned and ambled toward the coffee machine.
Dagmar looked at the display and saw that it was Karin.
“This is Dagmar,” she answered.
“Dagmar,” Karin said, “they say Charlie’s been in a bombing.”
She looked up at Murdoch’s bland back. “Who says?”
“The FBI. They’re here. They’re taking everything from Charlie’s office.”
Dagmar was astonished. “Why are they doing that?”
Distress flooded Karin’s voice. “They won’t say!”
“Have you called our lawyers?”
“Lawyers?” Karin sounded as if she’d never heard the word before.
“Call the firm’s attorneys,” Dagmar said. “If they’re taking company property, there needs to be an inventory. And probably a warrant— I don’t know.”
“Okay. Should I do that now?”
“Yes,” Dagmar said.
Karin clicked off. Dagmar looked at her phone and saw the AvN Soft number glow for a moment, then vanish as the screen went to black.
She tried to work out what to do next. Rush to the office to prevent the FBI from taking Charlie’s things? Tell Murdoch what had just happened? Do nothing?
Try to play detective and solve the crime?
It had to be admitted that this last approach hadn’t worked well so far.
Murdoch was stirring white powder into a cup of coffee with one of the red and white stir sticks. Dagmar holstered her handheld and approached him. He looked up.
“My boss has been killed,” she told him. “Charles Ruff, you might remember him. In a bombing.”
She realized as the words left her lips that Karin hadn’t actually given her all this information, and there followed a thrill of fear as she realized that Murdoch might trip her up.
But then, she thought, Karin wouldn’t remember what she’d said and what she hadn’t. And there wasn’t anything wrong with Dagmar’s knowing what she knew.
She was safe.
The crinkles around Murdoch’s eyes softened and then re-formed themselves, something Dagmar took to be an expression of interest.
“Is this the bombing downtown?” he asked. “In the Fig?”
“I . . .” Dagmar hesitated. “She didn’t say. She only said that the FBI turned up at the office.”
His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he looked down and gave a long sigh.
“Well,” he said, “if it’s the Russians, the FBI might be the best agency for it.” His tone suggested that he made this statement against his better judgment. He made a vague gesture with the hand that held the stir stick.
“I’ll make some calls,” he said, “and we’ll see what we can find out.”
In the end, Murdoch took Dagmar to the FBI’s blue glass tower on Wilshire, where Dagmar talked to a special agent named Landreth, a woman with perfect makeup, an immaculate gray suit, and a Tidewater accent. She seemed completely comfortable with the idea that Charlie was a terrorist who had blown himself up with his own bomb. When Dagmar pointed out that Charlie was a multimillionaire entrepreneur with no ideological ax to grind, Landreth gave her a green-eyed look that made her realize that it was her credibility, not Landreth’s, that was in question.
A fact that pointed to Charlie’s guilt, Landreth was convinced, was that he had checked into the hotel under a false name, Neville Longbottom. Dagmar pointed out that this was a character in the Harry Potter books. Landreth didn’t seem to think that mattered.
Dagmar didn’t tell her about the patch. Landreth would probably have confiscated it as a possible tool in Charlie’s terrorist plot, and Dagmar wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
After the futile interview, Dagmar was tasked to identify Charlie’s body. Charlie’s other associates suddenly seemed unavailable, and Karin had refused.
It would probably sour her breast milk, Dagmar thought. Sourly.
Murdoch, who seemed to be doubling today as her chauffeur, took her to the morgue. The attendants weren’t yet ready with Charlie’s body, and Dagmar waited with Murdoch in the corridor. A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Air-conditioning efficiently suppressed any odor: the place smelled like nothing at all.
“Harlem Nocturne” began to chime from Dagmar’s belt. She looked at the display and saw that it was Helmuth.
“Dagmar,” she said.
“We need to know what to do about the Banana Split mix-up,” Helmuth said.
“Jesus,” Dagmar said. “Do you know where I am?”
“We know that Charlie’s been killed,” Helmuth said. “But even if he has, we still can’t update till the players solve the Banana Split puzzle.”
She mashed her free hand against her forehead, then scrubbed her palm over her face, as if she were hoping that might help her mind to jump from one track to another.
“I can’t think,” she said. “You’ll just have to handle it yourselves.”
“Should I call Boris?”
“Sure. Why not? He’s devious.”
“He can’t hold his liquor very well.”
Dagmar didn’t remember that about him. It seemed to her that B J had been pretty good with alcohol— better anyway than Dagmar.
“He and I went out clubbing last night,” Helmuth said. “My God! He turned into some kind of rampaging disco monster.”
Dagmar remembered the email B J had sent her at four in the morning. Oh hai . . .
“You were with someone named Beverly?” she asked.
“Yes. Boris seemed… fond of her.”
“He didn’t pass out or anything?” she asked.
“No. He just… had more fun than the situation called for.”
