“Work with me here. Okay? Let’s say whatever’s shown in the window is something someone wouldn’t be pleased to find out was online. And once they found out it was, they had to have it removed. Think about it. Think of all the candid shots these Whirl360 cars have taken. Husbands cheating on wives, wives cheating on husbands.”
“But they blur the faces,” I said.
“Okay, but let’s say, for example, just for fun, you’re some guy in Hartford and you want to see if your house is on Whirl360, and you find it, there’s a car in the driveway you recognize as your golfing buddy’s Lincoln, except he’s never been to your house. But your wife’s home during the day, when the picture was taken. Or let’s say you’re that guy with the Lincoln, and you find out that picture’s up there before your friend does. What do you do?”
“I get what you’re saying.”
Thomas chimed in, “It’s like that car I saw that hit the other car in Boston.” To Julie, he said, “Ray wouldn’t do anything about that.”
“There’s all kinds of shit online that if you knew about it, you’d freak out,” Julie said. “And maybe when you were waving around that piece of paper, you tipped somebody off about the head in the window.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “So let’s say you’re right, and that my visit and the doctoring of the image are linked. How the hell would you go online and change it?”
“You’d hack in,” Thomas said.
Julie nodded. “Sounds logical. How else would you do it, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“It’d be worth calling Whirl360, asking them if anyone has tried lately to break into their system,” Julie said. “Get through their firewall or whatever they call it.”
“Where would you begin?” I asked. “Who would you call?”
Julie smiled. “You may know how to draw pictures but you’re clearly clueless when it comes to getting answers. I’ll take that on.”
Julie obviously had the smarts to find stuff out. What I was less sure was whether we should be trying. Was this something we needed to get involved in? Could nosing around backfire, get Thomas in trouble? We’d already had the FBI here. Did we want Whirl360’s security people at our door, too?
But I kept those concerns to myself, at least for the moment, because I had more immediate questions. “Thomas, tell me again what the landlord said when you called him. About the women who used to live there?”
“He said the apartment got empty late last summer. I don’t think they were sisters or related. They had different names.”
“What were they again?”
“Courtney and Olsen.”
“Those were their first names?”
“I think so. I had a hard time understanding him because of the accent. I told you that.”
“Olsen doesn’t sound like a woman’s first name,” Julie said. “Did he give you their full names?”
Thomas turned to his desk. “I wrote it down,” he said. “Courtney Walmers and Olsen Fitch.”
“Wait a second,” I said. Something about the name rang a bell. “Olsen Fitch?” Hadn’t I come across a name like that recently? “Thomas, let me sit there.” I got him out of his computer chair, opened up a new browser, and conducted the same search I’d done on Dad’s laptop of any news stories that had mentioned New York’s Orchard Street.
“Hang on…hang on,” I said. “Here we are. I knew that name rang a bell. Thomas, is it possible the landlord was saying ‘Allison Fitch’ instead of ‘Olsen Fitch?’”
Thomas thought. “I guess.”
“Okay, so here’s a story about the police issuing a statement that they were trying to find an Allison Fitch. She lived on Orchard, and worked at some bar and didn’t show up for work. There’s just the one story here, no follow-up.”
“That’s probably the person in the window,” Thomas said, standing close to me, like he wanted his chair back as soon as I was willing to surrender it. “It’s a woman. She got smothered, and then they got rid of her body.”
For a guy who didn’t watch TV crime shows, Thomas was pretty fast with possible scenarios.
“Thomas,” I said, “why don’t you sit back down here while Julie and I talk about how to handle this.”
“Are you going to go finish having sex?” Thomas asked.
I felt my own face flush, but Julie was very cool. “Maybe later,” she said. “We’re going to talk about this first. We can have sex any old time.”
Thomas was already back at it, exploring some city that looked to be European. Sensing my curiosity, he said, “Prague.”
Julie and I retreated into the map-covered upstairs hallway.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She raised her hands hopelessly. “Damned if I know.”
“Same here.”
We went down to the kitchen. Julie went looking for coffee and found a jar of instant. “Tell me this isn’t all you have.”
It was. As she filled a kettle she said, “Call me crazy, but I think there’s something going on here.”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.
“Why the hell would someone erase that head from the window if there wasn’t something funny about it?”
“Agreed.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“I know you said you weren’t really going to call the New York police like Thomas asked, but that was then. You gonna call them now?”
“None of the reasons that would have kept me from calling before have changed,” I said.
Julie looked surprised. “Excuse me? That altered picture sort of changes things.”
I reminded her about the FBI. “Thomas is already on their radar for sending e-mails to the CIA and Bill Clinton. Say we call the New York police, or even the Promise Falls cops. That’ll probably trigger some sort of alarm, and the FBI’ll be notified. And when the FBI brings everyone up to speed on my brother’s activities, that he’s been writing the CIA with all his street memorization updates, just how seriously do you think anyone’s going to take him? Especially when what he claims to have seen is no longer on Whirl360?”
