Flashback

and the co-eds had stated that there’d been a lot of uplight from the street that night, what with all the cars coming and going from Keigo’s party.

But one man, dressed in black, coming down one of those long rappel ropes from a black and silent stealth helicopter? wondered Nick. He had to smile when he imagined any district attorney presenting this James Bond/killer-ninja story to a jury.

He smiled again when he tried to picture the bull-chested mass of Hideki Sato, all dressed up in his ninja-suit and mask, rappelling down a two-hundred-foot-long rope in the night. It had damned well better be a sturdy helicopter.

“Bottom-san, do we await something?” asked Sato from his place just inside the library’s door.

Nick ignored him and ran his finger along the slightly fogged glass of the blastproof, bombproof, bulletproof window. He took the tactical glasses from his pocket and put them on. “You said you have the digital recordings for seven minutes after your Mr. Satoh broke down the door and rushed in to find Keigo’s body. Show me those minutes, please.”

“There were no cameras on this third floor…,” began Sato.

“I know that. I don’t want to be in the re-creation like down below. I just want to see it. Like any video. But I’m interested in a view from an external camera, one as close to this view”—Nick tapped the glass—“as possible.”

“One minute, please,” said Sato and tapped at his phone’s diskey.

Everything shifted again. Suddenly it was night and there was confusion on the dark street three floors below. The viewpoint wasn’t perfect—the camera must be up under the third-floor eaves on the outside of the building— and the effect it created in Nick’s inner ear was that he had instantly swooped up higher and to his right. The exterior cameras were in night-vision mode and things glowed greenly, turning passing headlights into blurred and streaking white-green blobs. Faces of people fleeing the party before the cops arrived were quite visible although the audio pickup would have to be filtered and cleaned up to pull individual voices from the distant babble.

Nick saw an older, bald Naropa Institute savant he recognized, looking cold in his thin cotton robe and rope sandals, running to a waiting van. Four or five of his acolytes, including the sandy-haired Derek Somebody, whom, Nick knew, Keigo had interviewed the day before his death, hurried to keep up.

Derek Dean, thought Nick. The guy’s name was Derek Dean. Shit, I wonder if my passport’s still good. I’ll need it if I go up to Boulder to reinterview him.

Sirens were wailing down Wazee Street now and the rush of people leaving the party became an undignified scramble.

There’s the ex-Israeli poet, Danny Oz, heading for a car with Delroy Nigger Brown. What on earth were those two doing together that night?

Remembering that Delroy was the major street vendor for drugs in this LoDo area, Nick figured that might answer his question. Patrol cars were arriving from opposite directions now and Nick recognized the white-blob faces of several patrolmen whose semi-intelligible reports were the first to be read in the giant pile that would become the K. Nakamura Murder Book. Nick had seen almost everything he’d wanted to see, but he kept the glasses on as the first ambulance arrived and EMTs boiled out of it in a totally unnecessary rush.

“Do I get my gun back?” asked Nick as he kept watching.

“Ah, so sorry,” said Sato. “The weapon you brought to the flashback cave is no longer available. But you have several at your shopping mall home, I trust.”

“What about the cash I had at Mickey’s?”

“So sorry,” repeated Sato. “The money there was left with the proprietor to cover any damages or medical bills for his bouncer.”

“Did you at least keep the flashback vials I bought?” asked Nick, feeling his anger beginning to burn again. If Sato did his Mr. Moto routine with that So sorry one more time, Nick thought he might go for the man’s throat.

“No,” said Sato. “The illegal drugs were also left behind.”

“Well, I’m going to need some of those illegal drugs if I’m going to do the research for the interviews I wanted to do later today,” snapped Nick.

“Whom do you think you will interview today, Bottom-san?”

“Oz, the writer, for sure,” said Nick. “But I want to prepare for the Boulder fruit fly, Derek Dean, and drop in to see my old friend Delroy at Coors Field. That’s three hours there, plus another two or three hours to flash on the reports themselves…”

“Four thirty-minute vials will be made available to you today,” said Sato. “And, of course, this complete video and digital reconstruction is being downloaded to your phone site as we speak.”

Swallowing his anger, Nick was reaching up to pluck off the glasses when he froze in place.

“Stop the recording!” he shouted. “Back it up… no, forward a little… back again… there! Stop!”

Sato put his glasses back on. “What is it, Bottom-san?”

Another patrol car had arrived as well as the unmarked GoMo Volta carrying the two plainclothes detectives on duty that night—Kendle and Sturgis. Cars that had been parked along the curb were driving up on the broad sidewalk to get past the growing cluster of emergency vehicles before they were hemmed in for good. Some people were just running away down the sidewalks to escape before the interviewing and ID’ing of witnesses began.

But Nick was looking at none of this.

Nick’s attention was focused on a small white twin-blob of a forehead and forearm appearing over the top of a parked car half a block to the east.

The lower part of this person’s face was hidden by the forearm and car roof, the person’s hair hidden by darkness, the rest of the form simply not visible.

Dara, thought Nick and felt literally dizzy for a second.

What the hell was his wife doing there that night? This wasn’t possible.

“Sato… forward a bit. Freeze. A little more now. Freeze again. Back…”

“Do you see someone, Bottom-san?”

Nick Bottom thought of his master’s degree work and heard some long-forgotten professor’s voice explaining that five million years and more of evolution had honed a Homo sapiens ability to distinguish a human face, however camouflaged or disguised, from its surroundings. The greatest enemy of man had always been man, said the professor, and the human mind was able to see another human face in even the most visually cluttered and ill-lit surroundings with more accuracy than one would think possible. The first thing a human infant can make out is his mother’s face—more specifically, his mother’s eyes and smile.

Nick saw no eyes or smile on this distant shape, only the white blur of a forehead, the white oblong of a forearm coming out of a dark coat to rest on the roof of a car, but he was certain it was his wife.

Dara?

Nausea and confusion rose in him. His first impulse was to rush Sato, take the big man down through the sheer kinetic energy of his assault, get his pistol, and hold the muzzle against the security chief’s head until he admitted what he’d done here and told Nick why.

Why would they fake this fuzzy image of Dara and insert it in the video?

To get Nick sucked into the investigation. To get him personally involved. To set him up somehow?

“Run it forward again… please,” said Nick.

The forehead bobbed down and out of sight. Was there a second person in the shadows with Dara or just refugees from the party moving past her in a hurry? The dark forms moved out of sight east along the sidewalk. Nick wasn’t even able to make out the form of a woman. His headache had returned and now joined with the sense of vertigo from the glasses to increase his nausea. Could he enhance that first frozen image? Probably, but the recording already looked to be at the end of its pixel-enhancement range for such a distant, dark shot. He could try with these glasses and phone interfaced with his own 3D-high-def displays at home.

He tugged off the glasses and slid them in his pocket. “Nothing. I thought I saw someone… but it wasn’t anyone. I’m tired. I need some rest and to get into the flashback of the interviews and documents.”

“You can take the Honda electric back to your lodging,” said Sato as he led the way out of the library to the foyer.

“So you can show off again by swooping away in your damned Sasayaki-tonbo?