Michael took out the seashell he had bought from the little girl last night and lifted it to his ear. What was that sound, inside? A hiss? No, it was the faint wheeze of the surge. It emanated from the inner passage of the shell, and along with a pungent scent of seaweed and decay, brought back the memory of the body. There she was, her beautiful head crowned with algae, her delicate throat cut, oozing blood.
And now, stretched across the lower end of the trail was a yellow plastic stripe, marked ‘Police Line—do not cross.’ A few beachcombers huddled next to it, shouting excitedly.
The cops, for their part, yelled the loudest and, to top it off, one of them gave a boisterous sneeze. “Away!” He sneezed. “Go away, y’all!”
Meanwhile, four men hobbled across the slippery sand dunes, carrying some burden. Oh, that was the body. Having finished taking pictures of it, they started to carry it away. They balanced it this way and that—until finally, at the risk of tipping over, they managed to load it onto a stretcher.
Farther behind, a cop tried to find a foothold between one rock and another. He kept marking the outline of the body with a chalk. A wave here, a wave there, kept licking at it, erasing the marks.
TV cameramen, shouldering heavy video equipment, tread on both sides of the yellow strip, and so did police photographers. They hopped gingerly about, in an attempt to preserve the traces in the sand, as well as any other evidence that might have been strewn around.
His shoes was nowhere in sight, so Michael started climbing back. This time he chose a different trail, which passed by the Las Brissas restaurant.
And there, next to an outdoor sink, stood an old man, naked from the waist up. He turned on the rusted faucet and cupped his palms under the drizzle of brown water. Then he poured it all over his leathery, sun-beaten shoulders. Slowly, meticulously, he went through his ritual as if no one else was there, no one else existed.
His profile seemed familiar. It was he—the old man whom he had spotted last night on the bench, the one who had gazed away into the erased horizon. Despite his tattered pants, or maybe because of them, he looked like an old prophet. And when he talked, he sounded like an English professor, one that had gone mad.
“You know,” he grumbled. “Somehow, I doubt that a goddess could be born out of sea foam.”
Michael shrugged. “It’s just a story. Which makes it all the more beautiful than what’s real.”
“You believe in love?”
“I do.”
“Do you? Fools like you deserve to be lied to!”
Michael turned his back on him, when without a warning, an arm came over his head and coiled around his neck, pressing in the point of a knife.
“I know why you’re here,” said the old man. “It’s the shoes.”
Michael twisted this way and that to avoid the being stabbed. It was at this point that he spotted the shoes. The old man was wearing them. In their polish, you could spot a reflection of his tattered pants.
The old man bellowed, “You came here—admit it!—to take them away.”
Michael bent over backwards to distance himself, as much as he could, from the sharp edge. “They got soaked last night, so I have no use for them anymore. Let me live—”
With ferocious laughter, the old man stamped his foot. Then he pushed Michael down to his knees on the damp ground, next to the trace he left, a unique zigzag trace of the sole. “They’re mine now!” he cried. “The shoes are mine. In the name of holy insanity!”
“I’m sure they are.”
“I know you. I was you.”
“Who am I?”
“You are the man who knows not his neighbor,” said the man. His voice had a deep resonance, even though it cracked from time to time. “You are the man who spits in the face of his father. You are the man of career.”
Biding his time, Michael waited for an opportunity to grab that knife. Meanwhile, he had no choice but to play along. “I hold a job.”
The man started pacing around him. His beard, gray streaked with white, flapped around his mouth. “You are on this earth for success—I, for survival. Curse the damn shoes!”
“Yes. Curse the damn shoes.”
“What size are they?”
“Size 11.”
“Too small for me.” The old man lowered the blade. “Even so, they’re better than nothing. Better a blister in a tight shoe than the bite of cold air.”
Michael was just about to leap for the knife when in a blink, the old man lost his hold on it. Catching a glint of light, the blade twisted in the air and fell to the ground, clinking.
To protect himself from a second attack, Michael lunged for the knife, but by now it had rolled down the slope into the side of the trail.
Meanwhile, the old man trampled over him, shaking his empty hand. “I am the Fool of fortune!” he screeched, over the squeak of the soles. “In the name of everything I lost! Family, and prosperity, and home! And the sweet, sweet lies of love!”
At last, he staggered away, laughing like a madman. Danger was gone.
Michael found himself feeling lucky, oh so lucky to be alive.
Then came the gunshot.
❋
The cop lowered his revolver, shouted at the crowd, and sneezed. Another cop came running up to the old man, who was sprawled on the ground, his breath fluttering painfully in his throat, and tied his hands behind his back.
Having frisked him, the first cop took possession of his knife. “No other weapons on him.”
And the other cop said, “Homeless nuts such as this one should rot in jail. Who knows how many more people he’s threatened with that knife!”
