The Liar's Lullaby (17 page)

Then he signed in to the second new e-mail account. He opened a new message and typed. He would not send the message. He would save it as a draft and log out.

As a way to keep communications secret, this technique worked for al Qaeda. It could work for the good guys too. There would be no record of messages sent, no packets of information flying around the Internet, just various additions to the draft, which he and Keyes would read in turn.

He wrote:
I have a new task for you.

 

 

A
T THE CUBBYHOLE desk in the garage at Blue Eagle Security, Keyes read Paine’s draft e-mail.

Keyes read that phrase,
clean skin
. He’d told Paine only half the truth. He had a criminal record, but it had been sealed as a juvenile. However, both he and Ivory had something better than clean skins: multiple skins. Fresh identities, numerous passports. His came courtesy of his former employer, which had arrangements with the State Department and CIA. Officially, those identities had been deactivated when he got fired, but they still fooled most civilian agencies, not to mention your average business.

And Ivory was a nom de guerre. Her fresh skin, the fake name on her driver’s license and employment records, came courtesy of her useless sister in Arizona, who had no clue her identity was being borrowed.

Every illegal from the ROW could shove him aside and get a job in the U.S.A. Well, fuck ’em. He and Ivory could use fake IDs too.

He read Paine’s words on the screen and didn’t have to think twice, because he knew that Tom Paine wasn’t just a mouthpiece, not just a provocateur. He was a righteous subversive, a saboteur who used fire and violence to bully political cowards into doing what needed to be done. Tom Paine would see things through.

He wrote back:
Will send photos this afternoon.

He logged out. Wiped the computer’s browser history clean. It was on. He was going to make a difference.

P
ATCHY MIST TURNED THE AIR ALONG GEARY BOULEVARD BRIGHTER than white. This stretch of the boulevard ran straight and flat all the way to the beach. The buildings had a retro feel: old movie theaters, well-tended trees, appliance stores painted a mustardy green that looked leftover from a WWII Quonset hut. Down the street, the golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church gleamed in the sun and shop fronts had signs in Cyrillic script. Jo swung the pickup into a parking slot outside Compurama.

Inside, the staff skittered around like nervous prairie dogs. Two of them huddled behind the cash register, comparing iPhones. Jo counted to five and, when they continued their avoidance behavior, knocked on the counter.

One looked up. He was about twenty, as thin as a baguette, with hair that swept over one eye.

“I’m looking for Ferd,” she said.

The boy tossed his hair and pointed toward the back of the store.

Compurama was crammed with aisles of computers and peripherals and a gigantic rack of candy and beef jerky. She found Ferd in a corner with a colleague, a towering woman with a ponytail. Ferd had a remote control in his hands. She heard the whir of an electric motor. A little vehicle approached.

“Is that a robot?” Jo said.

Ferd turned. His face popped with surprise at seeing her, then split into a grin. For a second, she thought he was going to hop with excitement.

He rushed toward her. “This is Ahnuld.”

Ahnuld was a foot tall and knobby with bits and protrusions. It ran on four fat tires, like a Tonka truck. It was covered with BIOHAZARD and RADIATION warning stickers. It looked like the spawn of WALL-E and a DVD player.

“Cute,” Jo said.

“He’s on loan from a friend in the robotics lab at Berkeley. This is the beta model for a competition later in the year.”

“Road race, or robot cage battle?” Jo said.

The woman with the ponytail cracked a smile. “Self-guided urban navigation.”

“Watch.” Ferd pressed a switch. Then he set the remote on a shelf. “He’ll negotiate a lap around the store on his own, using ultrasonic sensors. Okay, Ahnuld. Off you go.”

The cobbled-together little thing whirred away, zigzagging worryingly. Ferd gazed at Jo, his face beatific. Like she was the Virgin of Guadalupe, or Barbarella.

She said, “Have a problem. I need to trace an e- mail address and find its owner.”

