“They’re paying out line to you, letting you run with the hook, building files on the other fish you swim with. So you’ve got time. Maybe a few months, maybe a year. But if I were you, I’d melt out of here over a couple of nights, using the back entrance, and leave this an empty room by next week.”
“So it’s a pessimal situation.”
“Opposite of optimal,” she agreed. “I won’t tell you how I know any of this, but if you want, I can tell you how they tripped over your tracks.”
As she talked, he had extracted an Oreo from a bag of cookies. He popped the entire thing into his mouth, as though it was the size of a Cheez-It, and chewed vigorously. After swallowing, he said, “I guess I need to know. So tell me.”
“You remember a client named Carl Bessemer?”
“I make a point of not remembering clients.”
“One of your apps allows even tech idiots to perform super-easy spoofing from any smartphone. The call or text message gets routed through a Canadian exchange before it bounces back to the States, where it bounces some more before going to the recipient with fake caller/sender ID.”
“I’m proud of that one. My winnitude went off the charts with that one.”
His smug expression abraded Jane’s nerves. She said, “Plus, the call escapes the phone-company billing system, there’s no evidence afterward that it was ever made.”
“Spank me now. I’m a bad boy.” He plucked another Oreo from the bag. “In my defense, I must say we try to make an effort to identify potential terrorists and not sell to them.”
“How does that work?”
Crunching the cookie, he said, “Not as well as I’d like.”
“You also sold Bessemer a clever voice synthesizer with an interface that allowed it to be used with his smartphone. Feed the synthesizer a one-minute sample of anyone’s voice, which you could record by making a phone call, and the damn thing can change your speech to mimic the other person’s so well that a wife would think she’s talking to her husband, or a child to her mother, when in fact it was Bessemer.”
“Another Radburn top-of-the-charts product.” As he spoke, he celebrated himself by bumping one fist against the other.
His thick-fingered hands were pale pink and utterly hairless, as were his wrists to his shirt cuffs, smooth as rubber, seemingly boneless, repellent. Like the hands of some android bred in a vat.
“What’s bad for you is, Carl Bessemer wasn’t an ordinary phone phreaker trying to stiff AT&T. He wasn’t even an ordinary criminal.”
“In my experience,” Jimmy said, “there isn’t such a thing as an ordinary criminal. It’s a community of entirely unique individuals.”
“Pretending to be who he wasn’t, Bessemer lured young women to lonely places, then raped and killed them.”
“You can’t blame General Motors for selling cars to guys who get drunk and drive.”
Jane loathed him, but she needed him. “Understand, I’m not judging you, only telling you how the Feds stumbled onto you.”
“Don’t worry your pretty purple head. I’ve got a nose for character. I can smell it. Your character has the same scent as mine. You’re not the judgmental type.”
“Bessemer wasn’t his real name.”
“A lot of our clients’ names aren’t their real names, Ethan Hunt. Anonymity is essential to privacy, and privacy is a right.”
“His real name was Floyd Sutter.”
“Ah,” he said, getting the full picture. “Sutter the Cutter. The star of tabloids and TV news. What—fifteen, sixteen kills?”
“Nineteen.” She had been the one to cripple Sutter with a leg shot and secure him with cable zips of the kind he used to bind his victims on first disabling them. “Your bad luck was that they didn’t kill him in the process of capturing him. Floyd is a chatterbox. He didn’t know your physical address—”
“None of our clients do. We’re strictly a Dark Web business.”
“But with what he did know, with your app and the synthesizer, the FBI had enough to find you.”
“They’ve found Jimmy Radburn, not me.” He allowed himself another Oreo, but turned it between thumb and forefinger instead of eating it. “Jimmy’s not the real me any more than Carl Bessemer was the real him. When I flush this place, I’ll flush Jimmy.” He studied her for half a minute, and she allowed herself to be studied, and he said, “You don’t worry for a second that I might flush you, too.”
“I saw how you handled that blunderbuss. There’s no killing in you. You don’t care if anyone gets whacked as collateral damage to your business, but you don’t have a taste for it yourself.”
He smiled and nodded. “I’m a lover, not a killer.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do my excellent winnitude and intelligence turn you on?”
“No.”
“Some girls are turned on by that.”
“I’m just here to get what I need. I gave you a chance to skip arrest, court, and jail. You owe me.”
“I always pay my debts. It’s just good business.” He stopped turning the cookie between thumb and forefinger, popped it into his mouth, made a production of consuming it with much lip licking, and said, “I could eat you up like a bag of Oreos. I leave the offer on the table. Now, what is it you want?”
16
* * *
THE MAN CURRENTLY KNOWN as Jimmy Radburn had no self-esteem deficit and an excess of self-confidence. He always knew what he wanted and how to get it, and there wasn’t a problem for which he couldn’t find a solution. If he’d ever had doubts about his chosen career, he apparently vaporized them long ago. If anything had ever puzzled him previously, he seemed to have erased the experience from memory, because the intense puzzlement that he expressed over Jane’s requests was like that of a precocious child encountering for the first time something that bewildered him.
