by Rich, A. J.
I climbed out of the tub and pulled the plug. I wrapped myself in a towel, watching the water drain. Steven had said I could have my life back. He was wrong.
“There’s something that bothers me, and it wasn’t addressed in the police report.”
I heard weariness in Steven’s voice when he asked what I was talking about. When I told him about the scratches on the inside of the bathroom door, he said he remembered scratches on the outside of the door, not the inside. “You just got back from the guy’s funeral. Let it go.”
“I think I’m right about this.”
“I think I would have remembered that. And even if you’re right, what’s the difference? What does that prove?”
“It proves that someone else was in the apartment with Bennett.”
“I’d really like you to talk to Cilla.”
“This is not a psychological problem,” I pointed out. “This is about evidence that was overlooked.”
“Who is it you think was in the apartment with him?”
If I told him I thought it was Samantha, he would have me committed.
“Samantha. I need to hack into her e-mail.”
“Do you really want to provoke an insane person?” Steven asked.
“It’s not provocation if she doesn’t know I did it. Do you know someone I could hire to do it?”
“I could be disbarred, but that’s not why I’m not helping you with this. Promise me you’ll call Cilla.”
I called McKenzie instead. He answered his own phone—because I had called his cell phone. If I could trust my sense of him, he sounded happy to hear from me. But I could not trust my sense of him, so I trampled over it. In my preoccupation, I rushed into the business at hand. I told him I needed to check out something in the police report on Bennett’s death: “Don’t you have a copy of it?” I told him what I needed to verify.
He offered to stop by my apartment with the police report after work. I did a quick inventory of everything that needed cleaning, thought, the hell with it, and thanked him.
An hour later, I was pushing an old straw broom across the floors. I had never been able to figure out a Swiffer. I popped open a plastic container of premoistened, antibacterial cloths with bleach and went down on my knees to scrub the bathroom floor. I wished Steven had not replaced the door so quickly. But if McKenzie brought over a photo that showed no scratches on the inside of the door, I would let it go. Till then, I gave myself over to a Zen-like approach to cleaning. I slowed my movements, cleaned mindfully. You couldn’t help but be thorough in that state of mind. I should do this more often, I thought. Then, naw.
I had been listening to “You Go Down Smooth” by Lake Street Dive on earbuds, my iPhone safe in my pocket, when the music stopped and the ringtone sounded. The number had a Maine area code. Renee was furious. She told me she did not appreciate my giving her number to a crazy person, that she had been harassed by the woman, who accused her of lying about the death of her own son. Renee said that the woman claimed to be engaged to him. She didn’t need this, Renee assured me, and would I please respect her privacy from now on.
“I did not give that woman your number,” I said. “Renee, I’m so sorry.”
But the woman who spoke next was not Renee, but Vanessa, as angry as she’d been at the funeral. “This may be some big joke to you—all you gals claiming to be engaged to my dead brother—but we don’t think it’s funny, and you’re destroying my mother.”
“It’s not a joke. Nothing about it is funny.”
“Then tell this crackpot to leave my mother alone,” Vanessa demanded.
“I don’t have any say in this. She’s delusional.”
“You’re all delusional.” Vanessa hung up.
• • •
I needed to walk off the effects of the conversation, and the questions it raised, so I stuck a credit card in my coat pocket and headed for the expensive cheese shop. I’d need wine, too—or not. What do you serve someone who is coming over with police photos of your dismembered and mauled ex-lover? I chose pitted kalamata olives, the priciest cheese sticks on the planet, and several bottles of a local craft beer called Evil Twin.
I had just turned onto Grand Street when I saw McKenzie. He didn’t see me. He wasn’t on a bike this time. I hadn’t spied on him before. I had been at his side while walking, but from this distance I saw him objectively. He did spring forward on the balls of his feet; would-be jocks in high school walked like that, and I hadn’t liked it then either. He didn’t swagger, and he didn’t racewalk, as though his time were more valuable than someone else’s. He walked confidently, as though he walked to a tune in his head that I would have liked to hear, too.
Though I felt dishonest about it, I kept watching him without making my presence known. I followed him, keeping half a block away, until he reached my stoop. Then I ducked behind a parked FedEx truck to the count of ten, stepped back onto the sidewalk, and called out his name, rushing forward as though running late.
I noted that his smile belied the grim contents of his briefcase. Where we might have hugged if we were meeting in a bar, at my doorstep I had a bag in one hand, keys in the other, and stairs, lots of stairs, ahead of us. I hesitated in the entry, not wanting him to watch me walk up five flights, but realized he would insist I go first. It wasn’t as bad as the era of loft beds, when couples undressed before climbing the ladder, one person giving the other who followed an unfortunate view.
Steven was the only other person who had been inside my apartment since Bennett’s death. I suddenly wondered if McKenzie would be creeped out by being there. Too late now. Olive appeared and barked a warning before recognizing the man who had given her a provolone sandwich. She sat at his feet, wagging her tail like crazy. He crouched to greet her and she wiggled until she was a blur. “I can’t believe no one ever called to find you,” he said to Olive. I offered to hang up his coat. In taking it off, he had to put down his briefcase, now a loaded centerpiece on the table.
