by Kate Wilhelm
She stood under the shower for a long time. Maybe Brice was right, she had to tell Caldwell what she knew so they would stop wasting time and get on with finding the real motive, the real murderer. They could verify that there was a school, that Jud had given the checks to the priest, and then to the trust fund, and let it stop there without asking why he had done that. They didn't need to know why. Even with that knowledge, she thought then, they might think he had been coerced, that there was a conspiracy. Brice certainly would still think it was a con. Thieves thought everyone stole. Liars thought everyone lied. Con men ...
She closed her eyes and lifted her face into the water. But he was a con man, she thought. He had conned her thoroughly, lied to her; and he would keep doing it, she added.
She left the shower, dried herself and dressed, and then went to her room and sat at the desk, looking at the box that held her father's ashes. "I don't know what to do," she whispered.
She felt like a child confronted with a vast injustice, whose only recourse was to cry, "It isn't fair!"
19
She was still sitting there when Brice came to tell her he had ordered Mexican, burritos and chiles rellenos; she said she would reheat some in a little while, she wasn't hungry. Still later, when she gathered her gown and robe, preparing for bed, she hesitated, then walked out carrying them.
"Honey—" he said imploringly from his side of the bed.
"I'm not ready yet. Good night, Brice."
She sat in the living room for a long time, with a book in her lap; now and then she looked at the words, but they might as well have been in Sanskrit. When she tossed the book down and went upstairs, she stopped outside their bedroom door, then turned to enter her own room to go to bed there.
She didn't want to hear his soft snore, didn't want him to come awake and reach for her, didn't want him to reach for her when he woke up in the morning, the way he often did. Lying in the bed in her own room, she thought it wasn't really revulsion, something akin perhaps, but not that. Because, she thought clearly, if she didn't want to be in the same room with him, within touching distance, if sex went, what was left?
She knew when he got up the next morning, knew when he went down, had his breakfast, knew when he left the house and got into his car. She stood at the window and watched the big silver Buick drift down the driveway, turn, and drift down the street. It looked very cold outside, everything white with frost, and she thought of the times when she had gotten in her fourteen-year-old Honda and let out the brake, coasted down the driveway and then down the street because coasting downhill was the only way it would start when the mornings were very cold. Brice had been humiliated by that car; he had said the neighbors' cleaning ladies all drove better cars than she did, and she had laughed and said at least hers was paid for.
When Brice's car was out of sight, she went downstairs. The newspaper was on the table in the kitchen, and on top of it was the loan application. She ignored both and scrambled eggs, poured coffee, made toast, then found the comics section and read it while she ate. She read Dear Abby, and the medical column, and the section written by teens for teens. She would have gone on to the sports section if Caldwell's call hadn't come before she got to it. She picked up when she heard his voice. He would be there around ten, in an hour.
Caldwell arrived as she was signing for the FedEx package from Christina; she waited at the door for him. The frost was gone; pale sunshine was fading behind a cloud cover now.
"Good morning, Lieutenant," she said. "Come in. I was going to have another cup of coffee. Join me?"
"Sure thing," he said. "Sounds good."
Spook checked him out and wagged her tail a little in token greeting, and he grinned. "Progress," he said. "Even in small doses it's gratifying."
Abby led the way to the kitchen and poured coffee into two mugs, started to put them on a tray, but the lieutenant simply took one from her hand, and sat down at the kitchen table.
"Out here's fine," he said. "And I'll take off the jacket, but not too soon. Cold, around twenty-five." His jacket was sheepskin; it made him look burlier than ever.
Reluctantly she sat opposite him. This was too close. She would have preferred to have more distance between them. He took a sip of coffee. "Ah, that's good. What kind is it?"
"Celebese," she said. "Lieutenant, Brice told me your latest theory about the murder of my father, and it's wrong. I know what the cashier's checks were for, and they had nothing to do with his murder. You'll have to look somewhere else for a motive."
"You going to tell me what they were for?" He was watching her thoughtfully, his careful scrutiny unsettling.
"A charitable contribution to a school. I'm satisfied about its legitimacy, and I am not at liberty to tell you more than that."
"That's a lot of charity, Mrs. Connors," he said.
"Yes, it is."
"You said motive. Let me explain something. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about police work. Probably television and novels account for it. You see, most crimes aren't mysterious at all. A guy goes into a bank, pulls a gun, or says he has one on him, and walks out with money. No mystery; they even have his picture. So we know who, and what, and how, and we couldn't care less about why. That's for a defense attorney to dig into. When we collar the perpetrator, we seldom even ask why he did it. A prosecuting attorney might make a big deal of it, but it's not our business most of the time."
"But my father's murder wasn't like most crimes," she said slowly.
