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RBB [voiceover]: They took us downtown, and as Lieutenant Cosgrove's car moved slowly through the L.A. traffic, I had time to brood on my fix. I wasn't liking what my thinking was coming up with. I well remembered that Lieutenant zeppo had thrown me out of L.A. not even a week ago, and he'd be damned angry to see me back again. I knew that somehow Jason Cranky would find out that I'd violated the terms he set for his attempt to rebuild my life for me back home in New York. And somewhere deep in my gut I knew that the woman sitting next to me knew far more than she had seen fit to entrust to me, and that she had plunged us both into particularly oderiferous used food.
I could feel her staring at me and for a long time I fought the impulse to stare back. I was worried that, if I looked into her eyes, I'd lose my judgment and balance and hardwon cynicism. But the pressure of her unmet gaze was too much for me. I looked up.
RBB: What do you want? This is not the time to talk.
NAMAGOMI: I just wanted to say that I am sorry.
RBB: Let me tell you a little secret: sorry doesn't make bail.
RBB [voiceover]: I had risked meeting her gaze, and talking with her, and to my amazement I'd survived it. But that was a small victory that was no more than a prelude to what I was afraid would be a big and messy war.
At police headquarters, the cops separated us. I saw Namagomi-chan being led down the hallway, looking over her shoulder pleadingly at me. I looked back expressionlessly; for a while at least, each of us was on our own. I did see Lieutenant zeppo, who sneered at me and growled, "I thought you'd screw up, Bernstein." But he walked away, missing his opportunity for a full-scale gloat. Executive Assistant D.A. Jack Wolfman, who had joined the office of the D.A. after the spectacular failure of my last case, came in briefly to where I was being held, read through the file, and made a noise of exasperated disgust. He stalked out and slammed the door behind him.
I sat there, alone, knowing that I was being observed through the one-way glass. I sighed and reached into my jacket pocket for my battered copy of THE FEDERALIST and started to read. The late-eighteenth-century prose soothed my mind, as it always did, and gradually I relaxed. When the door crashed open, I was startled half out of my skin.
ROCHELLE: OK, Bernstein, you brought me a real doozy this time!
RBB [voiceover]: My favorite medical examiner was no longer the most pregnant medical examiner in the western world. She looked good, and her eyes still shone with friendliness and warmth. But she was clutching a thick folder, and under her smile I saw something more, something that caused a cold finger to trace its way down my spine.
RBB: What have you got, Doc?
ROCHELLE: I've got someone or something that should not exist. First of all, this big stiff is just that -- a stiff. There's no trace of him anywhere in our files or in the NCIC data banks. He has no fingerprints at all.
RBB: That's impossible.
ROCHELLE: That's what I thought. And when I checked his skull, I found something truly odd. He was being controlled from outside.
RBB: How?
ROCHELLE: Remember the Delgado experiments in the 1960s? The brain surgeon who wired a bull's brain so that he could stop a charging bull just by transmitting an electrical current into the bull's brain?
RBB: Yes.
ROCHELLE: This stiff's brain is to that bull's brain as a Pentium computer is to your fountain pen. They can be used to do the same thing, but the one is at least a dozen levels of sophistication above the other.
RBB: Weird. Did I kill him, by the way?
ROCHELLE: No. Once he crashed through the window and fell, and we know from forensics that he did that on his own and that it's not your doing or the woman's doing, the cyberneural connection between him and whoever was controlling him broke down. Only a small connection survived the fall, and then it ended, and he died.
RBB: He told me, "Nothing is real ... not even timleary ..." and then he died.
ROCHELLE: Well, that's another weird thing. We've torn apart the house looking for timleary, because the DA's office has had its eyes on him for a long time, and we found only a sophisticated holographic projector and an untraceable cellular phone hookup. He was never there in the house when you were there.
RBB: I see. Why are you telling me all this, Doc?
ROCHELLE: I went to bat for you with Executive ADA Wolfman and Lieutenants zeppo and Cosgrove. I decided to do it as soon as my autopsy on the corpse started turning up weird findings. They're listening to us through the one-way mirror there. You can hear Wolfman swearing now.
RBB: Yes, and he's no better at it than he is at mastering the intricacies of Israeli law and politics.
ROCHELLE: That's his get-out, not mine.
RBB: So ... where does that leave me, and Namagomi-chan?
WOLFMAN [entering the room]: You two are free to go, but let me tell you something, Bernstein.
RBB: I was right about the Law of Return?
WOLFMAN: Shut up. Finish whatever business you have in L.A. and get the hell back to New York and take the lady with you. This comes from way up.
RBB: Jason Cranky?
WOLFMAN: Leave him out of this. It comes from way up. That's all I can tell you.
RBB [voiceover]: He didn't realize it but he had told me a hell of a lot. But I knew that I'd have to give Namagomi a serious grilling, and I wasn't looking forward to the ordeal.
[TO BE CONTINUED....]
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