by David Cole
Maybe he didn’t recognize me, but I knew him.
Taut body stretched out for my file, muscles rippling inside the starched blue shirt, and he twisted sideways. He looked down at the file, turned his head slightly, sunlight across his reading glasses, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at my file or me. Idly licked an index finger, pushed up one page after another, he was looking at me, he already knew everything in the file. Finger pushed out a photograph, he nudged it free of the folder and across the desktop.
“This is you,” he said. Not a question. He was pleased.
A Washington State driver’s license. My face, no doubt about it, the long wig I’d worn, fake eyelashes, huge earrings, smeared lipstick, it looked so fake I wondered what I’d ever thought I could get away with back then, fifteen years ago in Yakima, when I had half a dozen grifts working at the same time. I don’t even remember what name I’d used, what name was on the license.
Oh, yes, he was pleased. He gestured at the doorway and a woman came tentatively into the room, two steps at a time, like a dance movement.
“Is this her?”
The woman came halfway down the room, placed her hands flat on the desktop, nails trimmed but not painted.
“Yah.”
“And what’s her name?”
“Katrina Mangin. When I knew her, she called herself that.”
“I’ll show you a Washington State driver’s license. What is the name?”
She held the license about six inches from her eyes.
“Katrina Mangin.”
“Who are you?” I said.
The woman wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t even look at me.
White spots at the ends of each nail, her way of control and misdirection so she wouldn’t have to answer my question quickly, hands straight out, fingers slightly separated and pointed at me.
“I don’t have to say, do I?” she said. “I don’t give my name, right?”
Those fingertip white spots, she was pressing very very hard to keep control. A bit of a smile, perfect teeth, just a wee tilt of the head, used to flirting, and she laughed just a bit, inhaled and just as quickly exhaled.
I stared at her, walked over to her, she recoiled as I looked into her face, but I didn’t recognize her from anywhere. Her eyes cut from me to a credenza along the wall. Restless, not given any direction, she picked up a silver frame, photo of a young girl on a merry-go-round horse, photo of some young woman and an older man, swimsuits, from the pilot deck of a thirty-foot powerboat rigged for deep-sea fishing. She set the frame down, looked all around the office, at every square inch of floor and walls and furniture and finally the ceiling.
“Jesus,” she said. “What do, what else do you want me to do?”
Her arms locked in front, hands on elbows. I shifted my eyes to her open-toed hump-me pumps, her toenails a bright, deep orange, but chipping.
“That’s all,” Kligerman said. “Send in Heather.”
Heather. Heather Celli, I remembered her vaguely from my visit to Kligerman’s squad room. Not nervous, not showing any kind of emotion, she laid a laptop on the table.
“Miss Celli,” the U.S. attorney said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t get your name.”
“I didn’t give it,” the attorney said. We locked eyes for a while, then he turned slowly back to the papers in front of him. “Miss Celli. Just summarize. Right now we don’t need anything but a summary.”
“Four times a day, I check a lot of files, a lot of computer logs. I look for any trace of somebody hacking into our system.”
“And, in summary, what did you find yesterday morning at three oh two?”
“Five illegal entries.”
“To the TPD databases?”
“No. To our entire system. All files. Personnel, financial, long-range planning, criminal investigations. Everything.”
“And, again, just summarize, what happened?”
“Several files were altered. One deleted. One new file added.”
“All at once, Miss Celli. Tell us everything, all at once. I don’t want to drag this out with a thousand questions.”
“Seven files on our latest investigations of the maras gangs. They’d been altered to show negative results of searches, identity checks, mostly financial transactions. A master file of financial data was deleted.”
“But you were able to reinstall those files? In original formats?”
“Yes. And we immediately began backtracking, trying to work out where the hacker came from. The IP numbers.”
“Don’t get techie on me. Just summarize.”
“We traced all the illegal entries to computers at the offices of private investigator Laura Winslow.”
“That’s a lie,” I said.
Heather held out some papers, shook her head. Nobody objected when I took the papers, flicked through them. It was my office.
“And the file that was added? You said one new file?”
Heather flipped the laptop open, pressed a few keys, swiveled it so the men could see something hidden from me.
“Again. Show her this time.”
Approximately ninety seconds of video. Me, in my biker outfit, standing on the top bleacher of the cockfight, shouting, laughing. I was stunned.
“Where did you get that?” I said.
“That’s all for now, Miss Celli.” She left the room.
“Laura,” Gates said. “For God’s sake, Laura. Why?”
“I didn’t do this.”
“That’s you, Laura. That’s you at an illegal cockfight.”
“Yes, that part, yes, that’s me. I was there undercover.”
“Part of an investigation?” the attorney said.
“Yes.”
“And who is your client?”
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“And all this other stuff?” Gates said.
“It’s fake. I didn’t personally do any of it.”
“Then one of your employees?”
“Never.”
“The evidence,” Gates said. “It’s all there.”
