The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer?

by Pat Powers

  "So I am told," I replied.

  Later, I reflected that I was the first and maybe the only person ever to get an interview from an actual unnamed source. When other people referred to unnamed sources, they were talking about people who had names -- they just wouldn't reveal them. But my source really didn't have a name.

  Chapter 10

  Penetrated here, there and eventually, everywhere

  By the time I finished my interview with the animal it was well after midnight, and my thoughts were muzzy and tired as I drove through the dark and mostly empty streets of the northern suburbs.

  I have learned over the years that unless I am driven by extraordinary pressures, like being near the end of a long case, my brain turns into a pumpkin about 18 hours after I get up in the morning. And although I was haunted by the thought that April's life was in danger and every second counted, I also knew that I had entered my personal stupid zone and if I didn't get some sleep, I wouldn't get out of the stupid zone. So I went to sleep. I set the alarm to wake me in six hours, the bare minimum needed to wake up outside the Stupid Zone. Because the other consideration here was that if I was going to help April at all, it would be by figuring things out. Something I didn't do well while in the stupid zone.

  My phone was doing the fast blinky-blinky that meant I had calls, so I paused to take notes on the half-dozen or so calls that had come in. I'd rather have done it in the morning when I was fresh, but by then the media might have tumbled to my involvement in the case, leading to a ton of messages.

  I woke up early and bright, as I'm prone to, made some grits, eggs and coffee and sat in the living room scanning the online news reports and wishing I'd thought to make my place woman-inhabitable before getting on this case. It's not that it was a mess, by male standards. The clothes scattered around the room didn't smell bad and none of it was underwear. There were no plates with wet food remnants in them. Just dry stuff, chips and the like. Only one coffee cup had things growing in it. And papers, videotapes, CDs and books didn't count as mess, since they didn't decompose unless they got wet.

  After I had some coffee in me I felt better, decaf or not. I looked at my notes and lined up my calls. Most were routine and not that productive, but when I called Andrew Thomson I got a lead.

  "One of the diners in Athena's palace is an interesting guy," said Thomson. "I hacked all the personal data the Atlanta PD collected from Athena's Palace, including the credit card receipts of patrons who were in the place when April was kidnapped. One of them was a fellow named Alfred Smith. Or at least that's what the card said. It had a few indicators on it, so I put it through an intensive check. Turns out the card is a fake, but not one of those stolen card fakes. It's an identity fake. I did a full-out search and was able to connect some of the data on the card with it's real owner. The real name of the bearer is one Alfred Speakman, and he did some time in Illinois for kidnapping a woman about a decade ago."

  "Gotcha," I said. "I take it he's on the Illinois sexual predator list."

  "Bingo," said Thomson.

  It was all the motive anyone would ever need to hide their identity. Being on the sexual predator list could lose you jobs, alienate your neighbors and get you a lot of unwelcome attention from the cops.

  "Still on probation?" I asked.

  "No, he left probation three years ago," said Thomson. "His record's been clean since he left prison. For what that's worth."

  "Does he have a job?" I asked.

  "He works full-time for Hyperglobalmegacorp," said Thomson, "as an accountant. Picked up spreadsheet and database management skills while he was in prison."

  "So he's not likely to be in during the day," I said.

  "No, he's not," said Thomson. "Hyperglobalmegacorp headquarters is a good nine miles from his place, so he's unlikely to make it home for lunch."

  In Atlanta's lunch-hour traffic, a nine-mile trip could easily take half an hour. So Speakman's place was probably empty from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Very nice.

  "No roomies or girlfriends living there?" I asked.

  "Not that I can find," said Thomson. "But a live-in girlfriend might not show very well in cyberspace, especially if she's kinda new."

  "It's a chance I can take," I said. "Do you happen to know anything about the locks and the security systems at Speakman's place?"

