Red Mist

  “The Jordans.” She must be looking for their alarm company information.

  “Customer data is gold, and it’s sold constantly and at the speed of light,” Lucy says. “That’s what everybody wants. Advertisers, researchers, Homeland Security, the Special Forces that took out Bin Laden. Every detail about what you surf for on the Web, where you travel, who you call or e-mail, what prescription drugs you buy, what vaccinations you or your children get, your credit card and Social Security numbers, even your fingerprints and your iris scans because you gave your personal information to a privatized security screening service that has checkpoints at some airports and for a monthly fee you bypass the long lines everybody else stands in. If you’re going to sell your business, whoever acquires it wants your customer data, and in many cases that’s all they want. Who are you, and how do you spend your money? Come spend it with us. And from there the data gets sold again and again and again.”

  “But there are firewalls, I assume.” I don’t want to know if she’s hacked her way through.

  “No guarantees that secure information doesn’t end up in the public domain.” She’s not going to tell me if what she’s doing is legal. “Especially when a company’s assets are sold and their data end up in someone else’s hands.”

  “As I understand it, Southern Cross Security wasn’t sold. It went bankrupt,” I point out.

  “That’s incorrect. It ceased operations, went out of business, three years ago,” Lucy replies. “But its former owner, Daryl Simons, didn’t go bankrupt. He sold Southern Cross Security’s customer database to an international firm that supplies private protection and security advice, a soups-to-nuts outfit that will offer bodyguards or oversee the installation of a security system or do threat analysis if you’re being stalked, whatever you want. In turn, this international firm probably sold their customer database, and on it goes. So I’m doing things backward, like deconstructing an elaborate wedding cake. First I find the wedding cake in the bakery of cyberspace, and then I have to search for the original itemsets, datasets that were mined when patterns of interest were extracted from data repositories.”

  “This would include billing information. Or details about false alarms.”

  “Whatever was on Southern Cross Security’s server, and that certainly includes false alarms, trouble on the line, police response, whatever got reported, and this information got cooked up into statistical analyses. So the Jordan information is out there or in there somewhere. A teaspoon of flour I’ve got to uncook. Ultimately what I’m really looking for is the intranet link that Southern Cross Security had to its archived files. In other words, a dead site that would have the detailed billing information of individual customers. I hate that the process is slow.”

  “When did you start the searches?”

  “I just did. But I had to write the algorithms before I could run them. Now I’m autotrolling. That’s what you’re seeing on these two screens.”

  “It might be a good idea to include Gloria Jordan,” I suggest. “We don’t know what name the account was in. Could have been an LLC, for that matter.”

  “I don’t need to single her out, and I’m not worried about an LLC. Her data will be connected to his and to their children’s and to companies and tax returns—to anything in the media, to blogs, to criminal records, everything linked. Think of a decision tree. Did she say anything to you last night about worrying someone was following her, watching her, maybe showing up at her building?”

  “Jaime.” I assume she means.

  “Any reference at all, maybe somebody who gave her a weird feeling? Maybe someone who was too friendly?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Why would you think to ask?” Lucy’s gaze is fixed on data streaming by.

  “The security system and camera,” I reply. “And she’d started carrying a gun. A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight loaded with high-power hollowpoints.”

  She is silent, watching data roll by.

  “Your influence?” I say to her.

  Lucy answers, “I don’t know anything about a gun. I would never recommend that for her. I never did, never got her one, never gave her lessons. A bad candidate.”

  “I’m not so sure it was simply a case of the jitters because she felt out of her element in the Deep South, and I should have asked if she was feeling frightened or threatened or unstable or irrational or just plain miserable, and if so, why. But I didn’t.” It’s a relief to get it out, but I feel ashamed as I wait for her to turn on me, to blame me. “Just as I didn’t bother to make sure she was okay when I left last night. Remember what I used to tell you when you were growing up?”

  Lucy doesn’t answer.

  “Remember what I always said? Don’t go away mad.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath,” I add the rest of it.

  “What I used to call your dead talk.Everything predicated on the possibility of someone dying or something that could cause death,” she responds, without looking at me. “Childproofing whatever it is, no matter the age and decrepitude of the person. Venetian blind cords or stairs or balconies with low railings or hard candies you can choke on. Don’t walk with scissors or a pencil or anything pointed. Don’t talk on the phone while you’re driving. Don’t go for a jog if it’s about to storm. Always look both ways, even if it’s a one-way street.” Lucy watches data streaming by, and she won’t look at me. “Don’t go away after arguing. What if the person gets killed in a car wreck or struck by lightning or blows an aneurysm.”

  “What an annoying person I must be.”

  “You’re annoying when you think you’re somehow exempt from feeling what the rest of us do. Yes, you, quote, ‘went away mad’ last night. I know how angry you were. You went on and on about it over the phone until three o’clock in the morning, remember? And you should have been angry. It was okay to be angry. I would have been, too, if the shoe had been on the other foot and she was saying things like that about you. Or had done that to you.”

