Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [77]
Starting with the top drawer, he goes through the contents of her dresser. Bras, panties, socks, scarves, sweaters. What would have been a puerile thrill has become numerous slugs to the stomach. Still, he finishes, digging under the piles of folded fabric, knocking the four corners of each drawer, hoping to uncover a hidden relic of some sort.
Secret photos, perhaps. A bundle of old love letters. A diary.
He moves onto the shelves, finds a leather-bound volume of lined paper with less than half of its pages filled. He reads the first entry. As he reads, her voice rings in his ear.
He closes the book, looks around the room. He shakes his head and feels his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s hot.
He must not get distracted by emotions. There is a task at hand, he reminds himself. Whatever she was doing in the river remains unfinished. He owes it to her to see it through, all the way to the end. He remembers the list of clues he’s assembled: a missing girl, Pavlov, six cats, a bell.
He opens the book again. He tries speed-reading the diary to see if any of these things are mentioned. Nothing. The information is either not there or he’s too impatient to find it.
Frustrated, he turns to the last entry. Ten days ago. It’s an inconsequential write-up, but it gets him thinking: Wasn’t that the night of their last get-together?
Flipping through the pages, he searches for his name. He tries to remember the exact day of their first date. He finds it, an entry about that night. He reads her words. Her voice rings louder.
He rips the page from the book, stuffs the paper in his pocket, slams the book shut.
The ticking of a clock fills the quiet that remains. He’s concerned that he’s been in here too long. He expects a knock at the door any moment, but can’t imagine who would come calling at this hour.
He sits at her desk, digs through papers there. A good number of them are printouts of online reports: girls gone missing, kidnap suspects arrested, and alleged abductors still at large.
A picture is developing in his mind.
Her computer is already on. He moves his finger across the trackpad to wake it from sleep. He starts by pulling up her blog. Though it looks like she posted daily entries, the site has not been updated in ten days. Her previous posts were all things he had seen before: conservation issues, environmental impact discussions, and public policy debates concerning the L.A. River.
He clicks off the browser and begins reading through folders and file names on her hard drive.
An electronic ding sounds off. A flashing window appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Someone is sending an instant message.
Shepherd_79: god i’m so sick of guys
Shepherd_79: he didn’t call again tonight
He is tempted to shut the program down, make it seem like a glitch. Her friend would never think twice about it. But he doesn’t do anything, thinking it is far less suspicious to do so.
His heart is racing, and he can feel his neck and chest flushing with color. Finding it hard to concentrate on reading her folder structure, he opts to open an image viewer and browse through her digital photos.
Shepherd_79: i should just get over him, right?
The photos are grouped into categories, mostly events: parties and a couple weddings. The largest group of pictures contains shots of the river. He opens them in thumbnail view and scrubs through them, trying to differentiate one from another. They all look the same. Graffiti-covered cement. A hint of water. Chain link, barbed wire, corrugated steel.
He clicks on a couple of images, enlarging them, hoping to read the graffiti. But it’s all senseless tagging in an indecipherable alphabet.