The Taken (20 page)

Costamides flipped the last page of the story, in case there was more, but she looked up at them shrugging, and laid the
papers aside. “Well, if you were wondering how your friend on the internet ended up in that basement –”

“We know as little now as we did twenty minutes ago,” Hazel said.

Fraser was staring down at the pages. “And we’re thinking of letting the
Record
run this shit?”

“Is that our prime concern right now?” asked Wingate. “Whether they run it or not, we have to decide what it means to us and what our next move is going to be.” He held up his sheaf of papers. Hazel had noticed he’d been underlining words on it. “If I understand this correctly, we’re being alerted to a murder, as well as a suspect.”

“Or someone wants to watch us dance like marionettes,” said Fraser.

“If we’re marionettes,” said Hazel, “I think we better learn our parts. Whoever this is, they want people to see everything. Which is why they want this in the paper.”

“I don’t care what the fuck they want,” said Fraser. “Who’s in charge here?”

“You’re forgetting about their collateral,” she said to him. “We have to at least give the appearance of cooperation. Or we’re going to find a body on our doorstep, and I’m not sure it would stop there.” She jutted her chin at Wingate’s copy of the story. “What were you writing?”

He flipped back to the first page. “I don’t know what you’re all thinking, but I read chapters one and two, like, ten times, and I don’t think three through five were written by the same person. The beginning was, well, it was
bad
. This isn’t exactly …”

“Dickens?” said Hazel.

He smiled at her, a little shyly. “Yeah. But it’s better than what preceded it.”

“Practice makes perfect,” said Costamides.

“No,” said Hazel, “the agenda has changed since those first chapters. It’s not a story anymore. It’s … it’s a map of some kind.”

“If we choose to believe it,” said Fraser, harshly. “And mind you, even if we
do
, how the hell do we know exactly what we’re believing in?”

“We’re being asked to figure that out,” said Wingate. He spread his fingertips on top of the pages, making a bridge over them. “The story is our guide. The stuff on the internet is for us to keep track of how we’re doing.”

“And how are we doing?” asked Costamides.

“We fall any further behind,” said Fraser, “they might start to run out of body parts to send us.”

Wingate ignored him. “Well, I noticed that he uses the word
damage
a lot. He says it when he’s sitting at the table, and then he talks about the water
damaging
the floor. And he does it somewhere else too, but I can’t find it.”

“The box he digs up in the backyard is ‘damaged,’” said Hazel. “It might mean something.”

“He’s doing the crossword at the beginning, isn’t he?” said Costamides. They all flipped back to the first page of chapter four. “‘Damaged’ is in the clue.” She looked up. “What’s a word that means ‘damaged’?”

“Broken,” said Wingate. “Smashed.”

“Something that’s ‘damaged’ isn’t necessarily completely ruined.”

“Damn it,” said Hazel. “I know what it is.” They all looked at her. “It’s a cryptic clue, like for a crossword.
Damaged
or
broken
or
messy
– words like that – they signal anagrams.”

They all turned their eyes back on the page. “Surely we’re not thinking this whole thing is, like, a palindrome?” said Fraser.

“No,” she said. “But something has to be rearranged before it makes sense. A detail or a word.”

“Fine. What, though?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel.

The four of them stared at the pages. To Hazel’s eyes, the longer she looked, the more the letters and words seemed like meaningless marks against a vast, empty field.

Her phone rang and she picked it up. It was Melanie. “I’m putting him on speakerphone,” she said.

It was Spere. “It’s official, people. The hand in Deacon’s freezer once held that computer mouse.” There was silence from the room. “We had to digitize the layers of prints, but we were able to separate and collate. We have a match.”

“Well, I guess that means I don’t have to play the rabid fan up at the missus’s house to shake loose a drinking glass,” said Fraser. “Good work, Howard.”

“Yeah, good work,” said Hazel. She reached forward and punched the disconnect. For the first time in this case, something was as it seemed. Her eyes were drawn to the computer screen, which continued to show its plea in blood. “What did you do?” she said quietly to it and then she slowly turned her gaze on the others. “What did Colin Eldwin do?”