Paging through the list she’d given him, he said, “Thirty-two coroners?”
“That’s right.”
“City, county, small-town coroners?”
“Yes.”
“Why so many?”
“There’s no need for you to know why anything. I could’ve given you ten times thirty-two. It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s weird, that’s all. It’s creepy. You’ve got to admit it’s creepy. It’s bizarre.”
“I’ve given you their names and websites. Work your way in from there, or however you do it.”
“Just suicides. Why just suicides?”
She answered him with a look.
“All right, okay. My interest is epsilon.”
“Good.”
He put the pages on the snack table and with a pen made notes. “All suicides during the past year in these jurisdictions. A full coroner’s report on each. You want details of brain examinations if they went that far. All this stuff is public record, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but there are privacy issues. And using the Freedom of Information Act can take months—years, even. Besides, there are some difficult people who won’t like this being looked into. I don’t want to draw their attention.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Difficult meaning badass?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“If you’re worried about it, maybe I should be, too.”
“I’m not a hacker, you are.”
“The word cracker is more accurate. Derived from safe-cracker. It just never caught on.”
“Cracker, hacker, whatever. If I go poking around, they know it. You can slip in, slip out with what I want, and they never know you’ve been there.”
“This is a lot of work.”
“Put your entire crew on it. I want it all by noon tomorrow.”
“You’re one demanding bitch. I kind of like that.”
His gray eyes were as pellucid and direct as those of a small and innocent child. If he had made a career of conning elderly women out of their life savings, his victims would have been charmed by his eyes, though Jane saw in them the sharp intention of a predator.
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She said, “Don’t flirt. You’re not good at it. I really mean noon sharp.”
“I heard. Okay, you’re the big dog right now. We’ll tool it till it’s done. What’s this name on the last page?”
“David James Michael. He serves on the boards of those two nonprofits. I want to know everything about him, all the way down to bank-account numbers, shoe size, whether he suffers constipation.”
“If you want a stool sample, you’ll have to get that yourself. I’ll have the rest by noon, but we’ll need to pull an all-nighter.”
She rose from her chair. Jimmy remained seated.
She said, “Don’t hand it to me on a thumb drive. I’ve gone primitive. I need printouts.”
He grimaced. “There goes a forest. Besides, we don’t do volume printouts, ’cause we don’t have a mumble line or a foo switch.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“It was worth a try. All right, no thumb drive. Come around noon, we’ll have your package.”
“You’ll deliver it to me in Santa Monica. You yourself. Alone.”
“You’re a woman accustomed to a lot of personal service. I’m the ace of personal service.”
“But you suck at double entendres. Santa Monica. Palisades Park. Somewhere between Broadway and California Avenue. Get one of those helium-filled metallic balloons. Easiest place to find one is a florist. Tie it to your wrist so I can see you coming from a distance. You won’t have to find me. I’ll find you.”
Jane went to the circular desk on the platform. She retrieved the Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum that he had put there.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Jimmy rose from his chair, alarmed.
“Relax. When I leave, I’ll put it on the floor by the front door. I don’t want it here to tempt you when I turn my back.”
“You’re the one who said there’s no killing in me,” Jimmy reminded her.
“Once in a great while I’m wrong.”
She walked to the head of the stairs and turned to him. He was still standing at his chair, but she could see how badly he wanted to come after her, nail her. Although he had seemed not to be stung by the needles that she’d stuck in him during their conversation, Jimmy didn’t take commands or mockery from a woman without at least fantasizing revenge.
“If instead of doing this job for me, you try to melt out of here tonight, I have someone watching the place,” she lied. “I’ll call the local FBI office, do my civic duty. You won’t get ten percent of your operation in a truck before they drop a rapid-mobilization unit on you.”
“You’ll get what you want,” he assured her.
“Good. And don’t forget the balloon.”
With the .44 Magnum in a two-hand grip, she crabbed down the stairs sideways, back against the wall that lacked a railing. Her attention was largely on the door at the bottom, but she glanced repeatedly toward the second floor, just in case the Colt hadn’t been the only gun Jimmy kept up there.
At the ground floor, she opened the door and saw no one in the back room, just the boxes full of old phonograph records.
The door stood open to the front room. No music. She could hear Jimmy’s crew talking animatedly, which they wouldn’t be doing if they were lying in wait for her.
She didn’t make a production of clearing the doorway, though neither did she amble through it unconcerned.
They were all gathered toward the farther end of the sales counter. On this side, Felix sat on Britta’s stool. The girl was on her knees, dressing his scraped shin with a roll of gauze. Another member of the crew stood with them. The remaining five were on the customer side of the counter.
As Jane went through the gate, they watched her in silence, like a gaggle of undisciplined and petulant children who had been temporarily put in their place by an adult against whom they were conspiring to commit all manner of wickedness.
She unlocked the front door, put the Colt on the floor, and stepped outside, surprised to find it still daylight after that realm of boarded- and painted-over windows.