Julie’s shoulders slumped. “Shit. But there’s more than just what Thomas saw, and you still have the earlier printout. And there’s that missing woman.”
“Who may or may not still be missing,” I said.
“Yeah, but that can be checked. Ray, I get your hesitation here, and being worried that the cops will think there’s nothing to it, but I gotta tell ya, this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I’m going to call Whirl360 and talk to whoever’s in charge of muddying images on the site and ask if someone hacked into it. Or if they changed it themselves for some reason.”
“And you think I should call the cops,” I said.
“I think you should call the cops.”
I raised my hands in defeat. “Fine, I’ll call the cops. Which ones?”
“NYPD,” Julie said.
“I don’t even know what precinct that would be.” Using Dad’s laptop, we concluded it was the seventh. I entered a number on the Web site into my cell phone. “Here goes,” I said to Julie while I waited for the connection.
“Yeah, hello,” I said when someone picked up. “I need to talk to a…I guess I need to talk to a detective.”
“Is that an emergency call, sir?”
“No, it’s not. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not an emergency.”
“Hold on.”
A few seconds later, someone else picked up. A man with a gruff voice. “Simpkins.”
“Hi, my name is Ray Kilbride. I’m calling from Promise Falls.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Okay, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I just need you to hear me out. My brother may have witnessed a homicide. Or something.”
“What’s your brother’s name?”
“Thomas Kilbride.”
“An
d the reason you’re calling and he isn’t?”
“I think he’s more comfortable if I do this.”
“And that’s because?”
“Look, that really doesn’t matter, and the thing is, he’s not really the only witness.”
“Who else is a witness? Are you a witness, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Sort of. The thing is, there could be a great many witnesses. There’s a record of the crime on the Internet. At least, there was.”
A pause at the other end of the line. “I see. Who got killed, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Okay, I don’t know for certain that anyone did, but it looks like someone being killed in a window. And it might be a woman named Allison Fitch.”
“Is this something you saw posted on YouTube, sir?” the detective asked, his voice already filled with skepticism.
“No, it was on Whirl360, where you can—”
“I know what it is. You telling me your brother thinks he saw a homicide on that site?”
“That’s right. Listen, at first I thought he was imagining it, but—”
“Why would you have thought he was imagining it, sir?”
“Because my brother has a history of psychiatric problems and—”
Click.
I looked at Julie.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I’d have hung up, too. Could you have laid it out for him any worse?”
“I told you it was a bad idea.”
Julie threw her hands up. “Okay, you were right, I was wrong. You want to stay out of this, not get Thomas involved, I suppose that makes perfect sense. You’ve got no stake in this personally. And even if someone did see you with that printout, they’ve got no idea who you are.”
“That’s right. I didn’t give anyone my name.”
“Well, there you go,” Julie said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
FORTY-TWO
“LET me have a look at the picture again?” the woman behind the counter said.
Lewis Blocker handed her the printout at the art store in Lower Manhattan. It was a screen-capture image from the surveillance video shot through the door of the Fitch apartment. It was the best image he’d been able to get of the man who’d come knocking with the Whirl360 image in hand. The face was slightly fish-eyed, but Lewis thought it was good enough for someone to make an identification.
She’d already glanced at it once and said she didn’t know the guy, then decided she wanted to have another look at it.
“So what’d this guy do, exactly?”
“Credit card fraud,” Lewis said. “Identity theft.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s a big problem.”
Lewis guessed the woman was around thirty. Jet black hair, skin like Morticia Addams, ruby red lipstick. She had studs in her ears, one through her right nostril, and another just below her lip. Lewis wondered how many other piercings she had that weren’t visible, where they might be.
She held the sheet in her hand and cocked her head to one side. “His face looks kind of puffy.”
“That’s just the way the camera makes it look,” Lewis explained.
“I don’t know. I thought maybe I recognized him, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Let me tell you what this guy’s been up to,” Lewis said, hopeful that once she knew what a bad person he was she’d be more inclined to help. He hadn’t actually told her he was a cop, but had flashed an open wallet at her, just long enough for her to get the idea. “He rips off real credit card numbers from real people, then makes new cards with all that personal data transferred onto it, goes on a wild buying spree for a couple of days, then ditches the card. Usually, by that time, the credit company has caught on to the fact that the usual spending for this card has changed, has alerted the owner, and shut the card down.”
She shook her head in wonder. “Fuckin’ amazing.” There was a hint of admiration there, like maybe she was wishing she could figure out how to do this herself. “I thought, ever since everyone started using those chip cards, this stuff didn’t happen anymore.”
“If only,” Lewis said. “New technology just slows the bad guys a while until they figure out a new way around it.”
He told her when he believed the man had been in the store. A couple of mornings ago.
“I was on, but I don’t remember this guy,” she said. She looked across the store, saw a tall, dark man restocking brushes. “Tarek, you got a second?”