She gave Melanie a couple of tasks. The first was to connect her with the
Westmuir Record
. A panicked Rebecca Portman came on the line. “Mr. Sunderland is on the warpath,” she said. “He just called from Atlanta and I had to tell him about our Thursday edition. I, um, have a message he made me write down. He told me to read it to you.”

“I didn’t call you, Miss Portman, to pick up messages from your boss.”

“I’m sorry, but, just the way he sounded …”

“I have a couple of needs you can take care of for me. Do I still have your attention?” Portman murmured that she did. “The first thing is, I’ve decided you can run Colin Eldwin’s story again. In fact, I want you to run both chapters four and five in Monday’s edition.”

“Both?”

“Yes. Is that going to get you in trouble again?”

“I’m afraid it will. Maybe I should read you Mr. Sunderland’s message, Ma’am? He asked me to read it to you.”

“Does it have the word
feckless
in it?”

“Um …” She was scanning the note. “Not exactly.”

“Is your boyfriend in today?”

“Who?”

“Beaker, Miss Portman, your nervous little friend in IT. I want him in my station house in fifteen minutes. Tell him to put all the emails Colin Eldwin has sent you – all of them – on a CD and have them bring it over to me. I have some questions for him.”

She thought she could hear Portman’s heart pounding over the phone. “He’s uh, not in today, Detective. Friday is usually pretty quiet.”

Hazel wanted to reach through the phone and wring the little dope’s neck. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Um –”

“Tell him I won’t keep him long. And I’m ‘Detective Inspector’ to you.”

“Sorry, Ma’am.” Hazel closed her eyes and held her tongue. “He really wants me to read this note to you.”

Cartwright appeared in the doorway. Hazel covered the mouthpiece. “What?”

“Mr. Pedersen says he’s having brunch with his wife. Is it urgent?”

“Tell him to come in when he’s done. And if he’s at Ladyman’s have him bring me a peameal bacon sandwich.”

She put the phone back to her ear. Portman was evidently reciting Sunderland’s message. “‘… and don’t think I won’t.’ I’m sorry for the strong language, Ma’am. But he insisted.”

“My ears are burning. Tell him you could hear me swallowing nervously. Hey, do you want to know what we called your boss in high school?”

“No.”

“We called him ‘Pokey’ because he was always in other people’s business. Probably the boys called him that too because he had a small penis. He might still answer to it.” There was silence on the other end. “Send me your little friend, Miss Portman. Burn him his CD if you know how, and get him over here. He has thirteen minutes now.”

Hubert Mackie – that was the kid’s name – showed up fourteen minutes later, out of breath and looking panicked. Cartwright offered him a cup of coffee, but he told her coffee made him sweat and she gave him a glass of water instead. He was wearing a black cloth jacket with a broken zipper and his wispy hair kept falling over his forehead. “I guess we’re going to need a computer,” he said, and Hazel led him out to Wingate’s work station. The kid walked through the pen with his head down, muttering “hello” left and right and pushing his hair away from his eyes.

Hazel pulled the chair out for him, and Mackie sat, apologizing as he did, and Hazel asked him if he wanted a sedative.

“Oh no, Ma’am, that’d just make me sleepy.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

“What is it you were wanting to know, Ma’am?”

“That story the paper is running – did the chapters all come from the same email address?”

He’d popped the CD into Wingate’s drive and was waiting for it to show up on his desktop. “I had Rebecca turn the emails you wanted to see into rtfs to make things easier.”

“Meaning?”

“Just text files, Ma’am. They’ll open in any word processor.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. He used the first two fingers of each hand to type and he seemed to be faster than Cartwright with all ten. The windows started opening on the screen, blooming and expanding until there were more than a dozen. “Thirteen in total, Ma’am.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“There’s his email address right there,” the kid said, putting his finger against the screen. The address read
[email protected]
.

“Is it always the same? Like, is it coming from the same email address every time?”

“Yeah,” said Mackie.

“So that means it’s him writing to you guys.”