He straightened and hitched up his pants. “At your service. What information do you have?”

“An address. Hotmail. Plus messages to and from.”

Ferd ran his tongue across the inside of one cheek. “Bambi? Thoughts? Beyond whois”—the domain and database search function—“or an IP lookup?”

“Bambi?” Jo said.

The woman with the ponytail said, “Bambi Hess. We met at Ferd’s Halloween party.”

It took Jo a second to recognize her. “The Klingon.”

She looked like she could tear a man in two by grabbing his ankles and pulling. Jo suspected a previous career in logging or, possibly, actual Klingon conquest.

“What’s more important—finding out who this guy is, or
where
he is?” she said.

“Who.” Jo thought about it. “But pinpointing the where could help narrow down the who. And it might help me track what this guy’s been up to. Evidence. It would form a timeline, and maybe a map. “What can you do?”

“Depends. An e-mail handle is useless by itself. Anybody can sign up for a Hotmail account without providing their real name or contact information. Do you know someone who works for Hotmail? Someone who’d slip you a name?”

“No. And I don’t know anybody I could bribe either, if that was going to be your next suggestion,” Jo said.

“Fair enough,” Bambi said. “If you had, say, admin privileges on a Web site or blog where he left comments, then you could look up the X-Originating header in the e-mail and trace his IP address to the source.”

“I can ferret around online and see if this person has commented somewhere.”

“Might help.”

Ferd scratched his head. The Brylcreem had turned his hair into a misshapen attempt at punk sculpture, stiff and greasy.

“How much do you trust me?” he said.

Jo raised an eyebrow. “You asking me?”

“Forward me some e-mails from this guy. I can do a traceroute. Maybe capture the location where he’s logging in from. And if that location changes . . .”

“You could track him, if he’s on the move.”

“Theoretically.”

“How closely could you narrow it down?” she said. “Country? City?”

“If I get really lucky, the source address might tell me where it originated—even inside a particular building. At a mall, say, or on a campus.”

Archangel X had asked Tasia about the
Bad Dogs and Bullets
tour. Jo wondered if tracing his e-mails might illuminate a trail, and show that he’d been following Tasia.

“That would be useful,” she said. “Could you do it without tipping him off?”

Bambi smirked. “You mean, without e- mailing him directly and saying, ‘Where are you, douche wad?’ ”

Jo turned to her with a flat stare. “Who said he’s a douche wad?”

“Why else would you be after him? He ripped you off, or he’s spamming you. Or broke up with you, right?”

Jo flattened the stare to a metallic sheen. “He’s my opponent in an MMRWRPG.”

Bambi’s eyes widened. The question on her lips looked like,
Huh?

“Massively multiplayer real-world role-playing game,” Jo said. “First to track the other wins.”

“Wow. Real world?”

“The realest.”

She wasn’t about to say anything else in front of Bambi. Around the corner, whirring happily, came Ahnuld. He was weaving and knocking into the shelves. Somebody had taped a Pepsi to him. Also a cigarette.

“Good luck,” she said.

 

 

A
S JO TURNED the key in the Tacoma’s ignition, her phone rang.

“Dr. Beckett? Dr. Gerald Rhee Park.”

Park was the physician who had prescribed Prozac to Tasia McFarland. “Thanks for returning my call.”

“I doubt I can shed much light on Ms. Hicks- McFarland’s demise. I only saw her twice.”

Jo felt surprised. “You prescribed an antidepressant.”

“She had symptoms of major depression. So, yes, I wrote her a scrip for Prozac.”

“Can I ask why you wrote it out to Fawn Hicks?”

“To protect her privacy. And if you’ll excuse me for stating the obvious, the brouhaha surrounding her death only confirms that she was right to be cautious. I wrote the scrip using her first name and maiden name, both of which were on her driver’s license.”

“That also meant that a pharmacy wouldn’t be able to cross-check the prescription against her other scrips for drug interactions.”

