Hard as Nails

by Dan Simmons

  Arlene smiled. "Officer, this is the D.A.'s office. Have you dealt with us before? The District Attorney is a wonderful man, but he's lucky to remember to zip up his fly."

  "Ms. Feldman's on bereavement leave this week," said the officer.

  "We know," said Arlene. "But the district attorney still needs her files."

  Jefferson smiled. "Yeah." He glanced at Kurtz. "I should show you the way up to Ms. Feldman's parole office, but it'll be a couple of minutes. Leroy's still making his rounds."

  Arlene held up a silver key. "Carol's sister gave us her key. This will just take a few minutes." She handed the heavy bag to Kurtz. "Here, Thomas, carry this."

  Kurtz followed dutifully as she clacked her way across the lobby and summoned an elevator. Jefferson gave a half-salute as they stepped in.

  "This will be on security video," said Kurtz as the doors closed.

  Arlene shrugged. "No crime, no need to check the security videos."

  "I presume that Ms. Feldman's office is near O'Toole's."

  "A few doors away."

  "Someday the D.A. will trace all this fun back to his predecessor's former executive secretary," said Kurtz.

  "Not in this lifetime," said Arlene.

  In another, less obvious pocket of Arlene's bag was the breaking and entering tool kit that Kurtz had always used for black bag jobs. He opened Feldman's office door first, turned on the lights, and then locked it behind them. There were three strands of yellow crime scene tape across O'Toole's doorway, but the door opened inward and they could step through. Kurtz took fifteen seconds to jimmy this lock as well.

  They lowered the Venetian blinds, took out a pocket-sized low-light, no-flash infrared digital camera and took four photos so they could set everything back exactly the way it was. Then they clicked on halogen penlights. Both had pulled on gloves. Peg O'Toole's computer was still there on the desk extension. Arlene found a power outlet for the backup drive, ran a USB cord to O'Toole's computer, fired up the parole officer's machine and her own, and whispered that they were set to go.

  "How long will this take?" whispered Kurtz.

  "Depends on how many files she has," whispered Arlene, tapping her gloved fingers on O'Toole's keyboard. "It took me forty-eight minutes to back up the WeddingBells-dot-com files."

  "We don't have forty-eight minutes!" hissed Kurtz.

  "That's all right," said Arlene. "WeddingBells has three thousand, three hundred and eighty files. Ms. O'Toole has one hundred and six." The backup disk drive blinked a green light and began to whir. "Eight minutes and we're out of here."

  "What if they're encrypted or password protected or whatever?" whispered Kurtz.

  "I don't think they will be," said Arlene. "But we'll deal with that when we get the drive back to the office. Go do your file thing." She handed him the travel scanner.

  The files were locked. He had them open in twenty seconds. He used the penlight to look over several years worth of parolees' thick files. What he needed was a recent list… here it was. Peg O'Toole currently had thirty-nine active "clients," including one Joe Kurtz. He made a space, plugged in the digital copier/scanner, and began running pages through the small device. There were smaller scanners—some pen-sized—but this one was reliable and gobbled entire documents quickly, eliminating the need to run the scanner tip over lines of type. Kurtz fed in lists of current clients, addresses, phone numbers.

  Arlene looked around the office and found a cassette tape recorder and racked stacks of cassettes. "She must record her notes, Joe," whispered Arlene. "Then transcribe them. And the last three weeks of cassettes are missing."

  "Cops," whispered Kurtz. He was digitizing O'Toole's DayMinder, using the slower wand, playing the light over O'Toole's handwritten entries. "We'll just have to hope she had time to type her notes into the computer files." He finished copying the top three pages in each of the active thirty-nine cons' files, including his own, set the originals back, locked the file cabinets and came over to the desk.

  The disk drive had already blinked that it was finished. Arlene left it attached and set a CD into the tray on O'Toole's computer. "I want her e-mail," whispered Arlene.

  Kurtz shook his head. "That'll be password protected for sure."

  Arlene nodded. "The program that I just loaded… ah… there it is. Will lie hidden in there and if anyone else knows her password and uses this computer, the program will quietly e-mail us a record of all the keystrokes."

