Signwave (20 page)

“Doesn't help at all, then?” MaryLou asked me.

“Not really. The only good thing is that the complex isn't new. There's actual buttons, not some electronic scroll.”

“What does that mean?”

“In some of the new places, there's a touch screen. You tap the apartment you want, and it goes right to the cell phone of whoever lives there.”

“What's the difference?”

“Those kind, the person you're looking for would know someone had been there, even if she wasn't there herself at the time.”

“Oh. Okay, but what good does that do them? I mean, you touch the screen, it rings someone's cell phone. They're not around, but their Caller ID tells them nothing except they had a visitor—someone who tried to visit, anyway.”

“Yeah. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We're no better off than—”

“Get behind the wheel,” MaryLou said over her shoulder, as she slid gently to the curb and went out the driver's door in one smooth motion.

—

“S
he's there,” MaryLou said as I was pulling away from the curb.

“How do you know?”

“The apartment's full of stuff. Nice stuff, too.”

“How could you…?”

“I rang her bell. She buzzed me in. When I got to her door, I could see it had one of those big one-way mirrors, not some little peephole. She looked me over for a little bit, then she just let me in, like she didn't want to have a conversation through the door.”

“She didn't act surprised?”

“Not…not really. I mean, she didn't know me, but I guess the idea of someone who she hadn't seen before ringing her bell wasn't anything new.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I apologized for coming over so late, but I was thinking of transferring to her school. To play soccer. And someone in the Student Union told me she was going into the program for coaching, so…”

“She didn't think that was kind of weird?”

“I don't know what she thought,” MaryLou said. “She wasn't nervous or anything. I could see she bought the story—I never have to tell people I'm an athlete. I could play volleyball, tennis…anything I wanted. I never played volleyball in high school, but I still got calls from recruiters. I'm a ‘natural,' ” she half sneered in contempt for what she must have been told a thousand times.

“Anyway, she was very nice, but she didn't waste much time before telling me I'd gotten a bum steer. She was interested in coaching, sure. She'd never played herself. She just thought it would be—what did she say?—ah, ‘a different path to upper management.' Her undergrad work was all in economics, and she'd researched opportunities, so…”

“That's perfect, MaryLou. Here I was cursing myself for being such a damn dope. When I was on my second pass around the area, I saw the parking area. It's not a garage, just slots with a roof over the top. And her car was right there, Slot B-17. And the license plate was a match—no chance it belonged to anyone else. But it was too late to call you on your cell, and…”

“What's next?” is all the big girl said.

—

“I
got her!”

Dolly was so excited I thought she'd burst out of her jumpsuit. She gave off that sweaty-sweet natural perfume that only shows up after she's been working for hours. Working hard. At something that really matters to her. Rascal was even a little charged up, but he stayed on his sheepskin rug, next to where Dolly had been.

I could see that her tablet had something on its screen, but before I could tell her to calm down, she grabbed my hand and hauled me over to the butcher block.

“Look!”

It was a Web page, with a swirling ribbon running across the top. I don't know what kind of coding it took to make the ribbon change colors as it moved, grow narrower or wider, and have little starbursts of light mixed into it, but I guessed it wouldn't come cheap.

I watched it for a couple of seconds before I saw the embedded
My Magic Can Be Yours
.

“Use the wand,” Dolly said, impatiently pointing with a lipstick-red fingernail at a three-dimensional pentagram that took up most of the screen. “See it under the ribbon? Just drag it to any of the points. Don't click it on, just do a mouse-over.”

“This isn't really my—”

“Oh, for…,” she muttered, hip-checking me aside and sitting down. “Watch,” she said.

The wand hovered over one of the pentagram's points. “Harness the Power!” came up.

“If I click
that
one…”

The screen filled with tiny little thumbnails.

“And I pick any one I want…”

A woman on all fours, facing straight ahead. She was wearing a black blindfold, each wrist separately bound to what
looked like an ebony stake. Her lips were parted, the lower one in an invitational pout.

Dolly tapped quickly. The same woman, posed differently in a dozen photos, but always restrained.

“Okay?” Dolly asked. Meaning, was there any point in making me look at the whole menu?

“Okay,” I told her. Meaning, I'd seen enough.

Dolly tapped twice, and the screen went back to the pentagrams.

She touched another point. The mouse-over came up “Spoiled Brat.” The first thumbnail was the same woman, in some kind of expensive-looking lingerie, with an anklet of diamonds impossible to miss.

“More?”

I touched the back of her shoulders.

Dolly kept going:

“Private School.”

“Mistress in Charge.”

“Best Date Ever.”

“Country Club Gala.”

“Voodoo Priestess.”

“All Business.”

“See Thru the Window.”

“How many are there?” I asked Dolly.

“I don't even know yet,” Dolly answered. “That pentagram is really a bunch of them. They rotate, take turns coming to the front. But there's at least…four times five, so twenty, minimum.”

“And they're all her?”

“Every single one. I used the Bertillon method. I know there's all kinds of science for facial recognition, but, no matter what you do with your face, the distance between the pupils of your eyes, that never changes.”

“Unless you had so much work done—”

“Yes. Some women went so far that their eyes look sideways, like a lizard's. But not
this
one. She's too young, for one thing. Remember when you asked me about a woman who could look fourteen or thirty-four? That was a question about pictures, not people. This one, she uses a different name for each…persona, I guess you'd call it. That's the ‘magic,' see? The client makes her into whatever he wants. But when I scanned in that yearbook photo, all I had to do was size it to the right dimensions for each Web site.”

“Huh! How many pages did you look at before you found this?”

