And suddenly the pitch deepened. The sound she could hear was the scream of an adult. It took Maddy a moment to realize what her imagination was inflicting on her: the sound Abigail unleashed when she realized she was about to die.
Madison closed her eyes. Or perhaps opened them. In this light, and in this state, it was hard to tell. Her exhaustion was total. She felt as if someone had opened a tap and let out all her blood, all her energy. She was empty. There was nothing left.
Only adrenalin, which continued to course through her system even when all else was gone. Still, as depleted as she was, the fever in her mind would not cool. After three or four hours spent in bed, perhaps fitfully dozing for a few minutes – or seconds, she could never be sure – here and there, she surrendered just after four thirty am.
She went first to the laptop, to visit Abigail’s Facebook page. Again. It was the third time she had looked, though earlier she had done only a quick scan, scrolling through for anything that stood out. This time she would look more carefully.
She started with the profile photograph. Abigail was heavily made-up, wearing a very obvious dark wig and, though only the distinctive collar was visible, what appeared to be a cheongsam in gorgeous red silk. Maddy guessed this was for a New Year party, though these days that look had become fashionable all year round. She clicked on the photo and saw the date. She was right: Abigail had changed over to this picture only a week earlier.
The page was full of tribute messages, scores of them – some from friends, some from members of the public, and lots from pupils and parents.
You lit up our school. You have left a big hole in our hearts.
When I heard about it, I was so sad, love from Kayleigh.
Abigail, you were the best friend a girl could have. Always there for me, never thinking of yourself. Heaven just got itself a new angel.
I hope you are now at peace. No one deserved that.
They kept on in that vein, though Maddy couldn’t read them for long. She didn’t know why. Perhaps the mawkishness. Maybe she didn’t like sharing her sister with strangers. Or perhaps it was the way these messages reinforced the irrevocable deadness of Abigail, hammering the same dread truth again and again. She clicked on Abigail’s housemate, Jessica, and sent her a message in addition to the two texts she had already fired off during the day. Please get in touch when you can. I’d really like to talk.
She hit the machine’s ‘Sleep’ button, wishing enviously that she had a similar feature. She wondered how long she would have to wait before calling Barbara Miller or, failing that, Jeff Howe. She was torn. As a bereaved sister, she wanted to unleash on the LAPD, slamming them for what they had told the TV news last night. For once she agreed entirely with Quincy, who had phoned her minutes after the broadcast was off the air. Her sister had been in tears, her voice hoarse. Maddy guessed Quincy had been crying all day – a contrast with herself that she chose not to think about.
‘I can’t believe they would be saying those things about Abigail. Sexual encounter. Where do they get off talking like that? As if she was some kind of … I mean, heroin? And sex? Who do they think they’re talking about here? This is Abigail.’
‘I know. It’s terrible. I had no idea they were—’
‘That’s just it. Aren’t they supposed to talk to us, keep us informed? I mean, you know them all, don’t you? You’re always saying you’ve got such good “sources” and all that. Well, why didn’t they tell you they were going to be saying such horrible things on the TV? And why didn’t you stop them? What about that man Abigail told me about? Jeff. She said he liked you. Why don’t …’
Quincy’s voice trailed off. Perhaps even she couldn’t quite go through with blaming the latest layer of this family tragedy on Maddy’s uselessness with men. But it was clear what she was thinking. If only you weren’t such a mess, if only you didn’t always go with the wrong ones and reject the right ones, you and your weird, borderline-disgusting career might actually have been useful for once.
‘Has anyone been to see you?’
‘Yes.’ Quincy blew her nose, noisily. ‘This afternoon. A victim support officer, I think they were called. Or maybe family liaison, I’m not sure.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘They wanted to know about Mom. Anything they could do. Whether she would want a visit.’
‘You said no, I suppose?’ Maddy asked, though what she was thinking was, Why is Quincy getting this treatment? Do they think single people don’t need a family liaison officer? Do we not count as family, even when our sisters are tied up and murdered, put to sleep with a needle like a household pet?
She replayed that conversation and several others as she paced around the apartment in the early hours, her conscious brain performing the task of processing the previous day that normal people experienced while fast asleep. She peered behind her window blind at the Korean store opposite, its lights still on. She wondered who was on duty tonight. Maybe the son. He was living and working at home, but was probably her age. She half-considered getting dressed, crossing the street and picking up something: cookies or a tub of ice cream. Just for something to do. But the chances were the Korean guy would recognize her and offer condolences and ask how she was doing and she couldn’t face any of that.
She lay back on the bed, not asking her body to go to sleep, letting it off for the night. Again she asked herself, how early could she call Barbara Miller? When was the acceptable start of the day for normal people? Leo used to take calls from six in the morning, but politics was different. They worked late and early. It was an insomniac’s business.