17
* * *
IN HER CAR ONCE MORE, a few blocks from Vinyl, Jane stopped at a traffic light. A young woman, crossing the street hand-in-hand with a little boy, approached from the left.
The child might have been six or seven. He bore no resemblance whatsoever to Travis, but Jane could not stop looking at him.
As woman and child passed in front of the Ford, the boy cupped a hand over his mouth as though shielding a cough. By the time they reached the sidewalk at the nearer corner, he seemed to be wheezing. His worried mother ushered him to a bus-stop bench and rummaged through her purse. She withdrew an inhaler of the kind used by asthmatics, and the boy accepted it eagerly.
The traffic light had changed to green without Jane realizing it. The driver of the Chevrolet crew-cab pickup behind her tapped his horn to inform her.
As she put down the driver’s window and waved the truck around her, she kept staring at the breathless boy, wanting to know he was all right. But the guy in the crew cab evidently had to be somewhere yesterday, and after only two seconds, he laid on his horn as if she should regard it as a siren and clear the way.
The mother had one arm around the boy’s shoulders, and when he took the inhaler out of his mouth, he didn’t have the throttled look that had contorted his features when he’d first sat on the bench.
In three seconds, Jane would have shifted her foot from brake to accelerator, but the guy in the pickup, with his hand still on the horn, eased his vehicle forward until it gently bumped the back of the Ford Escape. A bump, a tap, not hard enough to cause even the slightest damage. But the pickup was jacked high on oversize tires, the Chevy emblem centered in the bottom third of her rear window, and there was no reason—no damn excuse—for him to bully with his monster truck. She put her car in park and set the emergency brake and opened the driver’s door and got out into the street.
There were two men in the crew cab, both in the front seat. The driver let up on the horn as she got out of the car, then blasted her again. She stood staring up at him, in the grip not of personal anger but of fierce indignation.
She wondered how it could be possible that this jackass could be capable of such petty impatience hardly more than a day after the grisly horror on the Philadelphia expressway, one day after hundreds of fellow Americans had been torn limb from limb by the crashing jet and burned alive on their morning commute. She started walking toward the pickup.
The driver reversed, shifted into drive, swung the pickup into the adjacent lane, and accelerated around her as the specimen in the passenger seat called her stupid and shouted the C word and thrust his middle finger at her as if to curse her with some mortal blight.
Jane walked behind her Ford to the mother and child on the bus-stop bench. She said, “Is he okay?”
Wide-eyed and clearly shaken, the woman said, “What? Benny, you mean? Yes, he’s all right. Benny’s okay. He’ll be fine.”
Jane realized that the mother’s current anxiety was not so much related to her son’s condition as to the altercation that had taken place in front of her. These days, no one could know with certainty whether such a minor incident might escalate into real and terrible violence, with collateral damage. Perhaps as much as the driver of the pickup, Jane shared responsibility for this woman’s fear.
She said, “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry. It’s just that…” But she could find no way to explain her own anguish at Travis’s vulnerability and the distance that separated her from him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and returned to the car.
Two blocks later, she pulled off the street and parked in the lot of a strip center with ten or twelve shops.
Her brief loss of control troubled her. No one enduring long-term stress and under a death threat could be faulted for letting the gears slip now and then, but she expected more of herself.
Part of her problem was sleep deprivation. She hadn’t slept more than six hou
rs a night, sometimes four, in the past week.
The busiest enterprise in the strip center was the packaged-liquor store. She wasn’t much of a drinker. A little red wine now and then. She had only turned to vodka since being on the run, and only when too many bad nights piled up one after another; sometimes she needed sleep even at the expense of sobriety.
She went to the liquor store and bought a pint of Belvedere for later, after dinner, if the dark would not descend when she closed her eyes, if even behind lowered lids, memories of Nick bloomed as bright and full of motion as if they were events of the moment, if Travis was there in brightness as well, in a sun-seared place where slavery yet lived and children were sold into unthinkable service.
18
* * *
JANE DROVE WEST, through suburb after suburb, until she was far from the community in which she had earlier taken a motel room. It was unlikely that the people looking for her would be able to get a fix on her while she conducted these next bits of business. But if they located her, when their search team turned up, she would be clear of the area, and they would be nowhere near the motel where she had gone to ground.
She curbed the car under a street tree, near the Canoga Park Senior Citizen Center, and switched off the engine.
Less than two hours of daylight remained. The air was dry, and the sunshine seemed to splinter down through it, bright slivers piercing polished surfaces.
In addition to a pair of disposable cell phones in her luggage back at the motel, she had two in the car’s glove box. They had been purchased on different days in different towns. All of them had been previously activated; none had yet been used.
She took a phone from the glove box and called Sidney Root’s cell in Chicago. He answered on the third ring.
She had asked him to review his wife’s schedule to see if Eileen had attended any other conference or overnight event shortly before she had been at the Harvard conference where she had suffered the migraine.
“I don’t see how it could mean anything,” Sidney said, “but a week before the Harvard conference, she was two days in Menlo Park, interviewing Shenneck for a newsletter her nonprofit publishes.”