"Murder In The Solid State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

This can't be happening, David thought. So many bad things couldn't possibly occur in the space of three days.
It would upset the space-time continuum, hurtling them all into some kind of hyperspatial rift. No, it just wasn't possible.
"I think it's necessary," she went on, "that we move our relationship to a different level, one where we can exchange our feelings a little more honestly."
"It's very kind of you," he told her tightly, "but you don't need to buy me dinner to break up with me."
She blinked, blinked again, and burst out laughing.
David's face grew hot, his body stiff. Was that what she thought of him? Something to laugh at?
"Oh!" she said around her laughter. "That's funny! I was trying to ask you to move in with me!"
"What?"
"What?" she mimicked, still laughing. "Oh, you should have seen the look on your face. That was priceless. What possible reason could I have for breaking up with you?"
"I don't know," he said lamely. The switch of moods was too rapid for him; he hadn't found his equilibrium yet. She was going to ask him to move in with her?
"You'll need a tie," she said.
A tie? To move in with her? "Oh. You mean for the restaurant."
"No, for the zoo. What's with you tonight, David?" She held up her hands suddenly, palms forward. "Never mind. Hard weekend, I know, I'm sorry. Forget I asked. Should we stop off at your place? Have you got a tie?"
"Uh," David said, "I did, but it got ruined."
Vandegroot had stabbed him through it at the conference, mere hours before becoming a murder victim. White satin, flecked with blood. It might have passed for one of the newer patterns, despite the hole, but David had thrown it away, eager to be rid of it.
Marian frowned slightly. "It's too late to buy one. Hmm. Maybe they have loaners there at the restaurant. Do you think so?"
A thought occurred to David. "Wait a minute; I have got another zipper tie. I used it for the dean's presentation last semester. It's at the lab."
"Well hey," Marian said, grabbing him playfully around the waist. "That's not too far out of the way. Let's go."
They walked to the bus stop without speaking, something they rarely did. The night seemed quiet for Philadelphia; he could hear her breath whooshing softly in and out, hear the quiet clop, clop of her shoes against the sidewalk.
"So, uh, what's going on at the Bulletin?" he asked, just to inject some noise into the evening. He didn't like this silence, the naked feeling of it. Silence implied a bond, a telepathy, a mutual understanding that rendered conversation moot, where in fact he thought of Marian's head as a black box whose inner workings could not be deduced from the inputs and outputs he observed. She wanted him to move in with her? Three months ago she'd balked at the idea of his keeping an extra shirt in her closet.
"Women are funny," Bowser would say, and really, that was what it came down to. Women were a regular barrel of laughs.
"Muckraking," Marian said, "as usual."
Tracking down corruption on the local scene, she meant, and encouraging public debate on issues beneath the notice of the bigger papers. In its latest incarnation, the Bulletin was distributed free, so they had to sell a lot of ads to make enough profit to keep going. So they had to please the small business owners, which meant they had to do a lot of fashion articles and review a lot of rock bands and restaurants and offbeat playhouses. That, and address social problems on the nanoscale, discussing what they meant, not to the city or even the neighborhoods, but to the individual human beings on East Lancaster or South Broad Street.
But muckraking was not a term Marian would normally use to describe this. It was a word other people threw around when they wanted to make a point, when they wanted to upset her.
"Sounds like I'm not the only one who's had a tough weekend," he observed.
"Ooh!" she said, venting sudden anger. "The universities have a hobby, and that's pulling down the Bulletin. If we get a positive letter from anyone, we can be sure we'll see another one that has a U of Penn or U of Phil return address, a letter that defines a very long list of reasons we should all go to hell. Universities are so damn conservative these days, hey, let's kill the messenger if we don't like the news. Then we just round up the poor and ship them off somewhere, and it's Miller time."
"Want to talk about it?" he quipped; with a start like that one she'd be impossible to silence. Like Bowser, she had her buttons, and it looked like he'd just punched a hot one.
But what she said was, "Not tonight," which surprised him. He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't seem inclined to.
"Well," he said, trying on a little smile, "we don't want to talk about my weekend."
"It might make a good article," she replied seriously. "Page five stuff, half a column." She held up her hands as if framing invisible headlines, "GRAY BASTARD BITES IT: MURDER IN THE SOLID STATE."
A chill ran down his spine.
He tried to think of something to say, something clever that would make her laugh, that would make him laugh, but his mind was cold and blank. He felt the awful silence pressing down again. Surely he had to say something.
But just at that moment, the bus rounded the corner with a grinding of flywheel gears, and instantly Marian was lost, her mind elsewhere, her hands digging for tokens in the lower reaches of her purse.

"So," she prompted as they clomped down the dark, deserted corridor, "will you or won't you?"
"Will I or won't I what?" He fumbled with his keys, got the lab door unlocked.
"You have a short memory."
He opened the door, flicked on the light. . .
"Oh, my God," he said with quiet astonishment.
His lab was a shambles.
The counters had been cleared, the shelves emptied. The floor was covered in loose papers and fragments of... of everything. Someone had systematically smashed all his equipment, including the computer, including the SPM. And something else had been done to the computer, as well; a hole gaped in its front panel like a row of shattered teeth. The optical drive! Someone had stolen the optical drive!
He scurried in, his feet shuffling and crunching over the debris. The backup tapes. Where were his old notebooks, and more importantly, where were the fucking backup tapes? The shockproof, fireproof, burglarproof safe which normally held them stood open, its shelves bare.
What happened here?
A keening noise arose from his throat, a strange and inhuman noise. Five years' work was on those tapes. Five years work had been stolen or destroyed or. . . The sound he heard himself making now was like cats in a fight, like a car engine running with the oil drained out. It was the sound of broken dreams.
Marian's hand touched his arm, and he started. Tears sprang from his eyes and streamed down his face in a steady flow, and he didn't want her to see that. He hadn't cried for Big Otto Vandegroot, hadn't cried for himself in the jail, in the courtroom, in the Fellmer chair. Hadn't cried when he'd thought Marian's love was slipping away. He hadn't shed a tear, for anything, in years.
But this was his work; this was everything he'd done since finishing his bachelor's degree. This was a horror beyond his ability to comprehend. He wanted to sit, needed to, but even his chair had been broken. Dizzily, he leaned against the counter.
"Who did this?" he managed to croak. "The backup tapes are gone. God damn it, who did this to me?"
"I'll call the police," Marian said.
"Do better than that," he told her, his voice still choked. He pulled out his wallet, dug around in it until he came up with Mike Puckett's card. "Call the FBI."
"OK." She took the card from him, touched her fingers briefly to his arm once again. "Don't touch anything, OK? They'll need to scan for fingerprints and things."