AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

reached up to pinch herself on the cheek. “OK, but what are you going to do?”
    “We’ll figure it out once we get there,” he said.
    She drove to her apartment while Munroe kept up an inane commentary on the upcoming Broncos-Seahawks game, which normally wouldn’t have interested her, but he prodded her to say something in the affirmative to each remark. Before too long she was getting irritable, but at least she was awake.
    They finally reached her Congress Park apartment and she parked on the street. She rented the lower floor of a converted Denver square. It was relatively expensive for the area but she enjoyed the charm of the building. At the door, she yawned and asked him, “OK, what’s the plan? Do you stay here tonight? Do I call you a taxi?”
    “Well, first go in, because you’re freezing.”
    She opened the door and they went inside.
    “If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here to … wait a minute, you can log me onto the AfterNet, right?”
    “Huh? Sure.”
    “Just tether your terminal to your computer and I’ll be happy, that is if you don’t mind me spending the night. And maybe in the morning you can drive me to the station.”
    She yawned and nodded. “I’d be happy if you spend the night. Let me … make up the computer for you.” She laughed and walked toward her bedroom. “Come on, it’s this way.”
    He followed her and realized he hadn’t known that’s where she kept her computer. Her bedroom was large and oddly L-shaped. She had turned the stubby arm of the L into an office nook where her laptop sat on a roll top desk. She sat down before it and turned on the computer, then plugged her terminal into a recharging dock connected to the computer.
    “Crap,” she said, when she realized that she hadn’t acted quickly enough to force her Macintosh laptop into the AfterNet OS during startup. She restarted it and this time clicked quickly enough to launch the proper OS.
    He didn’t catch any of this because he was too busy looking around her bedroom. Like her it was tasteful but definitely not feminine. It was decorated in the Arts and Crafts style of heavy dark furniture, with a Mission-style bed, a mock Morris chair and the yellowish-greenish wallpaper he remembered from his own Arts and Crafts house in Seattle.
    Just because Nadine liked Arts and Crafts doesn’t mean it’s bad, he thought to himself, remembering his second wife, the dragon lady and queen of the damned. And I’m sure it doesn’t mean Linda’s a bad person.
    He noticed that she had shrugged off her coat and suddenly he sensed the AfterNet field again, temporarily off while the computer was rebooting.
    “OK, it’s up, Alex. Yo, Alex?”
    He only caught his name, but he guessed she was telling him the computer was ready.
    “I’m here. Uh, I didn’t know your computer was in your bedroom.”
    “Oh, I could move it into the living room but I’d have to move the terminal’s dock and get behind the desk to get to the adapter and …” Her comments trailed off.
    “No, no, that’s OK. I don’t want to make trouble. It’s just that, you know, you in bed and me here …”
    She rolled her eyes and he knew the discussion was over. “Oh, yes, well I’ll just have to sleep with my gun under the pillow.”
    She got up from the chair, repositioned it before the desk and then put a throw pillow on the seat. Munroe settled on the chair, feeling more like a dog than a man but appreciating that the pillow brought him up to “eye” level of the computer.
    She started undressing, but stopped and walked into her bathroom, closing the door behind her.
    Well, at least I rate that much, he thought.
    She came back out a few minutes later, wearing a Denver police academy T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. She crawled into her bed and then looked toward him. “Good night, Alex.”
    “Good night, Linda.” She turned off the lights and went to sleep.

Chapter 3
From The Atlantic Monthly
The trees in the Aokigahara forest can cast dismal shadows even in summer, but in the winter, the funereal gloom looks especially inviting to those who brave the maze-like trails of this haunted forest.
It’s suicide season.
“It really increases as we get closer to the New Year,” said Tetsuo Harada, an official with the Yamanashi Prefecture parks department. “Since the afterlife, it’s only gotten worse.”
The Aokigahara Jukai, literally “Aokigahara tree ocean,” has a long history in Japanese folklore and urban legend.