FROM: LadyDayFan

Looking at the article, it seems clear that Charlie Ruff is really dead.

FROM: Vikram

What difference does that make?

Dagmar’s car was in the part of the parking lot cordoned off by the crime-scene tape. Police cars with flashing lights sat parked in the street. Uniformed officers and detectives clumped in the parking lot, and a photographer’s flash briefly lit the palm trees near the street. An ambulance waited nose-in to the parking lot. Several of Dagmar’s neighbors, none known to her by name, stood outside the tape barrier, impatient to get to work.

“What’s happening? ” she asked.

“Sandy found a body,” someone said.

Dagmar felt her spirits deflate like the air sighing out of a tire. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that this brand-new dead person was not somehow known to her.

A whiff of the ginkgo fruit floated through the air and turned Dagmar’s stomach.

She looked at the detectives for Murdoch but didn’t see him. She called to one of the uniformed officers.

“Can I see the body? ” she asked. “I might know him.”

There was a consultation, and a young detective came over. He was Asian, with bad acne.

“You think you might know the victim? ” he said.

“I know lots of people,” Dagmar said.

“You can’t go too close,” the detective said. “We haven’t finished processing the crime scene.”

He held up the tape so that she could pass under it, and he took her elbow and gingerly took her past the trunk of her white Prius to where the body was visible between an old Buick and a Volvo station wagon.

Dagmar felt her vision narrow, darkness approaching from all directions, just as it had in the morgue.

“I know him,” she said. “Siyed Prasad.”

The detective produced a PDA. With his stylus he tapped a part of the screen that said Record, and then took notes on the screen.

“Could you spell that? ”

Dagmar spelled it.

“Did he live in this building?” the detective asked.

“No. He was an actor flown in for a commercial. I think he was at the Chateau Marmont.”

“Was he from India?”

“No. He was British.”

She kept looking at the body. It was tiny, crumpled between the two cars as if it had fallen there from out of the sky. Siyed wore a white shirt and white Dockers, both soiled with dirt and with blood. One foot was bare, and the sandal lay upside down on the asphalt a few feet away.

“How did you know him?”

For the first time she looked away from Siyed, into the detective’s hardened, acne-scarred face.

“He was stalking me,” she said.

The detective’s expression changed in some unfathomable but definitive way.

For the first time, Dagmar realized that she might be in trouble. There were three bodies, and she was the only connection between them.

If the police thought like police, which they most likely did, she had just jumped the quantum gap from witness to suspect.

“Could you call Detective Murdoch?” she said. “He knows me.”

“Do I need a lawyer?” Dagmar asked.

“Why would you think that?” asked Murdoch.

Dagmar looked at the interrogation room, the plain walls in depressing institutional colors, the metal table with its loops for handcuffs, the poster informing suspects of their rights, and the mirror behind which, if television was to be trusted, there was a camera.

“Why would I need a lawyer?” she repeated. “Let’s just say I’m getting that vibe.”

Murdoch and the Asian cop, whose name was Kim, had asked Dagmar to come to the station and make another statement. She had declined Kim’s offer of a ride and followed him to the station in her Prius. They’d provided the same equipment as last time, the lapel mics, computer, and screen that broadcast her words as text.

Vibe, she saw, was flagged as a suspect word. Vice, vile, and tribe were suggested as alternatives.

This interrogation was different from the other. The detectives were much more interested in her answers, for one thing.

“But,” said Kim, “why would you think-”

“I’m not going to speculate about my intuitions,” Dagmar said. “Why don’t you ask your questions?”

They complied. She told them that she had hired Siyed Prasad for a game called Curse of the Golden Nagi, which had ended five months before in India. She had to spell out nagi and explain what a nagi was. She told them she’d been sexually involved with Siyed but had broken it off when she’d discovered he was married.

“Did that make you angry?” Kim asked.

What the fuck do you think? Dagmar wanted to respond, but she settled for, “Yes.”

There were more questions about the state of her emotions, all of which seemed somehow askew, as if the detectives had never actually experienced emotions themselves and were trying to figure out what they were and how they worked. She began to suspect that her actual feelings meant less than the theory into which they could jack her answers. After a while, she worked out the equation into which they were trying to fit her.

E + R = 3H. In which E was emotion, R rage, and the rest multiple homicide.

She pointed at the transcription machine.

“Just have your transcript read, ‘Shaw shrugs.’ ” She looked at Murdoch. “Why don’t you ask me when I next heard from Siyed?”

Kim seemed a little taken aback by this, but Murdoch, without surprise, replied in his bland professional way.

“All right,” he said. “When did you hear from him next?”

“Just after Austin was killed,” Dagmar said. “Siyed sent me emails saying he was coming to Los Angeles to do a commercial and he wanted to meet me. I told him I wouldn’t be available.”

There was a flicker of interest behind Murdoch’s blue eyes.

“Do these emails still exist?” he asked.

“I think so. I’ll provide copies if so.”

She didn’t think there was anything in the emails that would send her to the gas chamber.

She said that more emails had followed, and phone calls. And a lot of flowers. She said she hadn’t responded to it, or had told Siyed to leave.

“I called his wife,” she said. “I told her that Siyed had gone crazy and that she should call him and get him to come home.” She shrugged. “I guess it didn’t work.”

Kim looked interested.

“Did you tell her that her husband was involved with you?”

“Had been involved,” Dagmar corrected. “And no, I didn’t.” She felt immediately that she’d given the wrong answer. The wronged woman might always make a good suspect.

“It’s possible that she knew anyway,” she said. “Siyed was acting pretty strange.”

Murdoch considered this.

“You didn’t at any time see Siyed in person?” he asked.

Dagmar took a breath. She’d been hoping this question wouldn’t come up.

“Yes,” she said. “A few days ago. He turned up at my apartment and tried to talk to me when I came home from work. I told him to go home, and the next day I called his wife.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me he loved me. He told me he had told his wife about us, but I later learned he’d lied about that.”

“How did that make you feel?” Kim asked.

Again with the feelings, as if they alone would justify a charge of murder.

Act on our feelings, she thought, and who would ’scape hanging?

Dagmar looked at Kim.

“It made me feel terrified,” she said.

“And angry?”

“And terrified,” said Dagmar. “I’d never told him where I lived. He’d tracked me down and ambushed me in my own parking lot.”

There were a few more questions, but they were just variations on the questions the detectives had already asked. She figured they weren’t after clarification; they were just hoping her answers would start contradicting one another, and then they could start picking her story to bits. She stood up.