The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (7 page)

That special someone really had left while Lulu was hiding in the can.

We'd missed her!

There was still the back of the building to check. It wasn't impossible these units had back doors. That would be good to know.

They didn't. And if someone had crawled out the back window, she would have had to crawl through a lot of shrubbery. And why would anyone bother?

We could try to bribe the desk guy. Probably not a good idea. What we could learn was not enough to risk someone telling Frank about us.

There was nothing to do but go back downtown and see if Frank would do anything else today.

So, by three that afternoon, Lulu was prowling around outside the police station waiting for Frank to come out and do something his wife could be told about. We bought an Italian soda (vanilla) from a street vendor. We wandered down to the underground garage to make sure his car was still there.

We sat in the Escort for over an hour.

We wandered back to the mall and spent some time throwing quarters into the guitar case of a street musician.

Frank didn't come out until after five and then he drove straight home.

Lulu grabbed some dinner at a Thai restaurant in the Market District and then ambled on back to the office.

Stripped.

Showered.

Gargled scotch.

Brushed my teeth.

Wandered around the office making painful faces.

Brushed my teeth again.

I don't know why I let Lulu order Thai. Eating the kind she likes is like letting a live wasp go crazy in your mouth. Hours later your tongue still feels like it's sitting on a bed of nails.

The blinking pink glow from the
TOFU
sign across the alley on the Baltimore building taunted me. See? You should have fried up some tofu.

I was disappointed about not wrapping up the Wallace case, but it wouldn't do any good to brood about it. I decided to switch gears and spend time with the case of the Graffiti Murders.

Prudence Deerfield was hot for me to get back into GP Ink. The big guy I'd surprised had been looking for something. Putting those two facts together, I could only conclude there really was something to find there. The police had surely been all over the place, and they probably had gone over it again after I'd bowled over Frank and Marvin, but they may have missed something. I would have to go back, and I might as well do it right now while I still had some momentum going.

Maybe go as Dieter?

No, if I let Dieter go, we'd probably stop off in some secret back alley kitchen for midnight menudo. My tongue needed the night off.

I'd let Dennis do it.

Dennis was an old disguise. I could put Dennis on in my sleep. Being Dennis reminded me that there would be the GP Ink computers to poke around in! He couldn't wait to get his hands on them. Who knew what neat stuff they might have squirreled away over the years?

Curbing his enthusiasm a little, I pushed our disguise down a level by disguising Dennis as a janitor in tan overalls. I looked Dennis over from head to knees in the long mirror on the washroom door. The nerdy guy who sweeps up. I gave him a big thumbs up.

I locked the office and walked down the hall to the janitor's closet and borrowed a mop and bucket. I had never seen anyone in my building use them. I only knew they were there because no matter where I am, I like to know what's behind every door. I'd found this closet the first day I rented the office back in … well, a long, long time ago.

I made the short walk around the corner and down the street to the Baltimore building. The night was cool and cloudy, the dark mall all echoes and whispers, shadows and night eyes.

The service entrance was locked, of course, but it didn't take me long to get inside. I wondered if the real janitorial staff would be bumping around in the building. If my building was anything to go by, janitors at the Baltimore might be purely mythical.

When I got to suite 317, I looked for light under the door, and just because I didn't see any, I didn't pick the lock right away. Instead, I put my ear to the door and spent some time listening. Nothing. So I went to work on the lock.

Once I'd gotten the door open, I walked directly to the door of the inner office to check for light under it. No light. I did some more listening. I did some sniffing. It's a fact that most bad guys would be more elusive if they showered more often.

I eased the inner office door open. Listened. Sniffed. All was quiet and everything smelled inorganic.

By the time I flipped on the lights, I was pretty sure I was alone. I put on my hey-don't-hurt-me face and held up my mop just in case, but there was no one there.

The inner office contained two desks. I'd had the impression there was only one desk when I was here so briefly last time, and that was because the desk to the left was turned sideways and pushed up against the wall. Maybe Gerald or Pablo had been trying to get a little privacy. I wondered if they had gotten along. I wondered why they'd never thought to put some kind of barrier between the two desks. The current arrangement would have driven me crazy.

I went quickly through the drawers of the desks and found nothing interesting. Address books and the like had either been taken by the police or maybe had not existed at all. The big filing cabinets back against the wall between the desks were empty.

I peeked behind the posters taped to the walls. I flipped through the books on the shelf running around the room just a foot or so from the ceiling. Nothing.

It made sense, I suppose. If there were anything to find in a place like GP Ink it would be on computer media. The police had evidently taken all the CDs, floppies, removable hard disks, and tapes that must have been everywhere in an office like this. That left only the hard drives on the computers. The police would have copied the data, but I doubted they would have erased it. My one hope was that I would see something they had missed, or maybe make some connection they hadn't made.

There were three computers—one in the outer office and two back here. Computers always made it easy to be Dennis. He decided to call the computer in the outer office computer number 1. Facing the back wall of the inner office, the machine on his left would be computer number 2 and the machine on his right would be number 3. That meant we could choose one of six (three factorial) orders of search—123, 132, 213, 231, 312, or 321.

Because we lived in this universe and not some other universe, the stuff we were looking for, if it existed at all, would be in the last place we looked.

Knowing that, Dennis figured it should be possible to fool the universe and save some time.

He turned toward the front office as if he were going to go for 123 or 132, then at the last minute he spun around and sat down behind computer number 2. At this point in the procedure, the information would be on computer 1 or 3 (it would all depend on which one Dennis chose next), so he could get up now and skip number 2.

He got up and walked over and sat down behind computer number 3. Now the information we needed would be on computer number 1.

He got up and walked out to the front office and sat down behind number 1. He switched on the computer and started in on the files.

