The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [81]
Wayne got to work an hour early and worked out at the hotel gym on the thirty-second floor. He showered and settled behind his desk and Peter had handed him the sports and the business and the living sections in that order.
There were minutes in the day when Wayne didn’t think about Nada—while scrutinizing a Dodgers box score, for instance—but they were few. Out in the casino, in addition to everything else he was looking for—drunks, cheaters, and general unruliness—he was always scanning the tables for her tiny shape, checking every hour for her little green dot on his screen, convinced that she wouldn’t call first but would just show up one day when her troubles had passed, assuming she was in any trouble at all.
Amoyo was right. Nada was exactly the sort of person who might disappear on a whim. Like a loose balloon, it was her lack of attachment that made him want to hold her so close. Nada could take care of herself far better than Wayne could take care of her, which was just one reason, he knew, she would never settle for him.
Peter tossed the front section of the paper over the narrow gap between their desks and, turning it right side up, Wayne winced at the above-the-fold headline, two lines of large type with a grisly report:
SPR. VALLEY MASSACRE LEAVES
ASST. DA, HUSBAND DEAD
According to the article, the bodies had been mutilated with a knife and police were exploring the possibility that the murders were the work of an individual (or individuals) whom Beatrice Beaujon had prosecuted in the past. The murder came on the same day Beaujon had extracted a surprise guilty plea from the son of billionaire shopping mall developer Danny Truman.
The description of the slayings unbalanced Wayne. He felt his moon weight rising. Even though his title was associate director of security, stories like this proved that security was mythical. Like with snuff films and hangover cures, there was no such thing as security. Any security can be circumvented by somebody who wants what you have more than you want to protect it.
Nothing seemed to have been taken from the Beaujons’ home, and both victims had been stabbed multiple times. “Carved” was the way the DA had put it. Donald Beaujon was a lawyer as well, and his case list would be examined for the potentially disgruntled, but between the lines, it was clear that the police thought Beatrice was the real target. They’d refused to comment when asked if they thought the killings might be related to any of the cases she had recently prosecuted.
Wayne wondered what it would be like to be murdered. Ambushed in your own home. He figured his size would give him an advantage over most attackers, but then, if someone really wanted you dead, if someone was angry enough because you had put him in prison, where he had wasted away for half a dozen years and maybe been gang-raped or gotten AIDS or all the horrible stuff you always heard went on in there, if someone wanted you dead as badly as that, there was probably no stopping him. If an unstoppable force was pissed off enough, Wayne would take it over an immovable object any day.
Wayne folded the paper and returned it to Peter’s desk. Peter’s computer was running its SETI screen saver, a dancing graph of greens and blues and purples and reds. SETI stood for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a project with which Steve Rhodes was famously obsessed. He had given the University of California over a million dollars to help fund radio telescopes pointed at the stars, scanning the white noise for intelligent patterns that hadn’t originated on Earth. Colossus employees were encouraged, though not required, to install these screen savers. The software enlisted the computing power of thousands of idle CPUs all across the country to process the telescope data, trying to discover even a hint of mathematical order in the cacophony of the universe. Peter was also a bit of a UFO nut,