  "Is that possible?" whispered Kurtz. The idea appalled him and made his headache worse.

  "I just did it," whispered Arlene. She unloaded the CD and put it in her bag.

  "So all the hard-drive stuff is on the CD now?"

  "No. Officer O'Toole didn't have a writable CD drive on this old machine. I just sent the data to the hard drive backup."

  "Won't the cops find your keystroke program if they look again?"

  Arlene smiled. "It would eat itself first. God, I wish I could smoke in here."

  "Don't even think about it," whispered Kurtz. "Now move, I need to get into that desk."

  "It's locked," whispered Arlene.

  "Uh huh," said Kurtz. He used two bent pieces of metal and had the drawers open before Arlene got completely out of his way. The usual desk bric-a-brac in the center drawer—pens, paper clips, a ruler, pencils. Stationery and official stamps in the top right drawer. Old appointment journals in the right center drawer.

  O'Toole had pulled the amusement park photographs out of the lower right drawer yesterday.

  There were a few personal things there—tampons modestly pushed to the back, toothpaste, a toothbrush in a travel tube, some cosmetics, a small mirror. No photos. No envelope of the kind she'd taken the photos from. Kurtz checked everything again to make sure and then closed the drawers. The photos hadn't been among the loose paperwork or in the recent files he'd checked.

  "Police?" whispered Arlene. She knew what he was looking for.

  Kurtz shrugged. She could have had the photos in her purse when she was shot. "We done here?"

  When Arlene nodded, he relocked everything and checked the infrared digital photos on the LCD screen to make sure everything looked the same. He went back to the desk and adjusted a pencil. They opened the door a crack, made sure the hallway was empty, and stepped out.

  Seven minutes twelve seconds.

  Kurtz unlocked Ms. Feldman's office and clicked off the lights. Locked the door.

  They passed the other guard, Leroy, coming out of the elevator. "Phil told me you folks were here. Done already?"

  Arlene held up the thick file of old SweetheartSearch-dot-com papers she'd taken from her briefcase. "We have what the D.A. needs," she said.

  Leroy nodded and moved down the hall to check the doors.

  Outside, Arlene didn't wait until they got to her Buick. She handed Kurtz the bag and lit a Marlboro. When they got in the car, Kurtz said, "You enjoy that?"

  "You bet I did. It's been more than a dozen years since I helped in the fieldwork."

  Kurtz thought about that. He didn't remember ever using Arlene in the field.

  "Sam," said Arlene. Kurtz was surprised that Samantha had taken Arlene out for fieldwork and never told him. Evidently, a lot had gone on at the agency that he'd been oblivious to.

  "Back to the office?" asked Arlene.

  "Back to the office," said Kurtz. "But go through a Burger King or something on the way." It had been more than thirty hours since he'd eaten anything.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  « ^ »

  They kept the lights low in their office—just two shielded old metal desk lamps—but the neon blaze from the Chippewa Street clubs and restaurants filled the big window and spilled onto Arlene's desk.

  Arlene loaded O'Toole's hard drive data into her computer, and then added the digitized scanned material. Kurtz understood just enough to know that essentially she was creating a virtual computer—O'Toole's—inside her own machine, but separated from A
rlene's own programs and files by various partitions. The parole officer's computer memory didn't even know it had been hijacked.

  "Oh," said Arlene, "I finished the research into Big John O'Toole, his brother the Major, and the amusement park search. I think you'll be pleased with some of the connections. You can read it while I open this stuff."

  Kurtz looked on his desk for new files, but there weren't any.

  "I e-mailed it to your computer. The files are waiting there," said Arlene. Her cigarette glowed.

  "My desk is five feet from yours, and you e-mailed it to me?" Kurtz was finishing the big burger they'd picked up during the drive over.

  "It's a new century, Joe," said Arlene.

  Kurtz's head hurt too much for him to start expressing his opinion on that happy revelation. He fired up his computer, downloaded the files, and opened them while he ate and sipped a Coke.