"No, it wasn't. We're still working on the who and the how. The way we figure, a man like your father must have made enemies along the way; people envied him, a woman was wronged by him, or her husband felt wronged. .. . Just the usual human reasons for wanting someone gone from your life. Sometimes the reason turns out to be so petty, it's unbelievable. And most often the guilty party just ups and tells us why he did it after we get him. So that's not a major concern."
"Then why are you here? What do you want from me?" she demanded. She had steeled herself for a grueling interrogation, hard questions, even anger from him, anything but this chatty tete-a-tete.
"I'd like to know what went on in California," he said. Then he grinned and made a dismissive gesture. "Don't get me wrong. I would love to know. But what I really came for was to talk about your father's work habits, and his computer. Okay?"
She stared at him in incomprehension. "You already know about the missing pages of printout; you know about the computer. Someone turned it off and stole a disk. But your people recovered all the data."
"And so did you," he said agreeably. "That took a bit more than a little knowledge on your part." He held up his hand in a placating manner. "Not accusing you of anything. Mind if I take off the jacket now?"
She watched him take it off and toss it down on another chair.
"See," he said, "if most people walk in on someone working at a computer, with a stack of papers facedown at their elbow, the logical assumption is that what's on the screen, what's being worked on at the moment, will be printed out and added to that stack. Most people would assume that if you're writing a novel, you start with word one on page one, and go until you reach the end. You know, a logical step-by-step progression, first one, then two, and so on. But what he was working on the night he was killed came from somewhere in the middle of the novel, according to my literary expert Detective Varney; the stuff that was lost when the computer was turned off was stuff he had already written and printed out, and those pages were still in the manuscript. Not where they belonged, mind you, but in among the other sections. The manuscript pages that were swiped, about sixteen, we think, had nothing to do with what he was working on that night, at least not with the material our guy was able to recover. And according to Varney, neither section could have been of interest to a killer. So why the theft?"
Abby found herself nodding. "She's right," she said. "Both sections were innocuous."
The first section was being rewritten, corrected, she reme
mbered, when the computer was turned off. It was an in-close reminiscence about a boy watching a fish lay eggs, a man, Link, recalling that day, the innocence of boyhood, yearning for its return, grieving its irretrievable loss. The other section, the printout pages that had been taken, had also been on the computer, and another version of it buried in the manuscript pile. It was a funny scene that occurred when the boy, now a pre-adolescent, tried to figure out if the adult he was talking to was really stupid, or if he was trying to play a trick on him; he couldn't believe the man was that stupid. Later he had accepted that many people were, but that was his first realization of the fact. In both instances Jud had written the passages almost too lyrically, and he had pared the language, sharpened it.
She said, "Stealing that disk and the hard copy was just to mislead you, make you believe my father had written something that someone knew about and didn't want to be made public."
"That's pretty much what we decided," he said. "But the point is the killer didn't know you could recover that material. We learn the hard way that if we don't save before we turn off the system, we lose whatever is on the screen. Me, if I delete something, I consider it gone forever. Period. You know better. Our computer guy knows better, but how many other people do? We use programs as given, learn the keystrokes, and think we're masters, but for experts like you that's just not true, is it?"
"I'm not an expert," she said. "Many people know about recovering data. I just don't see where you're going, what you're after."
"Okay, okay. Let me ask you this. If you wanted to really get rid of something, how would you go about it?"
She shook her head. "You could write over it, or reformat your hard drive, or wipe out everything with a powerful magnet. A strong electrical surge. Probably other ways I don't know about."
"How did your father do it?" he asked softly.
She felt herself stiffen with alarm. "What do you mean?"
"See, he didn't use an outline; you told us that and we confirmed it, as far as we can tell. But Varney says some of the parts are so well realized, with dates, places, smells, everything, he must have kept notes. Not on the computer hard drive. So if he used the computer to make notes, where are they? Maybe he wrote them in longhand, in a journal of some sort. Not a notebook, we looked for something like that, not a bound journal, either, but maybe loose among all those other papers. The problem we have is that even if he accused someone of something in the novel, that can't be used as evidence of any sort. Can you imagine our literary expert battling it out with a defense attorney's literary expert, deconstructing a novel in court? So we couldn't use a word of it, no matter what it is, if it's just in the novel. But a journal or a diary? That's different."
She had to moisten her lips before she could speak. "You've gone full circle back to motive."
"Not really," he said. "Not really. There could be hard evidence of some sort in a journal like that. A direct accusation, a threat recorded, something. We began to think that maybe we made a mistake letting you take his papers away before we went over them all, but at the time we didn't realize how he wrote, that he wrote about actual people and events, fictionalized a little, but real enough. The problem is that I can't search for those papers, if they exist, you see. I'd have to have cause to show a judge to get a warrant, and I don't have cause. You have a perfect alibi; you're not a suspect. If I opened that FedEx package you got, and found a full confession in it, I couldn't hand it over to the D.A., illegal search, you see. Well, I could, but he couldn't use it. So about all we can do is ask for help."
