The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall

Author:Michael Marshall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Serial murderers, Crime & mystery, Fiction, Modern fiction, Suspense, Adventure, Thrillers, Serial murder investigation, General, Thriller
ISBN: 9780007163946
Publisher: London : HarperCollins, 2004.
Published: 2010-08-21T04:01:10.421000+00:00

—«»—«»—«»—

After she'd gone I made more coffee. It felt good to be in a house, even one as unhouselike as Nina's. In a house you don't have to be spending money or on your best behaviour the whole time. You can just sit around. It's not like that, out there in the world. But I found that having the opportunity to simply hang, unobserved and unbugged by other humans, made me feel a little weird. So I got onto Nina's request.

Before she left I'd copied all the files from the disk she'd been given by Greg McCain. The disk itself was now being taken into the care of the cops, along with the one from Jessica's head. How she was going to explain the former's dog-legged journey I didn't know, and I didn't like the risks she was taking. She was the only one of us still latched into anything real world, and I got the sense she was drifting, like a plug slowly being drawn from a socket. I knew from experience that once this happens the shapes can subtly change, and you may find you don't fit back again. The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs.

First thing I did was watch the movies. They weren't proper, full-motion video, but long sequences of stop frames blipping forward at intervals. There were six. Three showed Jessica having desultory, drunken sex with three different guys: twice on the couch that dominated her tiny living room, once on the bed. The frames were grainy and badly lit and in one case in almost total darkness. There was no attempt to play to the camera, the position of which remained static. It was like watching a Ken and a Barbie being banged together by a child who had no idea what the action was supposed to signify. Time-stamping on all three suggested they captured the very end of evenings spent in bars. One of the other videos showed a four-hour period in which the woman watched television, did some spring-cleaning, played the guitar briefly, and made a half-hearted attempt to put together a not very complicated shelving unit. For most of this period she was wearing a pair of orange shorts, and nothing else. Another showed her sitting doing nothing, apparently in the aftermath of crying. The final video was stop motioned at much longer intervals, about five/ten minutes or so, and showed Jessica asleep on her couch, under a blanket, flicker-lit by the television out of frame. At the end she woke and sat watching it for a while with a cup of coffee. Nina had told me Jessica was in her late twenties. In the awake portion of this video, she looked about forty-five.

Then I worked through the stills. There were an awful lot of them. McCain had thrown them all into one big folder. I dropped this onto a graphics viewer and clicked through some examples at random.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.