  “I should have stayed and sorted it out with her,” I reply. “And if I had, maybe I would have been more aware of what was going on with her physically. Maybe I would have realized she was having symptoms unrelated to alcohol.”

  “I wonder if there’s such a thing as Hackers Anonymous,” Lucy muses, as if I didn’t just say what I did. “HA, that’s about right. A joke to think people like me won’t get into something if we can. You can’t cure a chipped plate. All you can do is live with it or throw it out.”

  “You’re not a chipped plate.”

  “Actually, what she used to call me was a cracked teacup.”

  “You’re not that, either, and that’s unkind. It’s a cruel thing to say.”

  “It’s true. Living proof.” She indicates the computers on the desk. “You know how easy it was for me to get into her DVR? In the first place, she was careless about passwords. Used the same ones repeatedly so she didn’t forget and lock herself out. The IP address was child’s play. All I did was send myself an e-mail with my iPhone while I was standing under the security camera, and that gave me the static IP address of that connection.”

  “You thought to do that while I was inside her apartment?”

  “Benton and I were standing out there in the rain, under the overhang.”

  I don’t know whether I should be amazed or horrified. “Holding on to my arm, but I was polite about it, civilized about it. He’s lucky I was. I almost wasn’t. He’s damn lucky as hell.”

  “He was trying—”

  “I had to do something,” Lucy cuts me off. “I saw there was an outdoor bullet camera that looked new—in other words, recently installed—an okay system with a varifocal lens, the sort of thing Marino would pick out, but I wasn’t going to ask him, and I haven’t,” she makes that point again. “And I figured there was a DVR somewhere, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to do something. Who the hell wants to sit around in life waiting for fuck
ing permission? The assholes don’t. The pieces of shit who cause all the trouble don’t. She’s right. I can’t be fixed. Maybe I don’t want to be fixed. I don’t. Hell, no.”

  “You were never broken.” I feel the anger again. “ Primum non nocere.First, do no harm. I’ve made promises, too. We do the best we can. I’m sorry I’ve let you down.” The words sound lame as they come out of my mouth.

  “You didn’t do any harm. She did it to herself.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t know what you’ve been told….”

  “She did it to herself a long time ago.” Lucy clicks the mouse pad and the paused image of Jaime’s building and the street in front materializes on the MacBook screen. “She filed that flight plan when she decided to lie, and she ended up in a crash even if someone else was at the controls when it happened. I’m aware that literally she was murdered and my philosophical point of view is irrelevant at the moment.”

  “That’s the suspicion, but it’s not been proven,” I remind her. “We won’t know until the CDC finishes its analysis. Or maybe we’ll find out about Dawn Kincaid first, assuming we’re dealing with serial poisonings by the same neurotoxin.”

  “We do know,” Lucy says flatly. “Someone who thinks she’s smarter than the rest of us. The link, the common denominator, is the prison. Has to be. All of you have that place in common. Even Dawn Kincaid, because her mother is there. Was there. And they were writing to each other, true? Everyone is linked because of the GPFW.”

  Party stationery and fifteen-cent stamps come to mind. Something sent from the outside to Kathleen. Maybe she sent something to Dawn. I envision indented writing, the ghostly fragments written in Kathleen’s distinctive hand. A reference to a PNG and a bribe.

  “I’m going to get you,” Lucy says to the image of Jaime’s building on the computer screen. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d stayed with her longer,” she then says to me, but she won’t give me her eyes.

  She hasn’t looked at me once since I sat down, and it hurts and unnerves me even though I’m well aware that if Lucy’s been crying she won’t look at anyone.

  “She sounded drunk,” Lucy says, as if she knows. “Just shitface drunk, the way she’s sounded before when she’s called.”

  “Called when you were together. Or do you mean since then?” My attention returns to the BlackBerry on the desk as it begins to occur to me what has happened.

  “You told me she was drunk, or more exactly, you said you thought she was drunk,” Lucy says, as she types. “You never hinted you thought she might be sick or that anything was wrong with her. So you can’t blame yourself. And I know you are. You should have let me go inside her apartment.”

  “You know why I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why do you shelter me as if I’m ten years old?”

  “It wasn’t about sheltering you,” I say, as I feel my honesty flitting away on the sweet breeze of my good intentions. A lie disguised as something lovely and kind. “Well, it was about that more than anything else,” I tell the truth. “I didn’t want you to see what I saw. I wanted your last memory of her—”

  “To be what?” Lucy interrupts. “My partner being the prosecutor and telling me why I must never have contact with her again? It wasn’t enough to break up with me, she had to make it sound like a restraining order. You are dirty. You are scary and destructive. You are crazy. Be gone.”

  “Legally, you couldn’t be in the apartment, Lucy.”

  “You shouldn’t have been in there, either, Aunt Kay.”

  “I already was, but you’re right. It poses problems. You don’t want your prints or DNA in there, anything that might cause the police to be interested in you,” I tell her what she already knows. “It was wrong of her to talk to you that way. It was dishonest of her to make you the problem instead of dealing with what was so intolerable to her about her own self. But I should have made sure she was all right before I left. I could have been more careful.”

