“I was just getting started,” Carla says. “You didn’t even let me get to the barnyard.”

“Spare me the muskrat love, okay?”

Carla hits a button and, in one of the six frames on the screen, the two of them appear. Carla looks stunning, even in the shitty light. Paris looks like he needs a shave, a haircut, and two months’ sleep.

“Most pay sites let you watch, without having a camera of your own,” says Carla. “But most individuals who cruise the Net insist that you have your own web cam.”

“So, what you’re saying is that Fayette Martin perhaps subscribed to one of these pay-per-view sex lines?”

“Perhaps.”

“And that our actor perhaps worked for that sex line?”

“Perhaps.”

“How would we find out which one she may have used? Are these sessions set up over the phone like phone sex?”

“Know a lot about phone sex, do ya, Jack?”

“Not a thing,” Paris lies, knowing full well that he had once rung up a ninety-six-dollar call one Friday night when the Windsor Canadian had a choke hold on his libido. “I read a lot.”

“Well, Internet sex is a little different than phone sex. Most of it is set up online. You click onto a site, give them your Visa or MasterCard number, and they let you in for x amount of minutes, hours, whatever.”

“But there won’t be a phone record?”

“Afraid not. Every time you log on you are given something called an IP address, which is unique to your computer until you log off. So the Internet service provider might have a record of where Fayette Martin went online the night she was killed. I’ll look into it. Most of the pay-per-view male solo performance stuff is gay. But if there’s an adult site that offers solo male performances geared to the heterosexual female, I’ll find it.”

“When do you think that might be?” Paris asks, then immediately regrets it. Carla gives him the look that probably makes her husband Charles—all five-six and one hundred forty pounds of him—roll over, cut the grass, fix the sink, and take out the garbage. Before breakfast.

“When it is, detective.”

Luckily, for Paris, at that moment Matt Sullivan sticks his head in the room. Tall and fair-haired, Matt is the youngest detective in the Homicide Unit at twenty-nine. “You guys hear what happened in Cleveland Heights?”

“What happened?” Paris asks.

“They found a body in Cain Park. Male white. Shot in the head. Hands are gone. Some kids were sledding, saw a foot sticking out of the snow.”

Paris and Carla exchange a glance, the sage look of two veteran cops who know that when hands are missing, someone is serious about delaying identification. However, the challenge of solving this particular murder would never engage them officially. This body belongs to the Cleveland Heights PD.

“Teeth intact?” Carla asks.

“No idea.”

“How long was the body there?” Paris asks.

“A couple days, I guess. Snowstorm covered it completely.”

“No ID at all, eh?”

“None,” Matt says. “John Doe, so far. Body’s on the table now.”

“Shit,” Paris says. “And here I was thinking of moving to Cleveland Heights.”

“The whole world’s a zone, Jack,” Matt replies. “See ya.”

Matt Sullivan moves down the hall as Paris absorbs the information for a moment, then looks back at the monitor screen. Mercifully, his hangdog video image is gone. “Is it possible to go to one of these sex sites now?”

Carla laughs. “I can do better than that,” she says, reaching under the desk and producing a rectangular, soft nylon shoulder bag. She puts the bag on her lap and unzips it. Inside is a laptop computer. Carla flips it open. “I loaded all the software you need, and the laptop has a built in camera. Sign it out and take it home, get familiar with it.”

“I have no idea how to use any of this, Carla.”

Carla reaches into another of the bag’s many pockets and produces a thin manual called Web Cam for Dummies. She hands it to him, along with a look that dares him to say he is incapable of learning from any book with the word dummies in the title.

The two of them stare at the Christmas tree.

“There’s no way that’s three feet,” Paris says. “Is it, Manny?”

Manny, at just under twelve inches tall, is an expert in only the first few feet of tree trunks. He cocks his head, glances back, as if to say that a scrawny tree like this isn’t even worthy of him lifting his leg.

Paris rummages in a kitchen drawer, finds his tape measure. He squats next to the tree and measures. Thirty-four inches. He knew it. Then he notices the snap-on plastic base in the box. He attaches it to the bottom of the tree and remeasures. Thirty-six on the button.

“Man oh man. Can’t even give you an extra freakin’ inch, can they? Some spirit of giving.”

Manny barks once, clearly in agreement.

The two of them set about the task of decorating the tree, with Manny shuttling individual ornaments from the box in the dining room, dropping them gently at his master’s feet, and Paris trying to find a spot for them. Small tree, big bulbs. In the end, Paris manages to fit only ten or twelve ornaments on the tree and, although the scale makes it look a little ridiculous, and the green of the branches is a shade not to be found anywhere in nature, when he plugs in the lights, it makes the corner of the apartment suddenly come aglow with a toasty radiance.

Not bad, Paris thinks. Not bad at all.

He puts the small star on the tree. Manny wags his stub of a tail.

And it is officially Christmas Eve.

30

It is Christmas Eve and I am in the white room. I have one session left, something set up weeks ago. A woman who, were I not so embroiled in my current activities, I would pursue mightily. She is divorced, in her mid-thirties. Or at least that is the role she is playing. We have had two sessions; both with her watching me.

Tonight, though, she has promised to appear on camera, to show herself to me.

I am in the white room early, nearly beside myself in anticipation. When the video stream opens at eight o’clock I see her for the first time. She is sitting in a desk chair, wearing a dark scoop-neck dress. Behind her, a bedroom.

She leans forward, tilts the camera slightly upward so that I may see her pretty face. In doing so, I am privy to a maddening few inches of cleavage. It appears as if she is wearing a black lace push-up bra.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello.”

She sits back, crosses her legs. I can now see the hem of her dress, a hint of her slip. “Merry Christmas.”

“And the same to you,” I say. Her hair is a light color, strawberry blond perhaps.

“Do you like what you see?” she asks.

“Very much.”

“Do you feel it was worth waiting for?”

“Yes.”

“If I can get away, I will be at Jayson’s on Chagrin Boulevard in one hour,” she says. “Do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“I will save the seat next to me until ten.”

“I understand.”

She stands, unzips her dress, slips out of it. She is wearing a black bra, matching slip. She turns to the side, places one of her spike-heeled shoes on the computer chair and adjusts what I can now see is a thigh-high nylon.

Then, incredibly, she turns off her camera and closes the session.

Is she baiting me?

I look at my image reflected in the now-black monitor. The reflection tells me the truth.

It is a mistake.

This is my chorus as I shower, shave, dress, and head for Jayson’s.

She is nowhere to be seen. The Christmas Eve crowd is thin, just a handful of couples scattered around the room, invisible in their sameness; just a pair of Asian businessmen at the far end. I sit at the bar, near the door, sip my Ron Rico, wonder. Perhaps she had car trouble. Perhaps she was in an accident. Perhaps her husband had intervened.

Perhaps I have no business doing this when I am so close to my goal.