She leaned forward, grasping the table with both hands, her voice harsh and low when she said, "If I found something like that, I'd hand it over in a second. Don't you understand, there's nothing I want more than to see you find the person who killed my father! Nothing!"
"I know," he said, almost soothingly. "From all sides what I've heard is how close you and your father were, what a special relationship you had. Some might even say it verged on hero worship. But sometimes, Mrs. Connors, you can be too close to see clearly what someone with a more objective viewpoint might glimpse. That's all I'm saying."
She stood up. "If I find anything like that, I'll give it to you. Do you want more coffee?" He kept regarding her with his thoughtful scrutiny; she stared back, thinking, This was his game. Lead you on, let you think he was behind you, supportive, believed what you said, and then spring out like a tiger from a tree. He wanted Jud's private papers; that's what he had come for, nothing to do with San Francisco or a hit man or the theory Brice had talked about—the blond man and an accomplice.
He had strung Brice along at least two times, first the insane idea that Willa had driven up the mountain and back, when he knew by then that no one had done that. And now the blond man. Whose theory had that been, his or Brice's?
Abruptly she turned away and walked across the kitchen for the carafe. He wouldn't have told Brice what he was thinking. No one could know what he was thinking. All traps, meandering paths to the thicket where he would pounce. What had he been after from Brice? Why had he played his game with Brice?
"No more for me," Caldwell said when she reached for the coffee. "I'll be on my way. You really going back to the lake tomorrow?"
She returned to the table; he was putting his jacket on. "Yes. I have a lot of reading to do."
"Aren't you a little uneasy, the idea of being up there alone?"
"I'll have Spook, and I feel safer at the cabin than anywhere else." Whether she meant personally, or safety for her father's secret, she couldn't have said.
For an eyeblink he looked surprised, then his expression was back to neutral, friendly even. He reached in his pocket and brought out a card and a pen, wrote on the back of the card, then handed it to her. "If anything interesting turns up, give me a call. Don't bother with the office number, just call the cell phone number I put on the back. Anytime, day or night. Okay?"
"Yes," she said.
On the way to the front door he asked, "By the way, do you know a Robert Langdon?"
"No. Why? Who is he?"
He shrugged. "His name just came up."
After she let him out and returned to the kitchen, she sat at the table trying to think what his visit had really been about. Jud's private papers, certainly, but what else? Brice must have told him some important papers might exist, and evidently had told him she was going to the cabin the next day.
For all Brice knew, the only papers she had were the printouts Jud had made; she had not told him about the laptop computer, about installing all of Jud's work on it, how she had found the missing sections. He must assume that she had found only paper copies. She backed up a step. Brice had no idea of the extent of her knowledge of computers, how much she had learned from Jud over the years; she had never talked about those years after it had become apparent to her that he had no wish to go into that part of her life. He could have looked into her desktop computer and would have found nothing of Jud's there; he would have assumed that the papers were all she had, and that among them she had found something that had taken her to San Francisco. She nodded to herself. The theory about the blond man had been Brice's, she felt certain, and he had pointed Caldwell in her direction to find something to confirm it. Lieutenant Caldwell never told you a thing he didn't want you to know, she added silently, but he let you ramble; he had let Brice ramble.... Why had he wanted her to know the name Robert Langdon?
She was thinking of various things the lieutenant had said: how most people knew the programs they used and little else; how would anyone erase or conceal data? How had Jud deleted his notes?
How had he? She had found nothing on his hard drive to correspond to the very personal notes he had written and printed out, the graphic omniscient record of his life. She narrowed her eyes, visualizing the notes, fanfold papers separated, clipped together, and suddenly she was seeing his loft again, his office, with many discarded, unused computers still taking up space, and remembering: "Honey, I have something to
show you, a new toy." He had bought a new computer and a new laser printer when he started the last novel, not quite two years ago, and he had made no notes on it. She thought he never made notes once he got into a novel. But that meant the older computer, the last one he had abandoned, might still have them, everything up to that time. She felt almost feverish with anxiety then. If Caldwell thought of that. . . They could still go to the cabin, the crime scene; they could still investigate a new development there even if they couldn't get a search warrant for this house.
She frowned, bringing back what Caldwell had said. He just wanted her help. Did she know a Robert Langdon? They couldn't get a search warrant without cause, and she had an alibi. Slowly she stood up and started to walk toward the stairs. He couldn't get a search warrant without cause, and she had an alibi, she repeated. Then she said, "And so does Brice."
At the door to Brice's room, she pointed to the floor and said, "Spook, watch." The shaggy dog lay down in the hallway, her ears twitching, accounting for every sound now; if anyone came to the house, came onto the property, she would give warning. Abby went inside the room and sat down at Brice's computer, where the screen saver was displaying silent aircraft in an endless loop.