“Miss Hicks was an adult, Dr. Beckett.”

“Did she tell you that she’d been diagnosed as bipolar one?”

“She presented with frank symptoms of major depression. I prescribed accordingly.”

“She was given Prozac without a mood stabilizer?” Jo pinched the bridge of her nose. “What sort of practice do you have?”

“I’m a primary care physician.”

“You’re not in psychiatric practice?”

“No. And to be frank, Dr. Beckett, your insinuations are quite without merit.”

“I’m insinuating nothing,” Jo said, knowing she was. Anger rising. “Prescribing an SSRI without a mood stabilizer onboard could have flipped Ms. McFarland into a manic or mixed state.”

“I did everything possible to help Ms. McFarland to the best of my ability and the highest professional standards.”

“Did you see her for any follow-up visits?”

“A phone consultation. She was experiencing a significant reduction in her symptoms. So if you’ll excuse me, this conversation is at an end.”

He broke off the call. Probably to phone his attorney, and prepare a malpractice defense and maybe a defamation lawsuit against Jo.

She shook her head. Park had prescribed Prozac, an SSRI—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor—without knowing that Tasia was bipolar. That prescription had possibly sent her into a mixed state—hyperenergetic, agitated, and maybe even suicidal.

The phone rang again. It was the Psych Department receptionist from UCSF. “Heads up. We’ve been getting calls all morning. The media has your name.”

She felt a spark of dismay. “Who called?”

“Fox, CNN, a wire service reporter, plus somebody was asking for you at the front desk. You have a bunch of messages. Would you like me to read them?”

“Sure. Thanks.” She ran her hand through her hair in frustration.

Everybody wanted her to call back. She wrote down their names. She seemed to hear a rumbling sound in the distance. A freight train, bearing down on her.

“You going to return their calls?” the receptionist said.

“After I return from my trip to Mars.”

She fired up the truck.

 

 

B
ACK AT THE HOUSE, she felt an increasing uneasiness, like an itch. Archangel X had gotten under her skin.

She paced, ate a banana with peanut butter, and made a pot of coffee. While it brewed, she called Tang. “Anything new?”

“We have initial tox results from Tasia’s autopsy. She was clean. No cocaine, no opiates, no illegal substances.”

“Prescription meds?” Jo said.

“Prozac.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope.”

After hanging up, Jo felt antsier than before. She found the business card belonging to the property manager for Tasia’s house, and gave him a call.

“Vandalism. Interesting you should ask,” he said. “I have a call in to Ms. McFarland’s insurance company. There’s some exterior damage that needs to be repaired.”

The itchy feeling climbed Jo’s arm, as if silverfish were running along her skin. “What kind of damage?”

“Graffiti.”

She had run out the back door and across Tasia’s backyard. She hadn’t seen graffiti. “What and where?”

“On the back wall of the house. And on the fence, which is up in the trees.”

“What does it say?” Jo said.

“I can send you photos.”

Jo gave him her e- mail address. When the photos arrived, the crawly silverfish feeling intensified. “When did you discover this?”

“Yesterday, after you were there. After the break-in.”

Jo couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it. Of course, she hadn’t had a chance to do an exterior tour of Tasia’s house. And when she ran after the intruder, she hadn’t looked back. If she had, she would have been shocked. On the back wall, in dripping black spray paint, somebody had written
tart
,
slag
, and
BURN
.

“Have the police seen this?”

“Yeah. I walked around the house with an officer yesterday after the incident.”

The images didn’t have the finesse of experienced gang tagging, or the joie de vivre and cynicism of street art. They were pure message, angry and sharp.

“Here’s another one, from the fence at the top of the hill. It’s on the back side, where nobody saw it until after the break-in,” the property manager said.

These were worse.
You betrayed me, now you pay.

“Don’t paint anything over. It’s evidence,” she said.

When she finished the call, she phoned Tang. “Why didn’t anybody tell me about the graffiti at Tasia’s house?”