  "The Bayloft Apartments are kinda old," said Thomson. "Speakman has just barely made it into the middle class. They've got Yale Model 3577 deadbolts and Schlege Model H34B handle locks. They've got those ridiculous Hanze Model 300 security systems. Speakman could have installed his own stuff, but I doubt it. He doesn't appear to own anything worth stealing, and Bayloft hasn't had a burglary in three years."

  "Bayloft have any security guys?" I asked.

  "No, but they've got a full complement of retirees, which most burglars will tell you is worse," said Thomson.

  "Lucky thing for me I'm a private detective and not a burglar then," I said.

  "Keep your eyes open, or you'll be both," said Thomson.

  "I'm a cautious guy, you know that," I said.

  "If you were that cautious you wouldn't have asked," said Thomson.

  "True enough," I said.

  I spent the next two hours setting up for my visit to Speakman's place. I had a variety of magnetic signs I'd had made up for my van, with various company logos on them. Each sign matched one of several jumpsuits I'd had made up. Today I was with Dworkin Pest Control.

  Speakman's apartment was in a nondescript brick apartment building that was nicely maintained, which meant the property owners still made enough income from the renters that spending money on upkeep made sense. Of course, the high cost of rent everywhere in Atlanta had made it a little easier on property owners. Tougher on renters, as I could attest. It wasn't anything like San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York, but then, neither were the salaries.

  I got my gear out of the truck. The nice thing about being a pest control guy was you got to carry a lot of gear and stand around a lot. I walked right up to Speakman's place and put my bag down, casually pulling out my lockpicks. I had the door handle lock picked in less than ten seconds. Then I picked up what looked like it might be a clipboard. Certainly, there was a clipboard velcroed on top of it. It was actually the latest thing is lockpicks, so high tech and so expensive that I couldn't afford it -- I was leasing it from a guy who had connections.

  I held the device near the door opposite the deadbolt's keyhole. It did a quick magnetic read of the interior of the deadbolt. Then it altered a set of pins that determined the shape of a mold inside the device. A new, high tech metal flowed from a special heated compartment into the mold. In a moment it was in the shape needed to push the pins inside the deadbolt. A quick blast of cooling nitrogen froze the lockpick solid and it was ejected from the mold and into my waiting hand.

  If my hand had been naked it might have been burned by the recently frozen metal, but I had a small insulated cloth in my palm. I was also wearing transparent latex gloves to conceal my fingerprints, but they wouldn't have done much to insulate me. I casually snapped the lockpick off and used it to the open the deadbolt. It was exactly as difficult as using a key.

  Once inside the apartment, I relocked the door and headed for the security system. It was an old one and a bottom-of-the-line one at that. I put the lockpick unit on the floor and pulled another box out of the bag, this one a more naked piece of tech with alligator-clipped wires. In a few seconds I had the security box jimmied and the alligator clips were attached to the input-output wires on the security unit. The clips picked up the security box's data stream and analyzed it, then sent the appropriate code announcing that the security set's button's had been punched in the right order. A green telltale on the security system dongle told me that I was safe.

  I was in and safe. I pulled my laptop out of the "pest control kit" I'd brought in and opened it up. It was already running my lookout program. A wireless antenna glued to the side of my van was transmitting
input from several vidcams hidden inside it to my laptop. They showed very clearly that nothing was happening outside. There were also a couple of motion detectors inside the van that would be triggered if any vehicles pulled up or any people came by. Also if a large dog came by, but better safe than sorry.

  With my lookout online, I walked to the back of the apartment, not a difficult feat because it was a small apartment. The small living room led to a cramped kitchen/dining room combination. The kitchen had doors leading to a bedroom and to a patio which also served as a fire escape. I unlocked the door but didn't open it, instead I just looked out the window and planned my emergency escape route to the woods that fringed the apartment complex. Since the woods started a scant four meters from the deck it would be an easy move. I had my exit route planned if my lookout beeped and the screen showed people moving in.