“Well, he’s had good news lately. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Sure. And we’re very sorry about Charlie, by the way.”
“Yes,” she said. “So am I.”
Dagmar put her phone away. To give her privacy, Murdoch had turned away and taken a few steps down the corridor, just as he had during the phone call at the North Hollywood Station that morning.
“Someone from work,” she said.
Murdoch turned around and gave her a diffident look.
“Do people at your office pass out very often?” he asked.
A reluctant laugh bubbled like champagne up her nose.
“They do when they’re drinking with Helmuth,” she said.
Murdoch nodded.
A door opened and an attendant came out. He had glossy black skin, was dressed in pale green surgical scrubs, and had shaved his head.
“We’re ready, ma’am,” he said. “I should tell you a few things first.”
Dagmar nodded dumbly. Her insides were trying to climb up her throat.
“The victim’s face,” said the attendant, “has been badly damaged.” Then, speaking quickly as he gauged Dagmar’s horrified expression: “We’re not going to show you the face. We’re going to show you as much of the body as we can, so that maybe you’ll recognize the hands or feet or a birthmark or something.”
“Okay,” Dagmar said.
“The victim has also been autopsied. There is a large Y-shaped incision on the trunk. It has been sewn up and has nothing to do with the accident.”
Accident. Indeed.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Dagmar had expected a scene from the movies, with a wall full of sliding trays with bodies in them, but the viewing room wasn’t like that. It was small, with subdued light, and the body was actually in an adjacent chamber, with glass in between. A woman attendant, also in scrubs, was in the room with the body.
The body was very white, and naked except for a cloth covering the face, and a towel folded over the genitals. The front of the torso had been blackened, and there were deep circular wounds dished over the arms and torso. The Y-shaped incision of the autopsy had been closed with large stitches.
Only the legs seemed normal.
Dagmar felt a lightness wash over her, a floating sensation as if she were on the very edge of sleep. She continued walking toward the body, but her feet felt as if she were walking on pillows, reaching a long way before they met the ground.
The shaven-headed attendant stayed behind her, quite close. To catch her if she fainted dead away.
She came up to the glass and stopped. She looked at the wounds on the arms and torso. It looked as if someone had gone into the flesh with a melon baller.
“What are those?” she said, pointing.
Murdoch understood her vague question.
“Shrapnel wounds,” he said. “The bomb was packed with nails, probably dipped in rat poison.”
Dagmar looked at Murdoch in utter surprise. The bomb wasn’t enough? she thought.
“Rat poison prevents clotting,” Murdoch said.
“Ma’am?” The woman attendant’s voice came through a speaker. “Can you identify the victim?”
Dagmar felt herself sway. She turned to the body again, flesh the color of raw dough except where it had been burned or wounded, and realized that this was the only time she had seen Charlie without his clothes.
It was clearly Charlie. The tall, thin body reeked of Charlieness. But she didn’t know how she knew this.
“I can’t really tell,” she said. “But I’m sure it’s him.”
“We need a definite identification, ma’am,” the male attendant said.
“In that case,” Dagmar said, “I can’t.”
The woman attendant took a step closer to the body. Dagmar noticed that she was wearing surgical gloves.
“The face is badly— there really isn’t a face left,” she said. “But if I remove the cover, maybe you can identify the shape of the face or the —”
“No,” said Dagmar. “No, I won’t look at that.”
She turned and walked out. Her vision seemed to have narrowed; she felt as if she were walking down the length of a telescope.
The intensity of the light in the corridor startled her. She stood blinking on the green and white tile floor. Murdoch stood at her elbow. The fact of his presence was shocking— it was as if he hadn’t walked there but had somehow materialized at that instant.
“Do you think you might want to sit down?” he asked.
“Just get me out of here,” Dagmar said.
Murdoch’s Crown Victoria smelled of leather and gun oil. Hissing voices spoke inscrutable ten-codes from the police radio. Dagmar closed her eyes and leaned against the headrest as he accelerated onto I-5.
“Damn,” he said in his mild voice. She opened her eyes and saw the flashes of taillights, long rows of them.
Rush hour had commenced. They were probably going to spend the next hour trapped on the freeway.
“Don’t worry about the identification,” Murdoch said. “They can do a DNA with hair from his bathroom at home or something. Though that will take a while.”
“Mm,” said Dagmar. She wasn’t paying attention; she was just relieved that she had avoided the Phantom of the Opera moment, the unmasking of Charlie’s mutilated face.
The car crawled at about ten miles an hour toward the San Fernando Valley. Dagmar thought of Charlie’s plaster white flesh and the horrible gouges of the shrapnel.
“Why did they do it?” she found herself saying.
“The Maffya?” Murdoch’s pinched mouth gave a twist. “Money. It’s why they do anything.”
“I mean,” Dagmar began, and realized that she had no idea what she had meant.
“I mean”— starting again— “why a bomb?”