A half an hour later, we decided the universe had not been fooled by our little game of musical chairs. There was nothing but routine day-to-day outer office stuff on the hard drive of computer number 1. Dennis turned if off and walked back into the inner office.

Just pick one, we told him, and he walked to the computer on the right (number 3) without further debate.

There was some interesting stuff on this one—Gerald Moffitt's machine as it turned out, technical stuff and personal stuff. Dennis had a lot of experience looking at the organization of information on hard drives, and it soon became clear to him that there were some holes in Gerald's stuff—sections ripped out. Hastily ripped out as if someone were scanning files, maybe copying stuff, and then erasing what they'd read. For instance, Gerald had kept a directory for important e-mail organized by date. But there were dates missing, and some of the existing subdirectories were empty.

My Sky side popped up and offered the theory that the big guy in the foreign shoes had been in the process of searching and trashing Gerald's hard drive when we'd surprised him.

So what had he missed? Well, there was no e-mail subdirectory for the day of the murder. None for the day before either. And so on back to five days before the murder. But there was a place for e-mail six days before the murder. Dennis opened it up. There were three messages. Dennis figured that meant the big guy had been here, too. Who gets just three pieces of e-mail a day? No one. So Mr. Cheap Suit may well have been poking around in that very directory when we interrupted him.

Dennis jumped into the mail program so he could see e-mail by sender address and subject line, switched over to the day in question and spotted something interesting right away.

The subject of the middle message of the three messages received six days before the murder was WARNING! The sender was [email protected].

We opened it up.

The message read, “This is your next to last warning, Gerald Moffitt!” It was signed SOAPY.

It was from the loose screw who claimed to have posted a picture of Gerald's body on the Web.

If SOAPY had been threatening Gerald before the murder, it made his claims a lot more plausible. But there was still something screwy about the warning. Then we got it. How did SOAPY know this would be the “next to last warning?” Didn't people just say “This is your last warning!” Even if they had to say it a dozen times? Had SOAPY planned to issue a fixed number of warnings and then kill Gerald anyway? And what was he warning Gerald about? And where was his last warning? Maybe he'd killed Gerald with no last warning.

Also puzzling was the fact that if the police had this information why were they still so hot to grab Pablo? Could they have missed this? Unlikely. Another puzzle for our list of puzzles in this case.

Dennis copied the letter onto a floppy. The only other interesting thing on Gerald's machine was a file called DATAPANTS. Besides the name, of course, the neat thing about this file was that it was encrypted. Dennis loved encrypted files. He copied the DATAPANTS file onto the floppy with the warning from SOAPY and put the floppy in his shirt pocket. Then he erased both the warning from SOAPY and the DATAPANTS file. Why make things easy for Mr. Sucker Punch if he decided to come back to finish up?

Dennis turned off Gerald's computer and switched over to the one on the other desk.

We were making progress!

That sudden burst of enthusiasm was a flash in the pan. Even with this new information, I felt an old despair creeping up, and I knew I could make it go away with a little dancing, but I knew too that down that road was just more despair. The hell of it was that I knew I was already deep into relapse. I'd proved that at Gotta Dance. It's like something good happens and I've got to run off and celebrate.

At least one of us had been planning it all along.

I'd been avoiding looking, fooling myself, but once the realization hit home, there was no sense denying it. I stopped in the middle of the room and looked down at my feet. I might be Dennis disguised as a janitor, but I was wearing our shiny black dancing shoes.

Unless I made a serious life change, everything I did now was just a holding action. My weird double-think ability was all that was keeping me going. Maybe that would be enough. You needed time to make big life changes, and time was not a luxury we had right now. Right now we had cases to solve. Dennis moved on to the next computer.

Pablo's computer was filled with nifty games. He and Randy Casey must have had a lot in common. It was hard to see how Pablo had gotten any work done at all. At least that was my impression before I started in on the directory called EES.

We hit another jackpot.

There were a lot of documents written in a foreign language. There was also a file of business letters discussing the foreign language files.

The first startling thing I learned was that the language was Russian! The reason I hadn't recognized it at once (not that any of us speak Russian) was that it wasn't written in the Russian alphabet, so I hadn't been tipped off by any of those funny letters they use. Instead everything was in the regular alphabet. Maybe the words were spelled like they sounded.

But the thing that really knocked me out was that the Russian company was called Evil Empire Software!

The nerve of these guys. They put it right out in the open and dared you to make something of it.

From clues in the business letters I deduced that GP Ink had been hired by the Russians to translate Evil Empire documentation into English.

six

There were simply too many Russians in the case. EES and 4e4—it had to mean something.

I decided to call a conference. I hadn't been making excuses when I'd told Prudence Deerfield that my disguises gave me the ability to look at a problem from a number of different perspectives. Each of my disguises represented a unique world view. In the old days, getting a discussion going had been difficult (not that we didn't manage it). These days, we did it with computers. Now I could log on to a private chat room, split myself into my several pieces, and talk the problem out.

I flipped over to Pablo's telecommunication directory and logged on to the Internet using the Skylight Howells office account. I jumped over to a commercial service I knew was usually not too busy at that time of night and made arrangements for a private room.

Once inside the room, I made an animated icon for each of my aspects. Sky became Mr. Face, the
Mad Mag
spy I often used when talking to my therapist Roger. Dennis liked to appear as a red, white, and blue superhero in netland. Huge chest. No butt to speak of. Goofy cape. Scarface wore a human body with the head of a bat. Lulu liked to dress up, and in netland she had the figure for it. Dieter always dressed in black. The clothes were a sharp contrast to his blond hair and piercing blue eyes. The Average Guy (Tag) waited until everyone had a look, and then assumed the precise average of the other five.