“I admire your courage in moving back here,” McKenzie said.
“If I didn’t, I’d keep moving and never stop.”
“Still, it’s brave.” He wasn’t going to let me deflect the compliment.
I saw how wrongheaded I had been to buy snacks—I wasn’t entertaining. I did offer him a beer.
When I returned to the living room, I saw that McKenzie had a manila folder on his lap. “It’s comfortable, isn’t it? Steven bought me this couch.” I wanted Steven in the room with us.
McKenzie knew I had looked at Susan Rorke’s crime-scene photos, but I did not protest when he offered to edit these photos of Bennett’s crime scene for me. He went through them himself. I watched him look at what I refused to see again. But I did see it again—in McKenzie’s expression. Finally, he held out one photo. The bloody prints on the tile floor of the bathroom were my footprints. I must have pulled down the shower curtain when I hid in the tub because it was balled on the floor. A bra was drying on a towel rack.
A band about eighteen inches high ran the width of the door; the gouges looked to be nearly a quarter of an inch deep, overlapping where the dogs had tried to claw their way through, and lighter than the surrounding wood because they had gotten beneath the stain.
I didn’t even have to point a finger at what I saw. McKenzie, I knew, was seeing the same thing.
“I think he wasn’t alone,” I said. “I think someone came over and the dogs were in the way. What I need to know is who let them out. Do you know someone I can hire to hack into an e-mail account?” And I told him my suspicions.
He wrote down an e-mail address, [email protected], and slid it across the table. “I didn’t give this to you.”
“How much does he charge?”
“She. Less than three months of Internet.”
“That means everyone can afford to hack,” I said.
“Everyone does.”
Olive had settled on his lap. I remembered the cheese sticks and olives in the refrigerator. I
asked if he had time for another beer. Without consulting his watch, he said that would be great.
I assembled a small plate of things from the cheese store and brought it out to the living room with another beer for him. I had a memory of having done exactly this with Bennett. It threw me so much that I did not get a second beer for myself.
McKenzie had moved from the couch to the bookcase. When he turned around, he was holding a piece of brain coral the size of a fist that I had found on a beach in St. Croix and used as a bookend.
“Have you ever been night diving?” he asked.
“The one time I went, the visibility was so poor, all I saw was my flashlight.”
“It’s spectacular. The hard corals bloom and the reef turns phosphorescent. A whole different set of fish come out, even more beautiful than the daytime crew. At night”—he held up the bleached coral—“this is the color of a sapphire.”
I couldn’t ask if he was planning to go diving with Billie anytime soon, so I said, “Are you planning to go diving anytime soon?” I hated how timid and suspicious I had become.
“The night I described was off Saint John. I’d like to go back there again.”
But everyone who flies into St. Thomas ferries over to St. John, and Billie had said she was going to St. Thomas. To pick up patty-cakes.
“The Stilton is really good,” McKenzie said, reaching for the knife and another cracker.
He was changing the subject, but I wouldn’t let go. “It must be hard for you to dive again.”
“I haven’t yet. But I’m ready, I think.”
Now I wanted to change the subject. Now I was afraid to learn that they were going on a diving trip together. I was sorry I had brought it up in the first place. So I forced McKenzie back into being my lawyer. “If it turns out that Cloud was locked in the bathroom, is there a chance she could come home?”
“We’re entitled to an appeal.” He looked at his watch.
I preempted his excuse to leave by thanking him for bringing over the photographs. I did not thank him for the hacker information, as he had not wanted acknowledgment. At the door, he told me to take care of myself.
• • •
I went down Grand Street toward the BQE. I noticed, as I often did, the number of pit bulls being walked by the younger residents of the neighborhood. Nowhere else had I seen so many of them as well-cared-for pets. I had my theories about why—that they were the most misunderstood and misjudged breed, that they were, in a sense, like tattoos, like instant gangsta cred (even though most of them were mushes), that young people wanted to adopt a rescue and the breed clogging all shelters was the pit bull. I’d several times seen a poster of a pit bull in shop windows: “Born to love, taught to hate.” And another one: “For every 1 pit bull that bites, there are over 10.5 million that don’t. Stop bullying my breed.”
Near yet another construction site, I found the address I had been given by hackyou. The storefront was filled with cheap religious figurines such as one sees in the bay windows of private homes or underfunded churches in the neighborhood. I double-checked the address, given what filled the display window, and saw that I had come to the right place. I walked in, a bell chimed, and a zaftig woman of around thirty, in a black dress that resembled a nun’s habit, came from the back and asked if she could help me.
“I was given this address but I think I might have written it down wrong. Do you fix computers here?”
“You’re McKenzie’s friend?”
“So I am in the right place. But what’s with the religious statues?”
“Have you heard the one about the mohel in the clock shop? So a guy’s looking for a place to find a mohel. He finds 273 Main Street, and the whole place is filled with clocks. He says to the guy at the counter, ‘I’m looking for a mohel.’ And the guy says, ‘That’s me.’ ‘But what are all these clocks doing in the window?’ And the guy says, ‘What do you want me to put in the window?’ ”
I followed her into the back room, which was as surprising in its own way as the front. There was a single laptop, not the gadgetry they always show in the movies. I said I was surprised that she could hack with one ordinary computer.