  Next thing to do was search the place. I had done some thinking before coming in and had decided not to toss the place. That was the fastest and easiest way to do a thorough search, but of course as soon as Speakman walked into his apartment he'd know it had been searched. And if he were the one who had kidnapped April, he might decide to kill her before someone rescued her and she was able to testify against him.

  First thing I did was search for April. Since she was human, there weren't many places she could be in the apartment, so I looked at them. The rooms themselves. The closets. The space under the bed and above the bed. Inside and under the sofa. The bathroom, including the shower. Under the desk. The bottom kitchen cabinets. The refrigerator (gruesome, but there it was). But it was a very tiny apartment, much of it full of the apparatus of daily life, and it took very little time to determine that no creature the size of April, however folded or confined, was anywhere in it.

  Next it was time to look for clues. The first place was the computer. I had several disks in my shirt pocket with a few small but nifty utilities. Some worked on Mac machines and some worked on Linux operating systems, but most were wintel programs. Speakman's computer was a wintel box so I booted it up and went through the desk's drawers while Bill Gates' behemoth roused its hulking corpus into life.

  I didn't find much. Some current games on CD. CDs for current database and spreadsheet apps. Instruction manuals. A litter of papers, all of them bland and unrevealing.

  After Windows was booted I inserted my flash drive holding the Searcher utility into the USB port and ran it. It would find any set of ASCII codes that corresponded to the type I entered in the search field, in any file on the machine. It was all machine code and lightning fast, and also undetectable by Windows. I tried "April " and "Dancer" and "Gorean" and a few others that were more in the way of a longshot. No results on any of them.

  I ran a couple more utilities and one of them revealed that there was a program called PGP running on Speakman's machine, and I knew why I hadn't found any incriminating text fields, and also that I was in for a tough run. PGP was Pretty Good Privacy, a really tough encryption program -- one that was so good that it once got the U.S. government's nose out of joint because it gave citizens the ability to write stuff that the government couldn't crack. The feds hadn't been able to suppress it, but in their petty way they still gave its inventor hell for giving it to the people instead of their would-be masters.

  Speakman was undoubtedly using PGP on anything he wrote that might be incriminating, and I wouldn't be cracking it and neither would any of my friends, because PGP was just too tough to crack in any reasonable time frame. There were rumored to be high-powered supercomputers used by the feds that were so fast that they could crack PGP, but they were just rumors, and more to the point, they were rumors that I didn't have access to.

  Still, I ran a little program I had called password finder that would pick out everything on a machine that looked like a password and save it to disk. That included PGP encryption keys, which were long strings of random numbers and letters.

  Password finder took a little time to run, and while it ran, I ran a physical search of the apartment. It was easy because Speakman didn't own much stuff. As Thomson had said, he had barely made it into the middle class. The apartment was tiny but didn't seem as tiny as it was because there wasn't a lot of stuff crammed into it. And of course, to a guy who had spent years living with a roomie in a six by eight foot cell, the place probably seemed like a mansion.

  Still, I checked every nook and cranny. I started with the books. They were an innocuous lot. Speakman seemed to like thrillers, horror stories and detective novels a lot. There was "The Abyss" by Steve Vance. And a Dirty Harry novel. And "The Fan Club" by Irving Wallace. There were even a couple of Gor novels, notably "Dancer of Gor" mixed in with fantasy novels by Sharon Green and Andrew Offut. Interesting but not really indicative. I thumbed through the Gor novels to see if there were any revealing glosses in the page margins, but I didn't see any, and I gave "Dancer" a very hard look for notes penciled anywhere on any page, but didn't find any.

  That was understandable. Speakman had been in prison. He'd had plenty of motive to develop secretive habits.

  I found some porn magazines in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Nothing spectacular. "Big Boob Babes" "Cum-Loving Sex Sluts," that sort of thing. I thumbed through them as well, looking for notes and such, but found nothing. Just large breasted women grinning as they were penetrated here and there and eventually, everywhere.