“It’s fake.”
“You’re despicable,” the U.S. attorney said. “The last time we met, that whole business about smuggling women across the border, I didn’t have enough power to charge you with complicity. Now I’ve got the power, and trust me, if there’s any truth in these charges, I will take you down for good.”
Chief Wallach raised a finger. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Laura, you’re saying, you’re an expert in identity theft, and somebody has apparently stolen your own identity?”
“Yes. I could fake this myself. It’s not hard.”
“I have all your files,” the U.S. attorney said. “Your old arrest warrants, as much of your background as anybody knows. A lot of different names. What is your real name?”
They all froze, they all waited for me to talk.
“Kauwanyauma,” I said finally.
“What exactly is that?”
“My Hopi birth name. Am I under arrest?”
“Laura,” Gates said. “I, personally, I can’t protect you.”
“You’re a flight risk,” the attorney said. “No use asking you to surrender your passport or any documents. You’d just create a new identity.”
“Bob,” I said. “You came to me. You knew I didn’t want this, you talked me into it, you led me into this. I trusted you.”
“I can’t help you.”
“You people,” I said. “You came to me, you asked for my help, and now you can’t even imagine that somebody has set me up.”
“Set you up?” Wallach said.
“You people. You’re all so totally ignorant about computers, you have absolutely no idea what can be done with them. I’m being framed, this is so totally a setup. You assholes. You’re being set up yourselves, the entire Tucson PD is being set up, and you’re letting it happen. You don’t even trust the one person you brought in from the outside to find one of yo
ur dirty cops.”
“What is she talking about?” Manouche said.
“Later,” Wallach said.
“What the hell is she talking about? A dirty cop?”
“Later,” Wallach said.
“So,” I said. “You arresting me? Or what?”
“Chief?” Gates said.
Wallach twiddled his fingers. “Is there a federal charge?” he said.
“Not at this time,” the U.S. attorney said.
“It’s my jurisdiction?”
“Yes. But I’d advise you. Don’t let her go.”
“Bob,” Wallach said. “Miss Winslow. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Show me anything, disprove any- thing. But just twenty-four hours.”
“Chief,” Kligerman said. “That’s the wrong thing to do.”
“And if I’m wrong, it’ll cost me my job. You have your twenty-four hours, Miss Winslow. If you’re guilty of this, God help you.”
“What happened in there?” Ken said. He’d followed me to police headquarters, waited for me to come out, expected the worst, that I’d been arrested and speed-booked without remand.
“Something really weird,” I said. “Something…I don’t know what happened in there, but I was being set up.”
“For what?”
“That’s what’s so weird.”
“What did they say?”
“It’s what they didn’t say. I can’t explain, it’s not logical yet, I can’t figure out what they didn’t say. Take me to my office.”
But before Ken could turn on the engine, Bob Gates banged on the top of the car and slid into the back seat.
“Around the block,” he said.
“Bob, Bob,” I said. “Why am I being set up?”
“It’s not real.”
“Not real?”
“We know you didn’t hack into the TPD computer network.”
“You know?”
“You knew?” Ken said.
“Only two of us. Wallach and myself. We trusted nobody, Laura. Having Django Manouche in that meeting means half the department will know about it in an hour. Manouche can’t keep secrets, he needs to tell secrets to get people to believe he’s got the power. When I first talked to you about this, Laura, I figured you’d get your company on it full-time. I didn’t think you’d wait.”
“I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“When you did nothing, I set up this meeting. We’re just hoping we force somebody’s hand, it’s a long shot.”
“It’s so long it’s invisible,” Ken said. “Just one thing. Who do you like for the bad cop?”
“We don’t know.”
“He’s in either Narcotics or Homicide.”
“We agree.”
“I think…Homicide.”
“Yes. We agree on that, too.”
“How many people in Homicide?” I said.
“Way too many. Drop me off here. I’ll walk back to headquarters. Twenty-four hours, Laura. Get out there, do your magic.”
33
I flipped open a brand-new cell phone, called Alex.
“Listen,” I said. “Get everybody there you can.”
“What up?” Alex said.
“First, I don’t care how you do this. There’s a bank account in the Green Valley branch of Bank of America. Under the name Dakota Barbie. I want a complete record of all transactions in that account. Focus mainly on where the deposits come from. Track them back as far as you can.”
“Okay.”
“Next. That online gambling casino. A lot of different kinds of games listed in the menus. Did you look at anything other than the one about cockfights?”
“Not had time. Didn’t know it was a priority.”
“You’re looking for the same kind of animated thing. Except with dogs.”
“Eeeeeuuuu,” Alex said. “Okay.”
“That’s it. You got anything for me?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh. One thing more. Run the name Max Cady through every police database. It’s an alias, you’ll find he probably uses a lot of names, including Taerbaum. Find anything that connects him with Barbie.”
“Max and the doll, okay. You coming here?”
“Sometime tomorrow.”
