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Talk

ONE

The voice on the phone was a whisper. It had a forceful, almost
desperate quality to it. Henry Pierce told the caller he had the
wrong number. But the voice became insistent.

"Where is Lilly?" the man asked. "I don't know," Pierce said. "I
don't know anything about her."

"This is her number. It's on the site." "No, you have the wrong
number. There is no one named Lilly here. And I don't know anything
about any site. Okay?"

The caller hung up without responding. Then Pierce hung up,
annoyed. He had plugged in the new phone only fifteen minutes
earlier and already he had gotten two calls for someone named
Lilly.

He put the phone down on the floor and looked around the almost
empty apartment. All he had was the black leather couch he sat on,
the six boxes of clothes in the bedroom and the new phone. And now
the phone was going to be a problem.

Nicole had kept everything—the furniture, the books, the CDs
and the house on Amalfi Drive. She didn't keep it, actually: he had
given it all to her. The price of his guilt for letting things slip
away. The new apartment was nice. It was high luxury and security,
a premier address in Santa Monica. But he was going to miss the
house on Amalfi. And the woman who was still living in it.

He looked down at the phone on the beige carpet, wondering if he
should call Nicole and let her know he had moved from the hotel to
the apartment and had the new number. But then he shook his head.
He had already sent her the e-mail with all the new information. To
call her would be breaking the rules she had set and he had
promised to follow on their last night together.

The phone rang. He leaned down and checked the caller ID screen
this time. The call was coming from the Casa Del Mar again. It was
the same guy. Pierce thought about letting it ring through to the
message service that came with the new phone number, but then he
picked up the phone and clicked the talk button.

"Look, man, I don't know what the problem is. You have the wrong
number. There is nobody here named—" The caller hung up
without saying a word. Pierce reached over to his backpack and
pulled out the yellow pad on which his assistant had written down
the voice mail instructions. Monica Purl had set up the phone
service for him, as he had been too busy in the lab all week
preparing for the following week's presentation. And because that
was what personal assistants were for.

He tried to read the notes in the dying light of the day. The sun
had just slipped beneath the Pacific and he had no lamps yet for
the new apartment's living room. Most new places had sunken lights
in the ceiling. Not this one. The apartments were newly renovated,
with new kitchens and windows, but the building was old. And slab
ceilings without internal wiring could not be renovated in a cost-
effective way. Pierce didn't think about that when he rented the
place. The bottom line was he needed lamps.

He quickly read through instructions on using the phone's caller ID
and caller directory features. He saw that Monica had set him up
with something called the convenience package—caller ID,
caller directory, call waiting, call forwarding, call everything.
And she noted on the page that she had already sent the new number
out to his A-level e-mail list. There were almost eighty people on
this list. People who he would want to be able to reach him at any
time, almost all of them business associates or business associates
he also considered friends.

Pierce pressed the talk button again and called the number Monica
had listed for setting up and accessing his voice mail program. He
then followed the instructions provided by an electronic voice for
creating a pass code number. He decided on 92102—the day
Nicole had told him that their three-year relationship was
over.

He decided not to record a personal greeting. He would rather hide
behind the disembodied electronic voice that announced the number
and instructed the caller to leave a message. It was impersonal,
but it was an impersonal world out there. He didn't have time to
make everything personal. When he was finished setting up the
program a new electronic voice told him he had nine messages.
Pierce was surprised by the number—his phone had not been put
into service until that morning—but immediately hopeful that
maybe one was from Nicole. Maybe several. He suddenly envisioned
himself returning all the furniture Monica had ordered for him
online. He saw himself carrying the cardboard boxes of his clothes
back inside the house on Amalfi Drive.

But none of the messages were from Nicole. None of them were from
Pierce's associates or associates/friends, either. Only one was for
him-a "welcome to the system" message delivered by the now familiar
electronic voice. The next eight messages were all for Lilly, no
last name mentioned. The same woman he had already fielded three
calls for. All the messages were from men. Most of them gave hotel
names and numbers to call back. A few gave cell numbers or what
they said was a private office line. A few mentioned getting her
number off the net or the site, without being more specific.

