Free The Upright Man by Michael Marshall Page B

Sexual was private, a personal assault: public said “Look, Universe, at what I have done.” It was outward-directed, some magical statement designed to change the world. Or so it seemed to her.
    “A hard disk,” Monroe said. “A small one, like in a laptop. One of the techs recognized it before it was even out of her head.”
    “No prints?”
    He shook his head. “Clean. But someone in a lab is finding what else it can give us. There’s a serial number, for a start. It came from somewhere, was bought somewhere. And there may be something left on it, of course. We’ll know tonight.”
    He caught the expression on Nina’s face this time. “He left it there for a reason, Nina. Let’s get back to work.”
    He stood up, thumb already dialing another number on his cell. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She wouldn’t want to beCharles Monroe’s phone, Nina thought. That was a job for a phone with tough abs.
    She drained the rest of her coffee, aware of his eyes on her, critical. “What, Charles?”
    “How’s your arm holding out?”
    “Fine,” she said irritably. He wasn’t asking about her arm. He was reminding her of unfinished business and of why their professional relationship had taken its second turn for the worse. She got the message. “Good as new.”
    He looked like he was going to say something else but then got an answer on his cell and turned and strode away, already in midflow. Someone was learning just what a damn fine SAC Monroe was; how in control, how just right on top of things.
    As she followed him, Nina checked her own phone for something like the twentieth time. She saw there was a text message from Zandt, at last, and quickly called it up.
    It said: I’m in Florida.
    “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered, then stuffed the phone back in her bag and walked back out into the heat.

C HAPTER FIVE
    I CHECKED INTO THE A RMADA ON P OWELL , IN downtown San Francisco not far from Union Square. It was appealingly expensive and had a guy dressed as a Spanish soldier standing on the pavement outside. Passing tourists were taking photographs of each other with him, presumably so that back home they could tell their friends that here they were, with a guy in a costume, outside a hotel they weren’t staying in. By the time I was settled it was too late to do the big thing on my agenda, so I went for a walk instead.
    As I walked I thought about what I knew, which boiled down to this: I had been wrong about just about everything to do with my life. I had believed I’d been born to Don and Beth Hopkins in northern California, where they had been living well-tempered lives of average tedium. They mowed the yard and kept the car clean and they bought enough material goods to keep the gods of commerce smiling upon them. My father built up a realty business and, after I’d left home, had continued to enjoy some success as a broker of luxury houses until a car crash had taken both of their lives. But on the day after their funeral, when I’d gone to their house to try to understand what I was supposed to do about it, I’d found a message. It had been hidden in such away as to draw the attention only of someone who knew my father very well.
    The message had said, simply, that they weren’t dead.
    This is the news everyone wants to hear—everyone, that is, whose relationship with their parents is marred merely by distance—and it was enough to make me spend the afternoon searching their house. I found the videotape my father had sealed into a VCR in his study, and this ultimately led to my discovering just how wrong I had been about my life. Wrong—or deliberately misled.
    I had thought I was an only child. A section in the video showed me with a brother of the same age, a brother deliberately abandoned on a city street, somewhere back in the late 1960s.
    I had thought my parents’ death had been an accident. They weren’t my parents and it wasn’t. They had been murdered by the group my natural father had