Play dead

FORTY-EIGHT

Jessica stood outside Eve Galvez's apartment. It was a small suite on the third floor of a nondescript, blocky brick building on Bustleton Avenue.

She stepped inside, and almost turned the lights on. But then she thought that doing so might be disrespectful. The last time Eve left these rooms she had every intention of returning.

Jessica danced the beam of the flashlight around the space. There was a card table in the dining area, one folding chair, a loveseat in the living room, a pair of end tables. There were no prints or framed posters on the wall, no houseplants, no area rugs. Black fingerprint powder claimed every surface.

She stepped into the bedroom. There was a double bed on a frame, no footboard or headboard. There was a dresser, but no mirror. Jimmy Valentine was right. Eve was a Spartan. The nightstand next to the bed held a cheap lamp and what looked like a photo cube. Jessica glanced in the closet: a pair of dresses, a pair of skirts. Black and navy blue. A pair of white blouses. They'd all been taken off the hangers, searched, and carelessly replaced. Jessica reached inside, smoothed the clothing, more out of habit than anything else.

The entire apartment was tidy, almost sterile. It seemed that Eve Galvez didn't so much live here as stay here.

Jessica crossed the bedroom, picked up the photo cube. There were pictures on all six sides. One photo showed a picture of Eve at five or so, standing next to her brother on a beach. There was another that had to be Eve's mother. They had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. One looked like Eve in, perhaps, eleventh grade. She was heavier in this snapshot than the others. Jessica turned it over, looked again at all sides. There were no photographs of Eve's father.

Out of habit, or training, or just nosiness that had at least something to do with her becoming a police officer to begin with, Jessica shook the cube. Something inside rattled. She shook it again. The rattle was louder. There was something inside.

It took a few moments, but she found the way to open it. Inside was a ball of tissue and a plastic object, perhaps two inches long by a half inch wide. Jessica put her flashlight beam on it.

It was a USB flash drive, the kind that plugs into a port on a computer. It was not labeled or marked in any way. Jessica saw the print powder on the cube, so she knew someone at CSU had touched this. She looked inside the cube again. The flash drive had been wrapped in the tissue. Jessica understood. Eve had hidden it in there and put in the tissue so it would not rattle. She had done this for the possibility of a moment just such as this.

Against her better judgment-in fact, against all the judgment she had-she slipped the flash drive into her pocket, and clicked off her flashlight.

Five minutes later, leaving the apartment virtually the way she had found it, she headed home.

An hour later Jessica sat in the bathtub.

It was Saturday. Vincent had two days off. He had taken Sophie to visit his parents. They would be back Sunday afternoon.

The house had been ghostly quiet, so she had taken her iPod into the tub. When she'd gotten home she'd plugged Eve's flash drive into her desktop computer, and found that there were a few dozen mp3s on it, mostly songs by artists of whom Jessica had never heard. She added some them to her iTunes library.

Her Glock sat on the edge of the sink, right next to the tumbler containing three inches of Wild Turkey.

Jessica turned the hot water on again. It was already almost scalding in the tub, but she couldn't seem to get it hot enough. She wanted the memory of Katja Dovic, and Monica Renzi, and Caitlin O'Riordan to wash off. She felt as if she would never be clean again.

Eve Galvez's music was a mix of pop, salsa, tejano, danzon-a sort of old-time formal Cuban dance music-and something called huayno. Good stuff. New stuff. Different stuff. Jessica listened to a few songs by someone named Marisa Monte. She decided to add the rest of the songs to her iPod.

She got out of the tub, threw on her big fluffy robe and went into the small room off the kitchen they used as a computer room. And it was small. Room enough for a table, chair, and a G5 computer. She poured herself another inch, sat down, selected the flash drive. It was then that she noticed a folder she hadn't seen, a folder labeled vademe- cum. She double-clicked it.

A few moments later, the screen displayed more than two hundred files. These were not system files, nor were they music files. They were Eve Galvez's personal files. Jessica looked at the extensions. All of them were.jpg files. Graphics.

None of the files were named, just numbered, starting with one hundred.

Jessica clicked on the first file. She found that she was holding her breath as the hard drive turned, launching Preview, the default graphic display program she used on her computer. This was, after all, a picture of some kind, and she wasn't all that sure it was something she wanted to see. Or should see.

A moment later, when the graphic showed up the screen, it was probably the last thing Jessica expected. It was the scanned image of a piece of paper, a yellowed, three-holed piece of notebook paper with blue lines, something akin to a leaf from a child's school composition book. On it was a young woman's back-slanted, loopy handwriting.

Jessica scrolled to the top of the file. When she saw the handwritten date, her heart began to race.

SEPTEMBER 3, 1988.

It was Eve Galvez's diary.