Pierce erased each message after listening to it. He then turned
the page on his notebook and wrote down the name Lilly. He
underlined it while he thought about things. Lilly—whoever
she was—had apparently stopped using the number. It had been
dropped back into circulation by the phone company and then
reassigned to him. Judging by the all-male caller list, the number
of calls from hotels and the tone of trepidation and anticipation
in the voices he had listened to, Pierce guessed that Lilly might
be a prostitute. Or an escort, if there was a difference. He felt a
little trill of curiosity and intrigue go through him. Like he knew
some secret he wasn't supposed to know. Like when he called up the
security cameras on his screen at work and surreptitiously watched
what was going on in the hallways and common areas of the
office.

He wondered how long the phone number would have been out of use
before it was reassigned to him. The number of calls to the line in
one day indicated that the phone number was still out
there—probably on the website mentioned in a few of the
messages—and people still believed it was Lilly's valid
number.

"Wrong number," he said out loud, though he rarely spoke to himself
when he wasn't looking at a computer screen or engaged in an
experiment in the lab. He flipped the page back and looked at the
information Monica had written down for him. She had included the
phone company's customer service number. He could and should call
to get the number changed. He also knew it would be an annoying
inconvenience to have to resend and receive e-mail notifications
correcting the number. Something else made him hesitate about
changing the number. He was intrigued. He admitted it to himself.
Who was Lilly? Where was she? Why did she give up the telephone
number but leave it on the website? There was a flaw in the logic
flow there, and maybe that was what gripped him. How did she
maintain her business if the website delivered the wrong number to
the client base? The answer was that she didn't. She couldn't.
Something was wrong and Pierce wanted to know what and why. It was
Friday evening. He decided to let things stand until Monday. He
would call about changing the number then.

Pierce got up from the couch and walked through the empty living
room to the master bedroom, where the six cardboard boxes of his
clothing were lined against one wall and a sleeping bag was
unrolled alongside another. Before moving into the apartment and
needing it, he hadn't used the sleeping bag in almost three
years-since a trip to Yosemite with Nicole. Back when he had time
to do things, before the chase began, before his life became about
only one thing.

He went onto the balcony and stared out at the cold blue ocean. He
was twelve floors up. The view stretched from Venice on the south
side to the ridge of the mountains sliding into the sea off Malibu
to the north. The sun was gone but there were violent slashes of
orange and purple still in the sky. This high up, the sea breeze
was cold and bracing. He put his hands in the pockets of his pants.
The fingers of his left hand closed around a coin and he brought it
out. A dime. Another reminder of what his life had become. The neon
lights on the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier were on and
flashing a repetitive pattern. It made him remember a time two
years earlier when the company had rented the pier's entire
amusement park for a private party celebrating the approval of the
company's first batch of patents on molecular memory architecture.
No tickets, no lines, no getting off a ride if you were having fun.
He and Nicole had stayed in one of the open yellow gondolas of the
Ferris wheel for at least a half hour. It had been cold that night,
too, and they huddled against each other. They'd watched the sun go
down. Now he couldn't look at the pier or even a sunset without
thinking about her. In acknowledging this about himself, he
realized he had rented an apartment with views of the very things
that would remind him of Nicole. There was a subliminal pathology
there that he didn't want to explore.

He put the dime on his thumbnail and flipped it into the air. He
watched it disappear into the darkness. There was a park below, a
strip of green between the building and the beach. He had already
noticed that homeless people snuck in at night and slept in
sleeping bags under the trees. Maybe one of them would find the
fallen dime. The phone rang. He went back into the living room and
saw the tiny LED screen glowing in the darkness. He picked up the
phone and read the screen. The call was coming from the Century
Plaza Hotel. He thought about it for two more rings and then
answered without saying hello.