Meanwhile, a stretcher appeared out of nowhere. A team of paramedics lifted the unconscious old man onto the stretcher. They cut open his pants at the knee to cleanse the gunshot wound and apply bandages. Then they carried him away.
With him, went Michael’s good pair of shoes. They could have cost that crazy fool his life.
By now, the crowd had thinned out. Police photographers were preparing to leave the scene. Some of them started carrying their equipment away. Others were still milling about, watching the digital display of their cameras, making sure they had gotten everything just right before saving their work for good, which gave Michael an idea, a terrific idea of how he could advance his simulation.
Why not get these photographs by hacking remotely into their data banks?
The information he had gotten out of zooming those Google Earth views had been a good beginning. But without footprints, actual footprints from last night, it was insufficient. The gory sight of the body compelled him to look for the identity of the killer.
Besides, he was consumed by a competitive drive. Could he figure out what had happened faster than the police?
Chapter 6
When Michael Morse arrived at the top of the hill, where a panoramic view of the Laguna Beach spread before him, there was Ash. This used to be their place for long walks, so it didn’t surprise him to find her coming back. What surprised him was the broad smile on her face. Was she waiting for him?
Ash reached over and touched her cheek to his. “All I could think about since this morning was your kiss. So gentle.” She blushed. “So tender.”
He ran his hand through her short, silky hair, loving the feel of it between his fingers. As his hand slipped from the bangs over her forehead down to her delicate earlobe, Ash held back her breath for a moment, only to utter a moan.
Then, when she opened her eyes, they clouded with worry at seeing the two cops, far down them below them.
“What did they want with you?” she asked.
“It’s the old man they wanted,” he said. “It was quite a spectacle, you should’ve been there!”
“From up here, I could barely understand what was happening.”
“He screeched like a madman and came at me with a knife, which is why they shot him.”
“Are you hurt?” she cried. “Did he want to kill you?”
&nb
sp; “Not really,” he said. “All he wanted was to keep the shoes.”
“What shoes?”
“The ones he stole from me.”
“What, in broad daylight?”
“No, it was at night that he stole them.”
She raised an eyebrow, so he went on to explain, “I went to the beach last night. When I came out of the water, my shoes were no longer there.”
“What a coincidence!” she said. “Aside from the theft of your shoes, there was another crime that happened here last night. I heard it in the news, earlier.”
“A crime?”
“A Murder.”
“Ash, I saw it.”
She locked her gaze with his and without words, something passed between them, which made him correct himself. “I mean, what I saw was not the murder, but the victim.”
“It’s that girl, Lace, isn’t it,” said Ash, without raising the pitch of her voice to a question.
Every muscle in him tightened. “I found her with her throat slashed.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“No, my cellphone fell into the water.”
“Did you tell the cops about it, just now?”
He shook his head, no. “They didn’t ask, I didn’t tell.”
She gasped. “Are you out of your mind? When they find out—and they will, sooner or later—”
“Oh, they won’t—”
“Sure they will! And when they do, Michael, they’re going to accuse you, simply because you held back what you know. ‘No alibi for the time of the murder. Suspect hid vital information from police.’ How would you like that? ‘Cause that’s what’s coming your way!”
“So you say.”
“So it is!” Ash contemplated the situation for a moment. “And on a different note, d’you think the old man had anything to do with the murder? Could he have done it?”
“That I doubt,” he said, even though the base of his neck still felt the pressure, or rather a memory of the pressure from the old man’s knife. “But from what the cops said, he’s their main suspect, not only for attacking me but for killing Lace. They’re heading to the hospital to interrogate him.”
“Why?”
“Because, they looked at the soles of those shoes and matched them to the traces along the trail.”
“I see.”
“What?”
She turned her face away from him. “You’ve been hiding information not only from police but also from me.”
To save face with her, Michael had to come clean. “I was following Lace,” he admitted. “That evening I was following her for a while. She reminded me of you.”
“Oh.” Her eyes lit with a green flare, which could not be mistaken for anything other than jealousy. “Please, don’t give me that.”
“I sensed that she was in trouble.”
“Oh, so to save her, you put yourself in the same tight spot?”
How could Michael explain that the foot tracks he had left behind were meaningless—no, more than that—misleading? That old fool had stolen a good pair of shoes that to his misfortune, placed him smack in the middle of the murder scene. The cops were going to arrest him. Was he the right man for the wrong clue?
Ash softened her voice. “Can we help the old man, without turning you into a suspect? Can we free him, without sending you to prison?”
“Not a chance. The shoes are my size, not his.”
For a moment, silence fell between them.
At last, “We don’t have much time,” he said. “It won’t be long before the cops figure out the rightful owner of the shoes.”
“They’ll come after you, soon.”
“Do you trust me?”
“I trust no one,” she stressed, “but you.”
Michael Morse pulled her to his breast, and was just about to brush his lips agains hers when all of a sudden, his cellphone came alive. It started buzzing incessantly.
