Flashback

Getting down on his hands and knees, Nick looked under the bed and under the desk, pawing through the mess. He found the old phone between the faux wood and the wall baseboard where someone had knocked it off the back of his desk.

Please God, tell me it’s not broken.

As usual, God did not deign to tell Nick Bottom anything.

The phone’s scratched screen lit up, but only to inform him that the long-term battery was too weak to run the old phone.

Nick again looked through all the junk removed from his room’s various drawers until he found the charger- adapter for his own phone. Nick and Dara had bought their phones at the same time; the charger fit both.

The files had closed and reencrypted at the power-down so Nick had to reenter the dream password.

Eight-to-five odds that the password won’t work for me.

But it did.

Nick went to the massive video files, hoping to see Dara. Even though he’d visited her for hours every night and day of his life for the past five and a half years—this past week excepted—his heart pounded wildly at the thought of seeing new video of her.

She wasn’t there.

But Danny Oz was. And Delroy Nigger Brown. And Derek Dean. And Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. And two dozen other talking heads, all familiar to Nick Bottom through the homicide investigation of Keigo Nakamura’s messy murder.

The missing last hours of Keigo’s documentary.

Nick didn’t even ask himself—yet—how Dara could have gotten a copy. Unless she was the murderer. He shut that problem out for now and flicked through the video-recorded interviews, too impatient to listen to them in their entirety, but jumping from interview subject to interview subject.

It was there. Something incredible was there.

Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev talking about the laboratories in Nara in Japan where flashback had really been invented and the larger, newer laboratories outside Wuhan and Shantou and Nanjing in China that would be producing the Flashback-two. Noukhaev smiling and talking about distribution networks flowing from Japan and reaching everywhere—just as they had for fifteen years now.

Nick jumped from person to person, hearing Keigo’s distant voice asking the questions—only the answers were to be in his documentary—and while most of the questions and answers were like the billionaire’s son’s earlier recorded footage, there were new parts—hints—clues—which began to come together for Nick, even hearing only fragments and unrelated snippets.

This footage alone might help him understand what Keigo Nakamura had been doing with his goddamned documentary—if not who murdered him for it—before Nick’s meeting with Nakamura later this afternoon or evening.

Of course, Nick realized, if he was still here when it came time for that meeting, he probably would have lost everything anyway. The trick was not to solve Keigo Nakamura’s murder after six years of both it and Nick being lost in the cold file, the idea was to get his son and father-in-law and to get away.

Even if, unlike in his dream that morning, there was no place to get away to. The Republic of Texas didn’t take in wanted felons—and he would be such by the time he got to any border—much less wanted felons and their sons and fathers-in-law.

Nick closed out the video and used the second password—Kildare—to open the text files.

The first ones, made about two months before Keigo’s murder, made Nick stop breathing.

It was not a long or thick text file, despite the fact that it covered the last seven months of his wife’s life. She’d made only a few notes for him (or for herself?) in the weeks before and after Keigo’s death, and then almost none through the winter months until just the days before her own death.

Nick didn’t skip through these files as he had through the videos. He read them straight through…

… participation of Homeland Security and the FBI, but Mannie Ortega is keeping it within his department…

… Harvey doesn’t want to lose the time with his family, but he sees it as a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity…

… if I could only tell Nick, but I’ve sworn to both my boss and my boss’s boss, in writing, that this will stay quiet until…

… speculating on her motives won’t help, Harvey keeps saying, but those motives still seem important to me since we’re all taking such risks with…

… the DA thinks another week before we bring the witness home, or rather the Feebies or Homeland Security or the CIA does, but Harvey’s afraid that if they wait too long, even with all the video and audio recordings we have, it might be…

… Love? A sense of betrayal? How can someone who loves someone—two someones—so very much do such a thing to them? Ortega and Harvey aren’t interested, but the question consumes me. If I only could talk to Nick about…

… to love two men so much in such different ways is possible, but to be pulled between them the way she’s been is terrible…

… the murders would seem to me to change everything, but Ortega insists, and I think Harvey agrees, that they change nothing. It hurts me inside to watch Nick working so hard, not knowing what Harvey and I have been up to right under his nose…

… sometimes I just want to leave Nick a note—real name Kumiko Catherine Catton —and see what happens. But I can’t…

… just reading her transcripts makes me miss and love my own father more, as weird as he is. I have to give him a call tonight, wish him Happy New Year at least…

… what Ortega says just isn’t acceptable to me. Harvey’s going to go along with it. He tells me that all this sneaking around has almost cost him his marriage already and that his kids don’t recognize him when he come home, but down deep I think he agrees with me that we can’t end it like this. Not like this. I’m supposed to sneak away to spend time with Harvey tomorrow at the Denver motel where we keep the stuff and he insists it’s the last time for us there, but I won’t accept that. I’ve told him I won’t. I told him that I’d go to Nick with the whole sad, sick story unless we found a way to carry on…

Nick wiped tears from his eyes and read it through. To the last fragmented, incomplete entry, made by a woman who didn’t know she was going to die the next day.

How many of us do? wondered Nick. Know we’re going to die the next day.

Or this evening?

When his phone rang, Nick almost jumped out of his skin. He’d been watching the videos and reading Dara’s notes for forty-five minutes. Poor Leonard must think that he’d been forgotten down there at Dr. Tak’s.

“Nick Bottom,” he answered but there was no one there and the caller ID was blocked in that way that prepaid phones worked.

Well, realized Nick, setting his phone back in his jacket pocket, Leonard had been forgotten. This data on Dara’s old phone changed everything, all right. Nick felt the old gears begin to work the way they’d used to for him, in Major Crimes Unit and before… the pieces coming together, the full picture of the puzzle being assembled.

It was all there. He wiped away more tears and cursed himself for a blind fool.

It had always been there. All of it. Dara had tried to tell him without telling him. And he’d been too full of his own ambition and self-centered game of playing cop twenty-four hours a day to really listen to her, to really look at her.

The first thing he had to do, even before fetching Leonard, was to e-mail the full contents of Dara’s text notes and the video to all the people he trusted in this world.

After two minutes of thinking in the silence, he came up with five names. Then, after more hard thinking, two more, including CHP Chief Dale Ambrose. K.T. was on the list… but it also had to go to people with better connections, people beyond the reach of those who’d reached Nakamura and Harvey Cohen and Dara Fox Bottom