“Breaking into an e-mail account isn’t hacking. It’s cracking. Hacking is an art. It’s discovering and exploiting the weaknesses in technology. Without hackers, we wouldn’t have a hope of privacy.”
“That sounds like the opposite of privacy.”
“Hacking isn’t personal. It’s about decentralizing information and giving it away for free. I’m talking about government and corporate information, not catching some congressman looking at pornography in his home.
“So tell me what I can do for you.” The woman had not given me her name.
“I need to find out if someone sent e-mails to herself as though from another person, or if these e-mails were, in fact, sent to her by someone else.”
“I can tell if they’re sent from the same IP address. It’s possible to reroute a message so that it appears to originate from a different IP, but you’d have to be a pro. And I can tell if this was done.”
She asked me for the server and user ID, then started typing. She said that the most popular password is password. The second most common password is 123456. The third-ranking password is 12345678. And one in six people use the name of a pet.
“Does Samantha have a pet?”
I told her I didn’t know.
“Let’s see if she has pet insurance.” The woman ran Samantha’s name through some kind of database. The computer was facing her, so I could not see exactly what she was doing. I looked at the religious statues—a chipped Virgin Mary, a weathered apostle, an armless St. Christopher. Did anyone ever repair them?
“Samantha Couper has pet insurance with the ASPCA for a six-year-old shepherd mix named Pal, with Cushing’s disease.”
So we all had sick, injured, or rescued dogs. If coincidence, it was odd for a man who didn’t like dog hair on his clothes. If not, then Bennett was a predator drawn to the goodness he lacked. In that case, he was the man I could build my thesis on. My pulse picked up and, for once, not in fear.
The woman typed in something new. She typed in something else. And again. On only her sixth try, she smiled. “MyPal. What is the username you suspect she’s using to write herself?”
I gave her Bennett’s e-mail—themaineevent@gmail—the only e-mail address he had used with me. The woman typed it in and turned the computer so that I could see the screen. Hundreds of messages came up. About a quarter of them after his death. Again, I nearly swooned—that old-fashioned word—at the shock of seeing the username that I had once longed for.
I asked her to open the first one dated after his death. I began reading: Sam, did you get to the bank? Did you find your passport? I trust you. I love you. We’re almost there.
“Can you tell if she sent this to herself?”
“If she sent it to herself, she didn’t use the same computer.” The woman clicked on an icon I’d never before seen. “You ping an address, and this sends a signal to a URL—like sonar—and it bounces back and you can determine how long the round-trip took. You press return and the IP address appears, followed by how many seconds or milliseconds the ping took. I know this was sent from around here.”
Either she was sending them to herself from my neighborhood and following me around, or someone I didn’t know was sending them from my neighborhood. Both scenarios scared me; I could think of no reasonable way to protect myself.
“Can you do one more thing for me? Can you find me the password for themaineevent?”
The woman quickly eliminated the most popular passwords. “This guy, Jeremy Gofney, created a twenty-five-computer cluster that can make three-hundred-and-fifty-billion guesses a second. But it will take me between thirty minutes and six hours. Why don’t you head out, and I’ll text you when I get it.”
I got a coffee to go from Gimme! Coffee and went home to walk Olive. I decided to take her to Cooper Park for a
change, not as big as McCarren Park, but, pleasingly, on Olive Street. And the chances of finding small dogs for Olive to play with were better there. But on this winter afternoon, even Olive’s cable-knit sweater didn’t keep her warm enough, so I put her inside my coat and we sat on a bench.
Where was Samantha planning to go that she needed a passport? Or where was she being urged to go? Would this be something she would write to herself? Only if she expected someone else to see it. And why would she stop writing to herself after this? Or why did the person who might have sent this message stop?
Olive squirmed inside my coat and brought me back to the here and now, the simple needs of a living creature. Thinking she had to pee, I put her down, but she refused to go. So I tucked her back inside my coat and walked quickly home. I mimicked the tired gestures of someone being pursued—looking first over one shoulder, then the other. I didn’t have it in me to fake the confident stride that would supposedly ward off an attacker.
The hacker was going to break into Bennett’s account. Maybe I was better off not knowing all that he had been capable of. It would surely be a trade-off: information versus further humiliation. Was one’s capacity for it endless? But the information—if I could shut down my personal response to it—would be valuable for my thesis. I would see firsthand the mind that conjures such behavior—I would see the predator as he moved in on his prey. The sociopath and his victim: me.
I probably still had a couple of hours until I could expect to hear back from the hacker. I needed to steel myself for whatever was coming. I had only four .25 mg Xanax left, but I had one more refill on the prescription Cilla had written for me. I left for Napolitano at the corner of Graham and Metropolitan. At this old-fashioned Italian pharmacy they knew you by name. The owner, with her red hair and perpetually white roots, greeted me warmly. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard what I’d been through. When I handed her the vial of remaining Xanax, she looked at the label and said, “You only have one more refill.” Apparently, I looked as though I needed more.