Tarek came over and stood across the counter from the woman, next to Lewis.
“This cop here’s trying to find this dude,” she said. “I don’t recognize him, but he says he was in and bought some shit couple mornings ago.”
“What’s he done?” Tarek asked, examining the printout.
Lewis went through it again.
“We still get paid, though,” Tarek said. “If it’s credit card fraud, the credit card company pays back the cardholder.”
“I know,” Lewis said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not in your interest to try to help get this guy.”
“Yeah, well, it won’t make any difference with him,” Tarek said.
“What do you mean?”
“I remember him. He paid cash.”
“Cash?” Lewis said. Who the hell paid cash anymore?
“He bought some airbrush supplies, I think, and some markers.”
“Do you know who he is? Has he shopped here before?”
“I don’t know who he is, but yeah, he’s been here before. At least that’s what he said. Said every time he’s in the city, he pops in.”
“He’s from out of town?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he say where?”
Tarek shook his head. “I don’t think. I asked him if he was on our e-mail list, and he said he was.”
“Can I have a look at that?”
“I don’t think the manager’d want to just turn it over. Besides, there’s hundreds and hundreds of people on it.”
“What was he buying the airbrush equipment for? Specifically. What kind of work does he do?”
Tarek thought a moment, the studded woman looking at him expectantly. “He said he was an illustrator. But you know, there’s only a few million of those. Oh, yeah, and he said he was going to be doing some stuff for a news Web site.”
“What Web site?”
“Some new one. I don’t know. Something political, like the HuffPo.”
“The what?” Lewis asked. He knew his way around the Internet, but he still preferred a real newspaper to reading one online.
Tarek shrugged. “You know, the one with the lady with the accent. She’s on Bill Maher’s show once in a while.”
Lewis hated that guy’s program. Left-wing dickhead.
“But not that site? A different one?”
Tarek shrugged. “That’s all I know. Good luck.”
LEWIS got a booth at a café around the corner, ordered a corned beef on rye with a dill pickle and coffee, and called Howard Talliman.
“You know that HuffPo site?” he asked.
“Of course,” Howard said. “Why?”
“You know about some new site that’s coming out that’s similar to it?”
“I could ask around,” Howard said. “Why?”
“Just ask and get back to me quick as you can.”
LEWIS was finishing his coffee when his cell rang. “Kathleen Ford’s starting one up,” Howard said.
“Should I know who the hell she is?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so I think it’s possible she may have hired our man to work for her.”
“You got a name?”
“Not yet, but I will. You got some contacts for this Ford chick?” Lewis had out his pen and notepad, scribbled down a couple of numbers Howard gave him. “You know her?”
“We are familiar with each other,” Howard said. “But I wouldn’t drop my name. She thinks I’m a reptile.”
Lewis ended the call, thinking maybe this Kathleen Ford
was a pretty good judge of character, although he had no illusions that, if she were to meet him, she’d view him any differently.
FORTY-THREE
SHE so wanted to call her mother. It was like an ache.
It had been nine months. Allison Fitch couldn’t believe she’d managed to hold off this long. Not that she hadn’t considered it dozens of times. More than once she’d picked up a phone—not her own; she’d pitched it within minutes of fleeing her apartment building—and started dialing. Once, she’d discovered a cell on a stall floor in the ladies’ room at the Lubbock restaurant where she was working briefly, and dialed every digit of her mother’s phone number but the last before she’d thought better of it and dropped the phone back where she’d found it. It was entirely possible her mother’s line was being tapped, her place being watched. Her mother didn’t own a cell phone, and even if she did, Allison figured there was probably a way to bug those, too. Didn’t they do it on that TV show about the drug trade in Baltimore?
She didn’t know for certain, of course, that anyone was listening to her mother’s phone conversations. But assuming they were, was it likely they were still doing it now, all these months later? Sooner or later, wouldn’t they just give up?
Allison could only imagine what her mother was going through. True, she had a history of putting Mom through this kind of anguish. When she was nineteen, hours before boarding her flight, Allison had informed her mother she’d be gone to Uruguay for a month with her boyfriend, the one who played electric piano in that band, and she’d been away for ten days before she even realized they’d actually gone to Paraguay. Then, at twenty-one she was given a car—an old rusted Neon, but who’s complaining—by her uncle Bert, on her father’s side, which prompted her to check out Malibu, which was only twenty-two hundred or so miles away. Threw some clothes in a bag and set off on her own. Five days into the trip she decided to drop in unannounced on her cousin Portia in Albuquerque, which was along the way, and when Portia opened the door and saw her she screamed, “Oh my God you have to call your mother she’s called everyone in the family and thinks you’re dead!”
But disappearing for nine months was, even by Allison’s standards of irresponsibility, over the top.
There was no way to tell her mother it was different this time, that there was no safe way to let her know she hadn’t called home not because she was a thoughtless, self-centered twit, but because she was afraid that if she did, she’d get herself killed.
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