The clock was crawling; still not five thirty. She rehearsed what she would say to Miller, the lines restated in her head. Repeatedly, she would stop herself mid-flow, make a slight amendment and go back to the beginning:
It’s outrageous that I had to find out about my sister from the TV news. I know the procedure: the family is meant to be kept informed of any major developments in a homicide inquiry. You owed it to us to let us know what you were thinking – not to accuse her like that in public. You just smeared the reputation of a dead woman. This whole sex-game theory is bullshit, you, you …
She would run out of road at that point, pausing to wonder how certain she could be. The meagre evidence of the use of force, the CCTV footage of Abigail at the bar earlier, perhaps picking up that guy. Maybe.
Occasionally, she would hear Abigail’s voice again. Her younger sister was not speaking to her exactly. But Maddy would hear fragments of her all the same. Some she thought were memories, the rest were a combination of recollection and imagination.
E is for England, that’s right. Who can tell me another E word? E is for Everything. That’s very good, Georgia. Who has another E word?
Maddy liked listening in, closing her eyes and hearing Abigail. She wondered if she might drift off to sleep to the sound of her sister. And then she heard her again, in a voice that was louder and firmer. Call Barbara at seven thirty.
Maddy’s decision was made: at seven o’clock, she went to the kitchen to make coffee.
While she waited, she forced herself to undertake a task she had been putting off, perhaps, she imagined, forever. She fired up her own Weibo account and went to her ‘mentions’, to see what people had been saying about and to her in the aftermath of Abigail’s death. The first shock came the instant she hit the ‘Connect’ button. There were close to a thousand such messages.
She loaded them all up, planning on reading them in something like chronological order, the first ones first. There, dozens of screens down, were lines that might as well have been artefacts from a different age: plaudits to her for her piece about the sweatshop, others linking to it and branding it a ‘must-read’. A few dissenting voices too:
Just read knife-job by @maddywebbnews. One more tired rant against Chinese. When will we realize we had our chance as No 1 and we blew it!!
She waded through those and then saw the first references to
Abigail.
Just heard terrible news about @maddywebbnews’s sister #sosad
What a senseless waste of precious life. Hearts go out to @maddywebbnews #tragedy
Then one she had to read a few times to understand:
Hmm. @maddywebbnews writes a story exposing sweatshop conditions, then her sister ends up dead #coincidenceidontthinkso
It struck Maddy as absurd, but that didn’t stop her doing the math. Her piece on the factory had gone live at midnight; Abigail’s estimated time of death was shortly after one am. One hour for the angry owners of that hellhole to decide to get their revenge not by killing her but by finding and following her sister? Ridiculous.
Her eye skimmed over the rolling wave of condolences and sympathies from strangers, including readers who said how much they had appreciated Madison’s journalism, ‘exposing wrongdoing in their midst’, as one put it. Messages from other journalists leapt out at her, as did one from the mayor.
The people of California will have the Webb family in its prayers today. My heartfelt condolences to @maddywebbnews
She could picture Leo hammering out that one. ‘People of California’ indeed. Positioning himself for the election, even in a message of condolence.
There were some old friends there too. Donna, one-time college room-mate, now with glamorous job and rich husband in Shanghai, said how sorry she was and asked if there was anything she could do. Several more in that vein, too, most of them hedged with embarrassment at saying something so personal over Weibo, with its tacit admission that the sender had no other way to make contact, that in fact they had lost touch.
And then there was this, though Maddy missed it in her first roll through the feed, spotting it only when she made a second round, this time looking for those of particular sentimental value she ought to save and take to Quincy and her mother:
@maddywebbnews heard your sister killed through drug overdose. Think same may have happened to friend of mine. Follow me pls: can explain.
Chapter 15
Maddy had hesitated at that, reading it two or three times to be sure there were no hidden traps. The user’s name was Amy Alice. The alliteration troubled Maddy; it sounded fake. But then the user profile identified Amy Alice as an actress. A link took her through to a basic, homemade website, consisting mostly of portrait photographs. Maddy reckoned she was in her mid- to late-twenties, though there was no date of birth. Not unusual in that business or in this town. She was pretty, her skin a shade of mocha, though whether that meant she was black, Latina or of mixed race Maddy would not have hazarded a guess. As Rosario Padilla had proven, ethnic profiling in the LA of the twenty-first century was a fool’s game. In one photo her dark hair was braided, in another it was worn long and, apparently, straightened. Maddy scanned the list of acting credits: a couple of musicals in the suburbs and a reference to ‘theatre in education’, which meant performances for schools. If Amy Alice was going to get a break in show business, she had clearly not got it yet.
Maddy did as she had been asked and hit the ‘Follow’ button. Now they would be able to communicate privately by direct message. Maddy’s first approach was brief but Alice replied quickly, her tone suggesting an eagerness to talk. Maddy glanced at her watch. It was now seven twenty. Was it odd for a struggling actress to be up and online at such an hour?
Ordinarily Maddy would have asked for a phone number. After all, any middle-aged sleazeball scratching his nuts in front of a computer screen could rip a few pictures off the internet and give himself a sweet, girlie name like Amy Alice. Covering some of the state’s most appalling crime stories over the last few years had taught her that there was no shortage of sickos aroused by making some connection, however vicarious or indirect, with a murder. She had interviewed the women who had befriended – seduced, in one case – men jailed for the foulest acts, visiting them in jail, writing daily letters, somehow turned on by the proximity to evil. Contacting the sister of a victim for kicks, and posing as a woman to do it, would be novel but different only by degree.