“Check. We’ll pull an all-nighter, Laura. I hope we’re getting paid well.”
“You can do that?” Ken said when I disconnected. “Get bank information? Things like that are supposed to be confidential.”
“With all the fake names as cutouts, I’m not sure we’ll learn anything. But yes, we can do that. We can do anything, looking for information.”
“It just kinda…floats through the air?”
“Air, telephone lines, TV cables, satellites. I said.
“Don’t know yet. Dogs. Doesn’t surprise me. Pet dogs in Tucson have disappeared for years, there’s now a state law with penalties for dog-napping in Pima County.”
“What happens to the pets? To the dogs?”
“Training bait. You don’t want to know any more.”
At three o’clock in the morning, I sat at my workstation computer, Cady’s wallet in my trash basket and everything inside the wallet spread under a desk lamp:
driver’s license
VISA card
Master Charge card
membership card for Sam’s Club
photo of three naked women
a dozen business cards
I’d phoned Alex with the credit card numbers. She’d sent most of the workers home, put our A team on the Bank of America bank account.
The A Team. The two Sarahs.
Sarah B worked with her head, Sarah C…well, she’d get locked into some endless search routine, no sense of how long it would take to run, Sarah C dreamed herself across the world to places she’d been or not. Not daydreams, she’d say, I am so not daydreaming, this is just astral traveling. You’re running a computer program, Sarah B would snap at her. All right, Sarah C would always come right back, so let’s say I’m an astral data traveler. Of the two sisters, Sarah C usually did the best, most intuitive work, so we let her travel, and if somebody’d notice that her program routines were completed but she’d still be locked off in Asia or Machu Picchu, we’d just rap her gently on top of her head and without complaint she’d come back to us.
With nobody in the office with time to run the credit cards right away, I said I’d do it. I rifled through the business cards, most of them for bars or strip joints. Only one looked promising. A totally blank card except for a handwritten telephone number.
“Laura?” Alex, on my cell. “Bank of America is just a drop box. Money comes in, it’s wired out within twenty-four hours. So far, we’ve chased the transactions over three continents.”
“Keep at it,” I said.
I could see long keyboard hours ahead. You have to treat these random searches with infinite patience, my friend. You shove time off to the side, you remove any clocks from the screens or the desks or the walls. You set a finish point, somewhere out there, you know it’s out there and you’ll finish. What you don’t really know is whether the finish will produce useful data.
And that’s why you learn to master patience. One friend of mine used to whistle toneless tunes, he never even knew he whistled. Another hacker conjugated German verb tenses, this guy’s phenomenal memory led back to high school German. He never spoke it, but he could conjugate all tenses of nearly three hundred verbs, and when he got to the end he’d start the process backward.
But tonight, impatience was my master, not the other way around. I laid my head on the table at one point, closed my eyes, and leapt up a silent dream of fighting, bloodied cocks.
I must have fallen asleep again, without dreaming. My cell went off right next to my ear, but I barely flipped it open before the call switched to voice mail.
“Laura. It’s Christopher Kyle.”
Oh, God, I thought. Not more bodies. But that’s what it was. A TPD sector car found a body burning in a vacant lot.
; “Who?” I mumbled.
“Laura. I heard…everybody’s talking down here.”
“About computer hacking?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve got solid evidence,” I said.
“But you didn’t do it.”
“No. But I can’t prove that.”
“I’m sorry,” Kyle said. “I’m…I guess I don’t know you after all.”
“Christopher,” I said. “Please. Don’t give up on me. Trust me, I didn’t do this. I need you to believe in me.”
“Why should I?” he said finally.
34
Late morning. Late morning. Beside the pool, Ana Luisa playing with Spider’s baby. Sarah Katherine couldn’t talk, Ana Luisa only understood Spanish, but they made sounds to each other, that rarity of human communication that extends beyond the normal senses.
Once they returned to the house, feeding time for the baby, lunch for everybody else, I sat on the edge of the pool, legs in the water, arms back and bracing myself, head to the sun. Another blue, high sky over Tucson. More cloud formations south, building toward another monsoon.
What is this case about?
Who faked the computer hacking at TPD? Why involve me?
Should I stop being involved?
I suspected everybody, I suspected no one.
Spider came out with a cup of coffee for me, saw I wanted to be alone.
I felt guilt about sex with Ken.
One more guilty phone call to Nathan, but getting only the familiar message that his cell phone was out of service. I called Ken and found his voice mail greeting had changed. An oblique mention of hiking in the Santa Catalina Mountains, getting away with a friend, would his friend please leave a message.
I am that friend, I thought. But I didn’t leave a message.
What is a friend? How do you tell the difference between a man who’s just a friend and a male friend who’s maybe something more?
David Schultz came at noon. Despite a temperature over one hundred degrees, still dressed in a seersucker suit, white dress shirt buttoned tight, tie a solid pale blue, shoes polished to a glimmer.