a minute,’ Bobby said. He nodded at the younger cop. ‘Let’s see you take a few steps back, hotshot.’
‘Fuck you,’ the cop said, equably.
The woman was still looking at me. ‘An Internet search was logged yesterday evening,’ she said. ‘Somebody looking for “The Upright Man”. Traced back to your account, and to this hotel. We’re looking for someone by that name.’
‘Not for me?’
‘Until last night I had no idea you even existed.’
‘So why are you looking for The Upright Man?’
‘None of your business,’ the younger cop said. ‘Ma’am, are you going to arrest these assholes or not? I’m really not interested in listening to them otherwise.’
‘Have it your own way,’ I said. ‘You can try to take us in, or you can take a walk. If the former, then, well, you’re welcome to try, but really I can’t advise it.’
The older cop smiled. ‘Are you threatening us, son?’
‘No. I’m too gentle for my own good. But Bobby’s badly socialized. There’s going to be blood all over this parking lot and none of it ours.’
Coat man spoke for the first time.
‘Great,’ he said, wearily. ‘Six hundred miles to talk to a pair of shitheads.’
The woman ignored him. ‘The Upright Man has killed at least four young women, maybe more than that. At the moment he has one who may still be alive and we don’t have very long to find her.’
Bobby stared at her, his mouth slightly open.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Does this mean something to you?’
‘You’re about to be scammed, Nina,’ coat man said. ‘You know what spooks are like.’
Bobby came back to earth enough to close his mouth, but not enough to start a fight. The woman looked at me.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It could be we need to talk.’
The older cop cleared his throat. ‘Ms Baynam, I’m wondering if you really need me and Clyde any more?’
We got a table by the window in the hotel’s excuse for a coffee lounge. The room was large enough, and new-looking, but had all the atmosphere of an empty cookie jar. Bobby and I sat close to the table, with the woman the other side. The guy in the coat – who’d finally been introduced, though only as being LAPD – sat a little distance away, making it clear that in an ideal world he’d be in another state entirely. The local law had already zipped off in their cruiser to eat pancakes and swap tales of how they would have beaten us up given the chance.
I took Bobby’s sheaf of paper and laid it in front of the woman.
‘If you want to know why we were searching for The Upright Man,’ I said, ‘then this is it. Actually we’ve been looking for something else. But this is what we found.’
She quickly read through the three sheets of paper. When she got to the end she handed the papers to the other guy.
‘So what were you looking for?’ she asked.
‘A group of people called The Straw Men,’ I said. ‘Bobby traced a Web site that led to this. Searching for “The Upright Man” was the logical next step. That’s all we know.’
‘This is agency business?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s personal.’
‘There was a LINKS button at the bottom of the last sheet,’ she said. ‘What did that lead to?’
‘What button?’ I said.
‘I found it after you crashed out,’ Bobby said, looking sheepish. ‘Hidden in a chunk of crashed Java code. Should have spotted it earlier.’
‘And where did it go?’
‘Serial killers,’ he said, and at that the man in the coat looked up. ‘Just fan sites. Pages of stuff about guys who kill, laboriously typed up by dweebs without the ambition to become real dangers to society.’
‘Could you show me the first page again?’ the woman asked.
He shook his head. ‘It’s gone. I checked back when I was done looking at fuzzy pictures of wackos. File no longer on the server, presumably moved somewhere else.’
‘You didn’t bookmark the pages it linked to?’
Bobby shrugged. ‘I didn’t see any reason to. All I had was guys with paranoid delusions and a hard-on for serial killers.’
‘It’s a leak,’ the coat guy said, handing the papers back to the woman. ‘Fan sites is right. That’s all this is. Somehow The Delivery Boy’s real name got out, and some psycho wannabe has set this shit up using his name. An interactive experience for people who want to drool over killer stats, complete with spooky moving site address. The net is full of this shit. Cannibal clubs slung up by fucks who can’t earn a five-star badge working at McDonald’s.’
I stared at him: ‘The Delivery Boy?’
‘That’s what the press called the man we’re looking for.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘You’re still looking for that guy?’
‘And will be until he’s dead. Nina, I’m going for a cigarette. Then I suggest we head back to civilization.’
He got up and walked out of the room.
‘He means “apprehended”,’ the woman said, quietly, after he was gone. ‘Apprehended is what he meant.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Bobby said. ‘You ask me, that’s someone who needs keeping on a very tight lead.’
‘What’s the deal with these Straw Men?’ she said.
‘Tell her, Bobby,’ I said, standing up.
‘Take it very easy,’ Bobby said, pointing a finger at me. ‘And remember what I just said.’
I left them and walked out into the lobby. I could see the guy in the coat standing a few yards outside the main doors.
‘You got a cigarette?’
He looked at me for a long moment, then reached into his pocket. When I was lit, we stood in silence for a while.
‘You’re that cop, aren’t you?’ I asked eventually. He didn’t reply. ‘Right?’
‘I was a cop,’ he said. ‘Not any more.’
‘Maybe so. But I was living in San Diego at the time. I read the news. There was one cop in particular, someone who was supposed to be a serial killer hotshot.