  “What you’re really saying is you could have been more caring.”

  “I was very angry, and I didn’t care enough. I’m sorry….”

  “Why should you have cared? Why was it up to you to give a shit?”

  I search for the true answer, because the right one is false. I should have cared because one should always care about another human being. That’s the right thing to do. But I didn’t. I honestly didn’t give a damn about Jaime last night.

  “The irony is, she was done anyway,” Lucy says.

  “We don’t get to decide that about anyone. She might not have been done. I’d like to believe she might have had insight at some point along the way. People can change. It’s wrong that someone has robbed her of that chance.” I’m deliberate and careful, as if feeling my way along a stony path that might trip me up and break my bones. “I’m sorry that my last encounter with her had to be so unpleasant, because there were many others that weren’t like that at all. There was a time when she was …”

  “I won’t forgive her.”

  “It’s easier to be angry than sad,” I say.

  “I won’t forgive or forget. She set me up, and she lied. She set you up, and she lied. She began lying so much there was no reference point of truth left, and so she believed her bullshit.”

  Lucy moves the cursor to playand clicks the mouse pad, and the digital recording begins. Bricks and steps and iron railings in shades of gray, and the sound of cars driving along the street in front of Jaime’s building, their headlights flashing past. Lucy opens another window and clicks on another file as a figure appears in the distance on the dark street, someone slender and on foot, the same young woman, I assume, but there is no bicycle, and she isn’t dressed the way she was last night. She begins to cross the street, and then the shocking hot spot of white glare as if she is an alien or a deity. She walks up to the entrance of the building, comfortable and at ease, her head flaring like a nimbus.

  “That’s not the way she was dressed,” I tell Lucy.

  “Stalking,” she says. “Dry runs. So far I’ve found five of them for the last two weeks.”

  “Last night she had on a light-colored shirt. So what I just saw on the recording was from when …?” I start to ask, but I’m stopped by the sound of Jaime Berger’s voice.

  “… I realize that once again I’m breaking the no-contact rule that I myself made.” The familiar voice drifts out of a speaker, and Lucy clicks on the volume and turns it up as the figure in the video recording disappears down the dark street in front of Jaime’s building. “I guess you know by now Kay is here and will be helping with a case of mine. We just had dinner, and I’m afraid she got perturbed with me. Always the lioness when it comes to you, and that didn’t help. Jesus God, it never helped. An unfortunate triangulation is putting it kindly. Somehow I always felt she was in the room no matter what room. Lights out, hello, Auntie Kay, are you there? Oh, well. We’ve been through all this ad nauseam …”

  “Stop,” I tell Lucy, and she pauses both files. “Did she call you on your new number? When did she do that?” But I have a feeling I know.

  Jaime’s voice is halting, and she is slurring her words. She sounds very much like she did last night when I left her, but slightly more impaired and nastier. I look at the BlackBerry plugged into the charger on the desk.

  “Your old phone,” I say to Lucy. “You didn’t change your number, you simply got a new one when you switched to an iPhone.”

  “She didn’t have my new number. I never gave it to her, and she never asked,” Lucy says. “I don’t use it anymore.” She indicates the BlackBerry.

  “You kept it because she’s continued to call it.”

  “That’s not really the only reason. But she’s called it. Not often. Mostly late at night when she’s had too much to drink. I save all of the messages, download them into audio files.”

  “And you listen to them on your computer.”

  “I can listen to them anywhe
re. That’s not the point. The point is to save them, to make sure they’re never lost. They’re all pretty much the same. Like this one. She doesn’t ask me anything. Doesn’t say she wants me to call her back. She just talks for a couple of minutes and abruptly ends it without saying good-bye. Sort of the way she ended it with us. Pronouncements and her talking at me and not listening, and then disconnecting.”

  “You save them because you miss her. Because you still love her.”

  “I’ve saved them to remind myself why I shouldn’t miss her. Or love her.” Lucy’s voice quavers, and I hear her grief and frustration and rage. “What I’m trying to tell you is she didn’t sound sick or in physical distress.” She clears her throat. “She just sounds like she was drinking, and that was a half hour after you were gone. So she probably didn’t sound even as bad as that when you were still with her.”

  “She didn’t mention she felt bad or strange. She didn’t mention anything.”

  Lucy shakes her head. “I can play all of it if you want, but she doesn’t say anything like that.”

  I imagine Jaime in her maroon bathrobe, walking from room to room in her apartment, sipping expensive Scotch and looking out the window at Marino’s van driving off. I don’t know the precise time we left, but it was no more than thirty minutes later that she called Lucy’s old phone number and left the message. Clearly, her symptoms didn’t become severe until later, and I envision the nightstand with its spilled drink and empty base unit, the phone under the bed, and also what I saw in the master bath, medications and toiletries scattered everywhere. I suspect Jaime might have drifted off to sleep and possibly around two or three a.m. woke up short of breath and barely able to swallow or speak. It was probably at his point she frantically searched for something to take that might relieve her terrifying symptoms.