  Big John O'Toole had been a street cop in Buffalo for almost twenty years and had remained a uniformed cop the entire time. He was a sergeant and three months away from retirement when he'd been shot and killed four years ago, during a drug-bust gone wrong according to the Buffalo News. O'Toole had been acting alone—strange for a sergeant with that seniority—investigating a series of car burnings over on Hertel, in a neighborhood famous for torching their cars for insurance, when he'd seen a heroin deal going down and tried to make the arrest by himself. One of the three suspects—all had escaped despite a huge manhunt—had got the drop on O'Toole and shot him in the head.

  Weird, thought Kurtz. An experienced cop, even a uniform, trying to bust several drug dealers without calling for backup? It didn't make sense.

  There were several related stories, including one covering Sergeant John O'Toole's huge funeral—every cop in Western New York seems to have turned out for it—and Kurtz recognized a slightly younger and somewhat thinner Officer Margaret O'Toole standing in the rain by the crowded graveside. He remembered learning once that she had been a real cop, working Vice at that time.

  Kurtz skimmed through the rest of the Big John O'Toole stuff—mostly citations, occasional community related stuff going back more than a decade, and follow-up stories on the fruitless search for his shooters—and then went on to the hero-cop's older brother, Major Michael Francis O'Toole.

  Separate photos—the two didn't seem to have been photographed together—showed that the brothers looked vaguely alike in that blunt Irish way, but the Major's face was broader, tougher, and meaner than the cop's. Arlene had somehow gotten into military records—Kurtz never asked her how she did such things—and he printed these pages so as to read them more easily.

  Michael Francis O'Toole, born 1936, enlisted in the Army in 1956, a series of American and European base assignments, then his first tour in Vietnam in 1966. This O'Toole had worked his way up through the ranks, been sent to OCS in the early sixties, and was a captain during his first combat tour. There were various citations, medals, and details of heroism under fire—one time running from a landed command helicopter, under fire, to rescue one of his wounded men who had been left behind during a confused evacuation. His specialty had been working with ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—Kit Carson Scouts, the high-morale, American-trained Vietnamese troops who did scouting, interrogation, and translation for the army and CIA in-country. O'Toole had been shipped Stateside after a minor injury, promoted to Major, promptly volunteered to return to Vietnam, landed at a forward area in the Dan Lat Valley, stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and had lost the use of his legs.

  That was the end of Major O'Toole's active military career. After a stint in a Virginia V.A. hospital, O'Toole retired from the Army and returned to his family's hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Then there were some 1972 virtual newspaper clippings about Major O'Toole in Neola, New York, a little town of about twenty thousand people about seventy miles south of Buffalo, along the Pennsylvania border. The Major had opened a major southeast Asian import-export business there along with his Vietnamese partner, Colonel Vin Trinh. They called the little business the South-East Asia Trading Company, SEATCO, which sounded like just another stupid military acronym to Kurtz, who'd had his share of them during his stint as an M.P.

  All right, thought Kurtz. The headache was worse and he rubbed his temples. What the hell does all this mean other than poor, dying Peg O'Toole had had a hero (if not too bright) cop for a father and a Vietnam-hero for an uncle?

  As if reading Kurtz's mind, Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and said, "Read that last file before you go any further with the O'Toole brothers."

  "The file marked 'Cloud Nine'?"

  "Yeah."

  Kurtz dropped the other stuff offscreen and opened 'Cloud Nine.' It was a puff article from The Neola Sentinel, dated August 10, 1974, about the wonderful amusement park being opened in the mountains above Neola. It was expected that this new, state-of-the-art amusement park would attract patrons from all over Western New York, Northern Pennsylvania, and North-Central Ohio. The park included a one-third-scale train that would hold up to sixty youngsters and which would follow tracks almost a mile and a half across and around the mountaintop. The park also boasted a huge Ferris wheel, a roller coaster "second only to the Comet at Canada's Crystal Beach," bumper cars, and a host of other amusements.

  The park had been built "as a gift to the youth of Neola" by Major Michael Francis O'Toole, president of South-East Asia Trading Company of Neola, New York.

  "Ahah," said Kurtz.

  Arlene stopped her typing. "I haven't heard you say 'ahah' since the old days, Joe."

  "It's a specialized term known only to professional private investigators," said Kurtz.

  Arlene smiled.

  "Only this time, you're the investigator. I didn't do a damned thing to dig up this information. It's all you and that computer."