“Well, it’s his email address.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?” she said, getting impatient.

“It’s just that, you know, when you write an email, there’s an IP address attached to the ISP both sending and receiving the email –”

“English, Beaker!”

“I’m trying!” He hunched over the keyboard for a second, making an effort to become invisible. He spoke faster now. “IP: Internet Protocol. Every machine, you know, a computer or a device of any kind, that’s connected to a network – like the internet – has an IP address. It’s a unique identifier, it tells you where the device is located.
Most
of the time. ISP: Internet Service Provider. Simply said, your email originates at one IP address, that of your ISP, and arrives at another, the IP of your recipient’s ISP.”

“Fine. Where were these emails sent from?”

The kid started cycling through the text files. He ran his
finger down a long string of gobbledegook that preceded the first bunch of the email messages. “Well, these all both originate and terminate at a Mayfair hub.” He quickly put his hands in the air to keep Hazel from yelling at him again. “A hub is the physical location where the ISP has its computers, and where all information is received, processed, and/or sent along. Eldwin’s provider is Ontcom, which has a hub in Mayfair, and ours is Caneast, which does too. So he sent these from his computer to the Ontcom servers, they sent them along to the Caneast servers, and we uploaded them to our hard drives from the Caneast servers.”

“So, broken telephone.”

“Sort of,” he said. “Except in the internet version, you can trace every step of the journey.”

“What about the rest of the emails? I want to know where chapters three, four, and five came from.”

He brought those up. She could see for herself that they still came from
[email protected]
. “These were sent from the internet, but still from his account.”

“
Meaning
.”

His shoulders slumped a little. “How come you don’t know this stuff? Ma’am.”

“You want me to slap your cranium?”

“You can send email from your desktop, you know, at home, off a program, or you can send it from the internet itself, from your ISP’s webmail program – it’s called a ‘shell’ and they all have one – which means you’re logging on to your account from some homepage – and this could be anywhere in the world – and you can send and receive mail from there.”

“Does the IP address change?”

“Yes,” he said. “Different servers.” He quickly added: “Servers are machines connected to the internet.”

“Can you find the location of these servers?”

“Yes,” he said, and he opened the browser on Wingate’s computer. He was copying and pasting strings of numbers onto a webpage. He clicked something and waited. Then he said, “Or no.”

“What do you mean
no?”

“I mean these later chapters were sent from Colin Eldwin’s email address through the shell, but he was anonymized.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

Mackie turned in the chair, panicked anew. “Please, Ma’am, don’t slap my cranium. There’s all kinds of ways to be anonymous on the internet these days. You can send email, surf, chat, all anonymously. You can be untraceable. Anyone can do it.”

“So we can’t know it’s Eldwin physically sending the emails?”

“That’s right,” he said, and he sounded proud of her. “Someone could have his password and is using his account. That’s all they’d need. Then they could cloak, log on, and send email and no one would be the wiser unless they ran the IPs, like we just did.”

Hazel stared at the screen. The string of numbers Mackie had input was now superimposed over an image of planet Earth with a big yellow question mark beside them. “So what you’re saying is these last three chapters could have come from anywhere.”

“Well, they
came
from Ontcom’s shell, but the person who logged on to the shell could have been in Mozambique for all we know. This person used a site called Anonymice to cloak themselves. It says it here in the expanded headers.”

“What if we serve Anonymice with a warrant?”

“Good luck,” said Mackie. “These sites don’t keep any records at all. They don’t know who’s accessing their service. Theoretically, you could identify a user if you somehow got legal control of the site and you found him
while
he was online, because the Anonymice servers know, at some level, who’s logging on and generally where they are before they cloak them and send them forward into the internet. But once your guy’s logged out of the site, he’s a ghost.” She leaned over him and brought up the window with the video in it. She let him watch it. “Omigod. Is that blood, Ma’am?”

“What can you tell me about that url?”

He copied it from the address window and pasted it into trace search. “It’s the same thing. The path begins and ends on the internet.”

“Is there any way to link the url with the company that anonymized the emails? Is it the same company?”