Free Precious Blood by Jonathan Hayes Page A

him.
    She smiled at him and brushed the hair out of her eyes as she sat back and chatted animatedly about her meeting. She hadn’t seen the guy in any of the photos she’d looked at, not felons, not cops. And the IAB detective had made it clear to her just how unlikely it was to be a cop. The computer sketch artist had been to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she wanted to do a master’s in photography. Plus he was really cute! She laid her head against the window, still smiling, and tapped the glass with the back of her ring.
    Precious Blood
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    *
    *

    *
    Jenner knocked softly on the bathroom door.
    “Ana?”
    There was a soft slush of water; he heard her sliding up to sit in the big tub. The wet air trickling out into the hall was fragrant with lemongrass and aloe.
    “Yes?”
    “I have to go out for a little while. Will you be okay?”
    She was silent a second, then asked where he was going.
    “I just have to take care of a couple of things—I’ll be down in your uncle’s studio.”
    “Will you be long?”
    “A couple hours. Just call me if you need me—a friend of mine will be in the hall, in case you need anything. His name is Jun.”
    She said, “Your neighbor, right? My uncle mentioned him.”
    “Yes.”
    She slushed back down. “Okay. Thanks.”
    Across the way, Jun was leaning against the door frame, eating Lucky Charms from the box. He was wearing surfer shorts, his fake dreadlocks gathered under a big green wool tam.
    “Need some coffee, Jenner?”
    Jenner shook his head.
    “How’s she doing? It’s all over the papers. You see the body?”
    Jenner nodded.
    “Sounded pretty bad.” He took another fistful of cereal.
    “Yeah.” Jenner pulled the door shut behind him. “I’ll be a while. I need to make a few calls, and I don’t want Ana to hear.”
    “Take your time. I have a stack of papers on raster graphics to grade, and they’ll all suck. These kids think if you’ve mastered Donkey Kong , you’re already nearly a video game designer.”
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    j o n at h a n h ay e s
    Walking down the stairs, Jenner remembered the first time they’d met. Jun’s girlfriend at the time, an exquisite model from Hokkaido with a deep tan and an ocher sun-burst tattoo on the small of her back, had overdosed on methamphetamine. Jun had appeared in Jenner’s doorway, tapping lightly on the frame, explaining carefully that he’d heard about Jenner’s work, and wondered if Jenner would perhaps help him with a problem. The two had worked with the Japanese embassy to repatriate her body, and had been friends ever since.
    Jenner knew Jun was involved in video game design, and was doing graduate work at New York University, but it wasn’t until Jun invited him to an open house at the school that he’d discovered his friend was a legend: apparently, while still an undergraduate at Keio University in Tokyo, Jun had written some sort of genius video game software—
    not a complete game, but a software element so brilliant that the code was still in use today. It had made Jun rich enough to buy his loft in the Lightbulb Factory, and then open a Stüssy store in Aoyama, which promptly earned him a second fortune.
    The door from the stairwell onto Pyke’s floor was in frosted glass, etched pyke: world image. Douggie owned the whole fourth floor, and had divided his space into living areas and a studio. The studio was as much an archive as a workspace; white enameled cube shelves covered two walls, packed with magazines and books that Douggie had either been published in or was collecting. There were dozens of photographs, everything from Pyke’s own work to photographs by John Wylie and Dennis Hopper. The single color photo was a twenty-by-twenty that had originally appeared on the cover of ZOOM —a self-portrait of Douggie in a bear suit with the Hong Kong supermodel Sarah San.
    Jenner sat down at the big steel desk and booted up Pyke’s Mac: time to see if Whittaker had killed his data access