Murdoch considered this. “Because the killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off,” he said. “A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.”
“But you need a lot of technical knowledge to make a bomb.”
“Not for a gunpowder bomb, and this was a gunpowder bomb.” She looked at him. “The smell,” he said. “That was powder.”
Dagmar didn’t remember a gunpowder smell, or any kind of smell at all, but then she supposed she could trust a police officer to know what gunpowder smelled like.
“You can legally buy up to a pound of smokeless powder at a time,” Murdoch said. “You can buy it at any gun store. You can buy it at Wal-Mart. For use in reloading ammunition.”
Dagmar thought idly about getting the players to track gunpowder sales in Greater Los Angeles.
“You can get a fuse from a model rocket kit,” Murdoch said. “You can find the instructions for the whole thing on the Internet.”
“It’s that easy?” Dagmar asked.
Murdoch’s unsurprised eyes gazed out over the hood of the Crown Victoria.
“Just google Anarchist Cookbook,” he said.
The trip to the North Hollywood Station took more than an hour. Dagmar thanked Murdoch for driving and got into her Prius. She didn’t feel like continuing the crawl along the 101, so she took back streets toward her apartment.
She realized she didn’t want to be alone in her rooms and wondered if she should stop somewhere and have dinner. But she didn’t have an appetite, so she stopped at a coffee shop and ordered a chai tea latte and bought a copy of that morning’s New York Times and read every page, even the sports news, which she usually skipped. The fact that none of the news was local was a comfort. She didn’t want to think about L.A. or the bombing or the wounds in Charlie’s bloodless body.
By the time she finished the paper, it was after dark and she felt the stirrings of hunger. She drove to a Chinese place and had twice-cooked pork, half of which she carried away in a white cardboard take-out box.
She went to her apartment and to her room. She took a shower, and when she finished toweling, her phone began its song. She looked at the display and saw that it was Siyed.
After the misery of these past few days, Dagmar found Siyed too pathetic a distraction to think about. She pressed the End button to divert Siyed to voice mail.
A few minutes later the phone chimed to let her know that someone had left a message. She turned the phone off.
Dagmar fell onto the bed and slept. She dreamed. Somewhere in her awareness was a sense of gratitude that she didn’t dream about Charlie, or his body, or what was behind the cloth tented over his face.
She dreamed about a lake, blue under blue skies. The shore was green with birch and poplar. It was a scene from her girlhood in Ohio, and in the dream she was a girl, gliding over a green lawn as she ran from a lakeside cabin to a sagging wooden picnic table. Little gold and brown butterflies flew ahead of her on tangled Brownian bearings.
Dagmar’s experience of the scene was strangely bifurcated. She was Girl Dagmar, running through the butterflies, and a smaller part of her was Grown-up Dagmar, the vigilant puppetmaster, supervising the scene to make certain that untoward, disturbing elements of her more recent past did not intrude.
Her father sat at the picnic table, smoking a cigarette, a glass of amber liquid by his hand. He wore cutoff jeans and a faded Metallica T-shirt. He wasn’t the sad, sly, frustrated man he became later, the man who pawned her computer to buy vodka, but a warm, smiling, benign parent whose breath was scented with tobacco and Irish whiskey.
Girl Dagmar hugged her father, climbed onto his lap. Grown-up Dagmar, watching the scene, felt a shock as she recognized Girl Dagmar’s Sport Girl denim skirt, with its narrow pockets and cartoony appliquéd bird. Girl Dagmar had actually worn that skirt.
Dagmar’s father kissed Girl Dagmar’s cheek, and she felt the bristles on his chin. A motorboat raced over the blue water.
Out of the cabin, with its asphalt-shingled walls, came Dagmar’s mother, carrying a plate in either hand. Grown-up Dagmar felt that her mother’s appearance was anachronistic— with her hair pinned back and her lipstick and an apron over the straight skirt that fell to below her knees, she looked like a late 1940s movie mom, not the Reagan-era parent that she actually was.
Dream Mom put the plates on the table, and Dagmar saw that they held sloppy joes. Grown-up Dagmar hadn’t eaten a sloppy joe since she had left Cleveland.
Girl Dagmar could smell the onions and tomato sauce. She slipped off her father’s knees and picked up her fork and ate.
The tastes of her childhood flooded her palate. Grown-up Dagmar approved.
The dream, or memory, floated serenely on. Grown-up Dagmar, watching from her corner of the sky, approved of everything: the lake, the motorboat, the spicy sauce on the ground beef, the soft texture of the bun. The sun on Girl Dagmar’s arms, the smile on her father’s face.
When she woke, she was smiling.
The sunny Ohio afternoon stayed with her as she rose, took her shower, and poured her first cup of coffee.
It wasn’t until she looked out her kitchen window and saw the parking lot with its flashing lights and yellow crime-scene tape that the last of the dream faded into the Valley’s hard, snarling morning light.