  I was interrupted four times in my search by alarms from my lookout station, and ran to the laptop each time to see what was up. Twice it was cars driving up and disgorging passengers who went to other apartments, once it was someone taking garbage out to the dumpster and once it was a large dog on some mysterious doggie errand.

  The lookout station recorded each visitor, just in case.

  The password finder finished its search and reported a dozen finds. Most were useless junk, probably culled from the text of a JPG graphic file (which could be read as ASCII files) whose characters happened to trigger a response in password finder. But I did find an AOL password and username combination, and also the same for what I'd bet were a couple of porn sites. I was vaguely surprised to find out AOL was still in business. I didn't get any PGP encryption keys, but of course keeping the key on your computer was very sloppy, and Speakman wasn't sloppy at all.

  There was a pile of floppy disks in one of the drawers, some of them labeled as containing apps and utilities, but others were unlabeled, or had hand labels that indicated they might contain data. Like, text. Floppy disks. True old school. What next, a 5600 baud modem?

  I would have loved to copy Speakman's floppies, but I didn't have blank floppy disks (where would I even buy them?) and I didn't have time. And I would have loved to steal them, but that would very likely alert Speakman to the fact that he was being investigated.

  So I left the disks there, but I did run one more program. I used it to activate Speakman's modem and then transmit every last text file in his computer's hard drive to my email address. The program had a nice little feature, a timer that let me program it to disconnect and shut down the computer at a preset time, and I programmed it to do so at 4 p.m. Now, even if Speakman got home early, he wouldn't suspect anything, and I'd have all or most of the text files on his system.

  While the program worked I sat down on the sofa in Speakman's living room. It was an old sofa -- thrift store or garage sale material, I was thinking. I tried to understand the man who lived in this place. There wasn't much to go on, but that was information, too. This was a single guy's place, where he set things up the way he wanted to live.

  And yet, the apartment didn't look like a bachelor pad. Everything was neat and well organized. Well, there were neat, organized guys in the world, I knew a few and they were nice guys. But it wasn't just the neatness of the place. There weren't a lot of personal touches to the place. Even young guys on their own for the first time, tasting that first whiff of complete freedom from parental supervision, would put up posters of favorite TV or movie babes, or of favorite movies,
etc. And they'd have tennis rackets, ski poles, baseball gloves, computers, aquariums, terrariums, whatever. This guy didn't even have plants.

  I thought about it a little more and realized that mentally, Speakman was still living in a jail cell. His apartment was set up for inspection by someone who had authority over him. Everything neat, nothing disorderly or out of the ordinary, just what a jailer would look for on a routine cell inspection.

  Speakman had been deeply affected -- maybe the right word was "scarred" by his time in stir. He knew he was a person who could be locked in a cage for years, because he had been. He was probably terrified of having his fake identity discovered. Back in stir again. But how to stay out of jail when you're required to announce yourself as a sexual predator wherever you go?

  Too terrified to abduct another woman? Maybe, maybe not. There was a reason that sex offenders had lists and no other kind of criminal did. The hardcore sex offenders were very, very hard to reform. It was easy enough to understand why. Suppose you were magically transported to another country, and in that country your sexual desires -- let's just say they're what passes for "normal" in our society, i.e., vanilla heterosexuality -- are considered horrible crimes against nature which can and should get you put in jail. Would you find yourself adopting whatever the norm is in that case? Or would you find yourself helplessly drawn to continue with your sick heterosexuality? Would visions of naked members of the opposite sex seeking to engage in missionary position sex with you entice you despite your every effort to drive all thoughts of vanilla heterosexuality from your mind?

  Damn right they would. And that's why hardcore sex offenders are so hard to reform. Unfortunately, the sex offender lists had rapidly swollen to include stuff like peeing in public, 18 year olds who date 16 year olds, garden variety flashers, and God knows what else by now, instead of the serial rapists and pedophiles it was originally intended to cover. It was one of the reasons I had quit the force -- stupid laws make evil men out of cops, and I had no taste for evil, legal or not.