  Arlene shrugged. "Have you read the file labeled 'Neola H.S.' yet?"

  "Not yet," said Kurtz. He opened it.

  Dateline The Neola Sentinel, The Buffalo News, and The New York Times, October 27, 1977. A high-school senior, Sean Michael O'Toole, 18, entered Neola High School armed with a .30-.06 rifle yesterday and shot two of his classmates, a gym teacher, and the assistant principal, before being wrestled to the ground by four members of the Neola football team. All four of the shooting victims were pronounced dead at the scene. It stated that Sean Michael O'Toole is the son of prominent Neola businessman and owner of the Cloud Nine amusement park, Major Michael O'Toole and the late Eleanor Rains O'Toole. No motive for the shooting has been given.

  "Wow, pre-Columbine," said Kurtz.

  "Do you remember when that happened?" asked Arlene.

  "I was just a kid," said Kurtz. Although it would have been the kind of news item he'd have taken an interest in even then.

  "You were already in Father Baker's then," Arlene reminded him. The court sent kids to Father Baker's Orphanage.

  Kurtz shrugged. The last thing in that file was the January 27, 1978, court hearing for the Major's kid. Sean O'Toole had been judged by a battery of psychiatrists to be competent to stand trial. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane in Rochester, New York, for further testing and "continuing evaluation and therapy in secure surroundings." Kurtz knew about the Rochester nuthouse—it was a dungeon for some of New York State's craziest killers.

  "Did you read the last bit of the Cloud Nine file?" asked Arlene.

  "Not yet."

  "It's just a Neola Sentinel clipping from May of nineteen seventy-eight," said Arlene, "announcing that the Cloud Nine Amusement Park, already beset by financial difficulties and low attendance, was closing its gates forever."

  "So much for the youth of Neola," said Kurtz.

  "Evidently."

  "But if her uncle was running this business and park in Neola, why wouldn't Peg O'Toole know about it?" Kurtz mused aloud. "Why would she show me those photos of the abandoned park—assuming it's Cloud Nine—and not know it's her uncle's old place?"

&nb
sp; Arlene shrugged. "Maybe she knew the photos weren't from her uncle's abandoned park. Or maybe she didn't even know that Cloud Nine existed. Her father, Big John, didn't move to Buffalo and start his cop job here until nineteen eighty-two. Maybe the Major and his cop brother were estranged. I didn't see the Major and his wheelchair in the photos from Big John's funeral four years ago. You'd think the uncle would be right there next to Ms. O'Toole since Peg's mother was dead."

  "Still…" said Kurtz.

  "Remember you telling me that one of the overturned bumper cars in the photo you saw yesterday had the number nine on it?"

  "Cloud Nine," said Kurtz. "It's all there. It just doesn't make sense. I'll be right back."

  Kurtz got up quickly, hurried to the tiny bathroom back by the purring computer server room, knelt next to the toilet, and vomited several times. When he was done, he rinsed his mouth out and washed his face. His hands were shaking violently. Evidently, the concussion didn't want him to eat yet.

  When he came back into the main room, Arlene said, "You okay, Joe?"

  "Yeah."

  "Do you need any other searches related to mis?"

  "Yeah," said Kurtz. "I want to find out what happened to this kid, the shooter. Did he stay caged up in Rochester? Is he out now? And I need some details of the Major's specific history in Vietnam—not just his medals, but names, locations, who he worked with, what he was doing when."

  "Medical records and military records can be two of the hardest things to hack into," said Arlene. "I'm not sure I can get any of this."

  "Do your best," said Kurtz. His cell phone rang. He turned to answer it.

  Daddy Bruce's voice said, "You wanted to know when that Big Bore Indian came back to the Blues hunting for you again, Joe."

  "Yeah."

  "He's here."

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  « ^ »

  Big Bore Redhawk was a born-again Indian. That is, he'd been born Dickie-Bob Tingsley and hadn't really paid attention to the little bit of Native American ancestry his mother had told him he had until he was arrested for fencing jewelry at age twenty-six and discovered—through a sarcastic comment made by the judge at his hearing—that he could have been selling jewelry legally without being taxed because of his reputed Indian blood.