“Probably thousands. But I'd be at it for another five years if I hadn't stuck with the one-woman ones. No ‘escort' stuff—they usually have dozens on every page, so the customer could get his choice. Or it's some stupid whore who thinks she can screen clients on Craigslist or Facebook. I used terms like ‘I can be…' Or ‘One is all…' Like that. No ‘specialists.' I knew it had to be a public site or we weren't going to find it, no matter what we did.”

“That's her, Dolly. She's the same…” My voice trailed off as I felt my wife slump her shoulders, like a fighter who couldn't go another round. Not just exhausted, emptied out.

—

“I
need Dolly out of the house from, say, nine to as long as you can keep her.”

Mack didn't ask why. Probably didn't want to know. But he hit his cell as he put some distance between us, talked for a couple of minutes, then came back to where I was standing.

“She says it'll be easy.”

“You called Dolly?”

He gave me a look I couldn't read. “No,” he finally said. “Bridgette.”

—

“I
'll be back later,” Dolly said, smacking the side of her hip to tell Rascal to heel at her side.

“I'll send that new info to
Undercurrents
inside an hour,” she assured me.

“Perfect,” I told her. “I'll probably be later than you. There's something I have to look at.”

She was as curious as Mack had been.

—

I
t was 21:25 by my watch when the monitor showed Franklin's truck pull in.

By the time I wheeled the motorcycle outside, they were both standing behind the tailgate.

“We'll have to grab some planks to make a ramp,” I told them, pointing at the bed of the truck. “There's lumber in the—”

“How much does that thing weigh?” MaryLou cut me off.

“Probably around four fifty,” I said.

She made a kind of snorting noise, then unlatched the back of the big pickup and said, “Bring it as close as you can.”

I pushed the bike until the front wheel was almost touching the bed. “You jump up there,” she ordered. Then she turned to Franklin. “Ready?”

If he said anything, I couldn't hear it.

They each took one side of the handlebars and lifted the bike until the front wheel was sitting on the bed.

“Hold it steady,” she told me.

I grabbed the handlebars. I couldn't see where they grabbed
the rear of the bike, but as soon as I saw it come up I began walking backward. It fit with plenty of room to spare.

“Can you lay it on its side?” she asked me. “It doesn't have to be all the way, just enough so it won't show.”

Before I could answer, Franklin leaped into the bed and took the bike from me. He pulled it over toward himself until it was below the rail of the bed and asked me, “Is this far okay?”

“Sure.”

By then, MaryLou was next to me. “We've got a bunch of tarps back here, and if we take that…”

Franklin shoved a roll of thick tree limbs into the empty space between the side of the bike and the floor of the bed. MaryLou had covered the entire bed with a heavy tarp. “No point scratching it up,” she said.

It didn't take much more wood to wedge the back wheel. Then the bike went under a blanket of more of the tarps.

We all jumped down. Franklin opened the driver's door. MaryLou climbed in, and he followed her. When I got into the passenger-side seat, he was behind the wheel.

“Let's go,” MaryLou said.

—

W
e off-loaded the bike, reversing the way we'd put it in the bed.

“It's a little before midnight,” I told them. “We already know her car's still in its slot. By now, Dolly's e-mail to
Undercurrents
about the rumor that the same group that bought up that strip of land by the bay is connected to one of those ‘green' organizations is already in their server. We know the person feeding info to Benton is this Rhonda woman. She couldn't count on always being the one picked to investigate, but she's always notified, so the boss is playing some game with her. Which means she has to know how to find him.”

“That quick?” MaryLou asked.

“I don't know. But the only way to find out is to follow her…if she leaves, and we can't know that she will. So you and Franklin go wherever you want, it doesn't matter. I'll meet you up the road, that spot we picked out. I won't be any later than five in the morning, win or lose.”

“What if that girl doesn't go out tonight?” Franklin said.

“Then I'll try again.”

“How many times?” from MaryLou.

“As many times as you're willing,” I said to them both.

—

T
he rumor that Dolly had sent to
Undercurrents
wasn't just a fraud to draw Rhonda Jayne Johnson out; it was a safety play.

Benton had warned Dolly about not running around half cocked after the hard info about someone buying up a whole strip of worthless land had been sent. This latest e-mail wasn't just soft info, the kind still worth checking out—it was dead wrong.

If Benton moved Dolly from “threat” to “gossip” in his mind, he wouldn't be warning her again. Why would he? The more nonsense she sent to that ultra-blog, the less
anything
she sent would be respected. Probably not even get past whatever BS screens they had set up.

But Benton would still be notified. Enough gossipy garbage and he'd figure out that Dolly really didn't know anything. She wasn't investigating; she was just passing along anything she heard other people speculate about. That would move her all the way down the threat scale and up the other side. All the way to “Diversion.”

Hell, if she kept on gossiping, he'd get what he wanted, and it wouldn't cost him a dime. Next time he ran into Dolly in that coffee place, he'd tell the barista the drinks were on him.

—

I
didn't have long to wait.

Or far to go. The target wasn't on the highway more than five miles before she turned off.

When she turned off the road, I turned off the bike's headlight. A two-lane blacktop could make following a car a lot trickier, but only if the driver's rearview mirrors showed anything.

Traffic was so light at that hour that the only danger to me would be some drunk who crossed the dividing line. I kept the rear light of the bike on, to warn off any idiot who believed intense tailgating made him a Le Mans candidate.

The taillights on her little blue Audi were a beacon I could have followed even without the night-vision goggles, but when she turned off again, I was glad I had them; the road she was following was still two-lane, but it curved through what looked like a forest on both sides.

When she turned again, she slowed way down to follow a narrow path. I gambled on that being a driveway, the kind Martin and Johnny had. So I pulled off the road, stashed the bike quick, and cut through the woods in the same direction she'd been headed, following the sound of her car. I left the helmet with the bike, but kept the goggles on.