"Are you calling for Lilly?" he asked. A long moment of silence
went by but Pierce knew someone was there. He could hear television
sounds in the background.

"Hello? Is this call for Lilly?" Finally a man's voice answered.
"Yes, is she there?" "She's not here at the moment. Can I ask how
you got this number?" "From the site." "What site?"

The caller hung up. Pierce held the phone to his ear for a moment
and then clicked it off. He walked across the room to return the
phone to its cradle when it rang again. Pierce hit the talk button
without looking at the caller ID display.

"You've got the wrong number," he said. "Wait, Einstein, is that
you?"

Pierce smiled. It wasn't a wrong number. He recognized the voice of
Cody Zeller, one of the A-list recipients of his new number. Zeller
often called him Einstein, one of the college nicknames Pierce
still endured. Zeller was a friend first and a business associate
second. He was a computer security consultant who had designed
numerous systems for Pierce over the years as his company grew and
moved to larger and larger spaces.

"Sorry, Code," Pierce said. "I thought you were somebody else. This
new number is getting a lot of calls for somebody else."

"New number, new place, does this mean you're free, white and
single again?" "I guess so." "Man, what happened with Nicki?" "I
don't know. I don't want to talk about it."

He knew talking about it with friends would add a permanency to the
end of their relationship. "I'll tell you what happened," Zeller
said. "Too much time in the lab and not enough between the sheets.
I warned you about that, man."

Zeller laughed. He'd always had a way of looking at a situation or
set of facts and cutting away the bullshit. And his laughter told
Pierce he was not overly sympathetic to his plight. Zeller was
unmarried and Pierce could never remember him in a long-term
relationship. As far back as college he promised Pierce and their
friends he would never practice monogamy in his lifetime. He also
knew the woman in question. In his capacity as a security expert he
also handled online backgrounding of employment applicants and
investors for Pierce. In that role he worked closely at times with
Nicole James, the company's intelligence officer. Make that former
intelligence officer. "Yeah, I know," Pierce said, though he didn't
want to talk about this with Zeller. "I should've listened." "Well,
maybe this means you'll be able to take your spoon out of
retirement and meet me out at Zuma one of these mornings."

Zeller lived in Malibu and surfed every morning. It had been nearly
ten years since Pierce had been a regular on the waves with him. In
fact, he had not even taken his board with him when he moved out of
the house on Amalfi. It was up on the rafters in the garage.

"I don't know, Code. I've still got the project, you know. I don't
think my time is going to change much just because
she—"

"That's right, she was only your fiancée, not the project." "I
don't mean it like that. I just don't think I'm—" "What about
tonight? I'll come down. We'll hit the town like the old days. Put
on your black jeans, baby." Zeller laughed in encouragement. Pierce
didn't. There had never been old days like that. Pierce had never
been a player. He was blue jeans, not black jeans. He'd always
preferred to spend the night in the lab looking into a scanning
tunneling microscope than pursuing sex in a club with an engine
fueled by alcohol.

"I think I'm going to pass, man. I've got a lot of stuff to do and
I need to go back to the lab tonight." "Hank, man, you've got to
give the molecules a rest. One night out. Come on, it will
straighten you out, shake up your own molecules for once. You can
tell me all about what happened with you and Nicki, and I'll
pretend to feel sorry for you. I promise."

Zeller was the only one on the planet who called him Hank, a name
Pierce hated. But Pierce was smart enough to know that telling
Zeller to stop was out of the question, because it would prompt his
friend to use the name at all times.

"Call me next time, all right?"

Zeller reluctantly backed off and Pierce promised to keep the next
weekend open for a night out. He made no promises about surfing.
They hung up and Pierce put the phone in its cradle. He picked up
his backpack and headed for the apartment door.

Excerpted from CHASING THE DIME by Michael Connelly. ©
Copyright 2002 by Hieronymus, Inc. Reprinted with permission by
Time Warner Bookmark. All rights reserved.