He glanced at it before silencing the interruption. The number seemed familiar. Yes, he knew who the caller was, knew him even though they had never made actual contact. It was Dr. Michael Foreman, the brain surgeon whom he had wished to consult, back when Ash had been in a coma.
At the time, getting a second opinion on her behalf had seemed like a good idea. Yet, in the realm of good ideas it had been destined to remain. Being merely a boyfriend, not a next-of-kin, had prevented Michael Morse from obtaining her medical records. Without these, he couldn’t bring himself to make the call.
The cellphone continued to vibrate for an endless minute in his chest pocket. Why was Dr. Foreman calling him? How did he even know about his existence?
How did he manage to get his number?
No matter. Michael had no more need for advice, no need for a second opinion. After all, Ash had awakened back to life. Here she was, in his arms, and nothing else mattered. He combed her hair with his fingers, bringing her ever so closer, feeling her heart pounding against his.
This time his kiss wasn’t soft, nor was it tender, but by her clinging to him he knew that it thrilled her down to her toes.
“I’m not going to explain anything right now.” Michael released her from his arms and got into his car. “Come over to my place tonight and all will be revealed.”
❋
Back at work, the secretary glanced at her watch. Perhaps she noted that he was an hour late coming back from his lunch break.
“Wait!” she said. “I have a message for you. The president will be coming to your office, any minute now, to get a demo of your virtual reality work. You ready?”
“Anytime,” said Michael.
Up to this point, he had been planning on retrieving photographs from police data banks and incorporating them into his model, on top of the information he had already garnered from Google Earth views. Now, the prospect of being interrupted in the middle of his investigation made him cautious.
He could not allow his constructed murder scene to be seen in its present shape, not only because bringing in police data might be considered an unauthorized hacking activity that violates cyberspace security but also because in his eyes, Mr. Armstrong was himself a possible suspect.
Mr. Armstrong should not see things as they were. Before he put on the headset, before its lenses come into contact with his eyes and open them to that virtual hillside, the view should be masked.
The first thing Michael had to devise was smoke and mirrors.
He opened his office door. The computer screen was dark, just as before. At the touch of his thumb, Laguna Beach swung around and came into view, its contours hanging over the shoreline with cliffs here, valleys there.
He put on his virtual reality headset and found himself standing there, on the familiar trail, watching the ocean in one layer of his vision, his office door in another.
“Inflate,” he said.
In a blink, the contours of the topography around him started stretching in some places, contracting in others. The higher elevations shot up to the sky, raising the hilltop to a sharp new height. The lower ones sank down, deep below the shoreline.
Now the glinting blue surface, simulating water, started flowing away from the magnified cliffs and into the newly created ravines. The view was no longer recognizable as Laguna Beach. Its heightened contrasts suggested an alien world, one where war games would be fun to play.
“Bring in the bombers,” said Michael.
Four Northrop Grumman B-21 Raiders materialized out of thin air. Their capacity of delivering air-to-ground weaponry was indicated by the dusting of pixels around their cargo area. They hovered with a constant, yet barely audible buzz at four points around the dome of the sky, which started at the ceiling of the office.
Now he was ready for Mr. Armstrong.
Chapter 7
Tapping his fingers impatiently across his computer screen, Michael wanted to get the imminent meeting with Mr. Armstrong over with as fast as possible.
Absentmindedly, Michael took off his headset, then put it b
ack on, restoring his dual vision to see both the real and the virtual. One of the bombers he had conjured earlier appeared in the clouds, just over his office door. Just beneath the belly of the aircraft, an LED display changed digits, counting time since its creation, counting it to the subtle sound of ticking, ticking, ticking away.
An hour passed. Michael began to wonder if Mr. Armstrong was ever going to come. Perhaps something else grabbed his attention. Perhaps he forgot.
Out of curiosity, Michael stepped out of the office, and it was only when he got to the lobby, where the president was standing between two cops, that he asked himself, had they been interrogating him?
“She was seen here yesterday,” said one cop.
“Was she, really?” asked the president.
“We need all the footage from your security cameras, the ones that cover the parking lot.”
“Giving it to you may violate the privacy of some of my employees. Let me think about it.”
“This is not a request, Mr. Armstrong. It’s a demand.”
“Of course.” The president sounded none too happy to comply. “Let me call the security company in charge of these cameras.”
The cops followed him into the executive office. Meanwhile, Michael went back down the corridor.
He was determined to start his fine-tuning work. Even if interrupted, he could turn off the virtual simulation just in time, before anyone could take in the murder scene. Or so he hoped.
His model looked barren, somehow. Sooner or later he had to populate it with figures, so why not start with the one that made him most curious?
“Create woman,” he said. “Name her Lace.”
A slender figure appeared. It was made of wire, so as not to waste computer memory on body type and facial recognition and not to slow down movement computations.
Virtually Lace Page 4
