Prologue 3

That evening, we started general background searches on both our client and her... his boyfriend.. I called some of my buddies downtown and Ariadne worked her magic on the internet.
We found two Josephine Williams in the city, one Joseph Williams, and three Joe Williams. One Joe Williams was a career criminal -- three convictions for armed robbery -- but with his third strike he was locked up in CAMP, Cabott Arnold Memorial Prison, without parole. One Josephine Williams was a little known porn star, and she had her own website. From her pictured, she was definitely a woman, and definitely didn't fit the description of our client. That left four realistic leads on Jo, as we were beginning to call her. I would follow up with a friend with access to DMV files tomorrow.
Roy Webber was a little easier to find. There was only one of him in the city. He looked like a player. He had two home addresses that he used and six phone numbers. Ariadne identified three of them as cell phones, then there was one for each of his "homes". The last, when we called it, turned out to be a fax machine. Ariadne used our own unlisted cell phone to call all of the numbers. No one answered at any of them. Voice mail or an answering machine picked up on all but one of the cell phones. The home number one, located in Greenvale Park, a ritzy area in the south east part of the city, had a female voice that answered, saying that we had reached the Webber residence and to leave a message. We didn't. The other home number, the address for an apartment in Berton, an economically depressed area right near the downtown center, had a male voice who didn't offer a name, only a repetition of the number we had called. One of the cell phones was for "Creative Enterprises" and the other "Web Incorporated".
Neither phone numbers nor addresses corresponded with any of the information we had for Jo. The home address our client had given us was located in Lowlands, an old suburb bordering Berton. That was as close a connection we had.
After several hours of grinding and tedious work in front of the computer, a melodious beeping came from Ariadne's side of the desks. She pulled her cell phone out of somewhere and answered it.
"Yeah, honey, I'm on my way. Yeah. I just got a new client, so I got a little wrapped up in my work." She laughed. I was a little... no, a lot jealous of her domestic bliss. After a little more chit chat, she packed up her stuff and took off, telling me, like always, not to work too late.
I worked for a few hours more, after which I rubbed the muscles in my face, trying to massage my tired eyes back to life. I didn't have a cute and cuddly family to run off to. I felt like I was missing something in the files. I had it in front of me, but I was too tired to see it. The tiredness was also reinforcing my dark thoughts on my personal life. It was time to take a break.
I pulled on my trench coat and hat and went out for a walk. It was dark and drizzling. The cones of light under the street lamps were filled with silver darts of rain.
I didn't want to go there, but my walk took me to Nora's door.

I stood in the rain, out of the light of the streetlamps, staring at the iron grille of the door into Nora's apartment building. A brass plate on the grille read "499". Some of the windows were brightly lit, some not at all. Nora's window, however, had a very faint light. So faint that it might only be my imagination. It was candlelight, I was sure of it. Nora always lit candles when she took a bath... or when she took a lover.
Jealousy squeezed my heart, a memory of old pain. I wanted to ring the buzzer. I wanted to hear her voice, to see her face, to know which it was. To see if her neck was moist with bathwater or sweat. Her scent would tell me.
I might have taken a step forward, I don't know. But I stopped. I was afraid of her look. Afraid to know the answer.
She would ask me why I hadn't called. I couldn't answer that question. Not because I didn't want to... I did, desperately. But I didn't know the answer.
Instead, I walked away, into the darkness.
The question made me think in other directions. Jo was afraid her... his...her boyfriend was dead or had left her/him. What was Roy afraid of? Was he operating under fear? Had he run away?
I had a feeling that I had something. It wasn't too far of a stretch to surmise this though. Most crimes are rooted in fear -- fear of poverty, fear of rejection, fear of appearing weak, fear of anything, really. The question was, what was Roy afraid of?
I walked around the city and thought through the possibilities for another hour before going back to my apartment. I dumped the old magazines and dirty clothes off the bed and fell asleep with my clothes still on.