Still, Maddy was reluctant to talk on the phone about this. She told herself it was too sensitive; it needed to be done in person. Nevertheless, in the back of her sleep-deprived mind there was a nagging sensation that she was not telling herself the whole truth, a suspicion she was not bringing to the surface. She left it there, unarticulated, and restated to herself that on any story that counted the key information was always garnered face to face.
They agreed to meet later that morning, at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, on the corner of Sunset and Fairfax. She tried to make it earlier, but that was the earliest Amy could get out of work. Which meant at least four hours of inactivity, a prospect Maddy could not countenance. She paced some more, trawled through her weibs to see if there were any more leads she might have missed, checked her email for the same reason – but there was nothing.
It was past seven thirty, past time to call Detective Miller. But now the urgency had cooled. Maddy returned instead to the search window of her computer. She knew she was retreading old ground but she also knew that the first time she had done this she had been numb with immediate grief. Maybe she had missed something. She typed: heroin, victim, overdose, suspicious.
Most of the stories that came up were ones she had already read. The rest were scientific entries, detailing or debating the chemistry of excessive opium intake. Not relevant. There was one that gave her pause, from a blog – Pleasure Dome – apparently written by a heroin user, who posted only as ‘Coleridge’. There were dozens of posts, but the one that had come up was called ‘On passive injection’.
I’ve been asked for my thoughts on the evergreen topic of passive injection. I discussed this earlier here and here but the focus this time will be on the erotic aspects of helping out a friend or being helped out, rather than simply shooting up for yourself by yourself.
As regular readers will know, I’ve long seen using as a very sexual act: after all, when it comes to bliss, orgasm is junk’s only rival. So it’s only natural that people would want to share the pleasure. When that involves a needle, well, it hardly needs spelling out, does it? It is an act of penetration, one person breaking through the outer layer of another, inserting themselves, then releasing their holy fluid into the person they love. It is a moment of total intimacy. The trust required to offer your naked skin to your lover, to allow them to pierce it, to fill you up with a serum that will bring life and ecstasy …
Maddy clicked away, repelled by the suggestion that the fate that had befallen her sister was somehow sexy. She only hoped that Barbara Miller hadn’t found this same blog. If she had, she’d doubtless have tucked it away in the file as further reinforcement for her theory.
Then Maddy went back to the stories she’d already opened once before, forcing herself to read more slowly this time. The incidents of tainted heroin she dismissed again. But she stopped at the report of a grief-stricken father, mystified by his daughter’s apparent suicide by heroin overdose. There was a photo of the victim: the usual graduation shot, though it was hard to make out the colour of her hair since most of it seemed to be gathered under the mortarboard. The story was given extra play because the girl’s father, Ted Norman of Orange County, was a worthy in state politics, recently elected as chairman of the Republican party in California.
‘I always thought she loved life too much to kill herself,’ was the key quote. But then came the sixth paragraph of the story, explaining that the man’s daughter had been depressed for several months.
Madison clicked on the accompanying photo. It showed an earnest, scholarly young woman looking intently at the camera. She was attractive, her most striking feature her long, curled hair. As if to confirm that ‘there’s no story here’, as Howard Burke might put it, the girl’s hair was not blonde, but a warm, dark brown. Madison clicked out of the item. It was tragic, but not relevant.
She showered and set off to meet Amy Alice. The smog was heavy, but not unmanageable: she could at
least see the cars in front. At intervals, her view was impeded by a convoy of military vehicles, supply trucks by the look of them, each branded with the yellow-and-red star of the People’s Liberation Army. Odd; they were usually more discreet than that.
As it often did when she was driving, the first wave of tiredness from the wakeful night began to break over her. For a terrifying moment, she had the dizzying sensation that the cars ahead of her might be a mirage, a hallucination of sleeplessness. She gripped the wheel tighter, seeking the firm evidence of solid matter.
She dialled Barbara Miller’s number: straight to voicemail. She gave it two minutes, then dialled it again with the same result. Needing the stimulation of another voice, she tuned the car radio to KNX, where the news headlines at quarter past the hour recapped the overnight developments in ‘the Abigail Webb case’, referring to the CCTV pictures ‘now being examined by LAPD detectives’. So that detail was now out. It was the fifth item and there was nothing else. After it came a report on the Winter Olympics, where the USA was struggling to hold third place in the medals table, behind Russia and, at the top, China. That led into the obligatory light item, about a hapless US bobsled rider who had crashed in each one of his heats – and who had prompted a debate about whether he should be allowed to represent the United States or should be immediately withdrawn and sent home. His defenders had turned him into an ironic hero, branding him ‘Billy the Bullet’.
Perhaps ten minutes later Jeff Howe called again. Before Maddy even had the chance to ask, he spoke about the leak to KTLA. Or, as she swiftly corrected him, the ‘briefing’ to KTLA. It was far too detailed and solidly sourced to be anything but.
The 3rd Woman Page 11
