Free Body Work by Sara Paretsky Page A

deployed, they couldn’t understand why Chad was so angry all the time when he got home, so he kind of lost touch with them. The guys he sees now, they’re Army buddies he picked up after he got home last summer. Most of ’em I don’t know, but Tim Radke, he’s the one who called me after he heard about Chad. He’s the one said they’d been at a bar.”
    Vishneski didn’t know Radke’s number, but maybe Mona would. I asked if there were any women in Chad’s life, not counting Nadia Guaman, whose connection to Chad we were tiptoeing around.
    “He dated a sweet gal in high school, but she married someone else while he was overseas. Since he got home, I don’t think he’s been meeting any women. But his ma would know. You ask Mona when you talk to her.”
    Women are the repository of personal details in the lives of all who intersect their worlds. Even my own brief husband had expected me to know his clients’ and his parents’ birthdays.
    Back in my office that afternoon, I typed up all my notes from the day and entered them into everyone’s separate case files—which I religiously backed up on a portable drive as well as the office backup drive.
    Oh, the computer age. It’s been good for me, in a way. I used to write my notes on scraps of paper and lose them in the landfill on my worktable. Now everything’s tidily laid out in my Investigator’s Casebook spreadsheets, which automatically updates my handheld. Something’s missing, though: the personal touch on archives. You see things when you’re handling documents that you miss on the World Wide Web.
    The winter evening had closed in on the city hours ago. I felt cold and lonely in my office, although my leasemate was still hard at it with a blowtorch across the hall. If we still lived in caves, we’d be asleep, not driving ourselves to work in the dark.
    I logged on to the Body Artist’s website, embodiedart.com . It opened to the slide show I’d seen on the screens at Club Gouge—the eye winking down at her vulva, the jungle scenes up her spine. The Middle Eastern music twanged with the changing screens.
    The text, which was also disquieting, changed along with the pictures:
What, is thy servant a dog that she should do this thing?
My eye winks at my muff, my beaver, my little animal
The Female of the Species is Deadlier than the Male
    The bashful audience member, drawing a few squiggly lines, a few people attempting actual figurative work with varying degrees of success, were staples of the shows. And so was Rodney. You didn’t actually see him stride up to the stage, his paunch swaying slightly with his rolling gait, but you almost always saw the crude sets of letters and numbers on the Body Artist’s buttocks.
    I found one of Nadia’s drawings, the pink-and-gray scrolls, the woman with a slash down the middle of her face, and tried to print out a copy of that, and of Rodney’s crude work. Unfortunately, the Artist had a slick print-protection feature built into her site: all you got was the text around the edge of the page, not the picture itself. You had to pay fifty dollars to print your own version; seventy-five would get you a signed print from the Artist. Two hundred, and it would arrive framed.
    I copied down Rodney’s contributions. “C-I,” he wrote on one occasion. “3521986 !397844125” on another. “L-O 6221983 !4903612.” I looked at five different examples of Rodney’s work. Each entry had a set of numbers separated by an exclamation point, but, other than that, I couldn’t see what they shared. The strings of numbers weren’t the same length from entry to entry.
    I wondered if they might be phone numbers, perhaps for disposable phones in an overseas market. Europe doesn’t share our fixation with the ten-digit phone number. Or perhaps Rodney was a spy for a burglary ring and used the Body Artist to broadcast safe combinations. Or he’d picked pockets at the club and was relaying credit card numbers. No matter what