Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  I was looking at the Schiele drawing when I heard the dog’s toenails on the kitchen floor, and LuEllen screamed “No” and I turned, and the dog was coming. He must not have seen me behind LuEllen, because he leaped toward her snarling, and she half stood, her hands in front of her. I took two steps toward them, and as he hit her upper arms and she started to go down, I kicked him in the throat. LuEllen’s arm pulled out of his mouth as he tumbled over and down, then he scrabbled his legs under him, recovering, and I took another step and he was almost on his way again, and I kicked him in the head and he went down again.

  He was still alive and still trying, and I kicked him again in the ribs without doing much damage except to roll him over, and then LuEllen pushed by me, lifting the crowbar over her head and bringing it down like a baseball bat. The dog rolled his head, and the bar bounced off; she flailed at him again, and this time connected squarely. Blood spattered across the floor, and the dog’s legs started to run in a death kick, and she hit him again, and again, and I grabbed her and pulled her off.

  “Let go,” she said. “I’m okay.” She dropped the bar and began flinging open the doors of the kitchen cabinets and raced into the dining room and looked down the stairs, and then went out through the garage door.

  The phone was still ringing in the background. I hunted it down and pulled it off the hook, and rehung it. In the sudden silence I could hear the dog’s bubbling breath as he died.

  “Get that fuckin’ dog and stuff it in the hall closet,” LuEllen snarled as she came back in the house.

  I went back to the kitchen and dragged the dog by its collar into the hallway, and pushed it into the closet. “What happened with the whistle?”

  “Some dogs are trained to ignore them. In fact, they go on alert when they hear one. I don’t think there’s an alarm, by the way. The dog was it.” She was examining her upper arm, and there was blood on her shirt. “There’s no entry alarm. There’s no motion or sound detectors I can see. I thought maybe they had a direct-call alarm, but I couldn’t see anything on the phone lines. I cut them anyway. Let’s get this done in a hurry.”

  “How bad are you?”

  “He got me, but it doesn’t look too bad.”

  “Let me see.” I pulled the neck of her shirt down over her shoulder, and found four gashes, each an inch long, ragged and deep. They were bleeding profusely.

  “Hurts like hell,” she said. “I have to find a different shirt and something to soak up this blood.”

  We went down the hall, and she suddenly stopped and said, “Whoa.” The living room had been done by the Marquis de Sade. Scarlet flocked wallpaper set off a two-inch-deep wool pile carpet as black as India ink. The furniture included a walnut-colored baby grand piano and an inky-blue overstuffed living room suite of velvet. A candelabra mounting six black candles sat on the piano. The room smelled of incense and marijuana, and something else, something from the locker room or the bedroom. Sweat. Human juices. Something.

  On the walls, at eye level, were groupings of small, high-quality art photographs and engravings, all expensively framed, all pornographic.

  “I don’t believe these things,” LuEllen said, as she examined one of the engravings.

  “Everybody needs a hobby,” I muttered, looking around. “Let’s find that fucking computer.”

  “Fucking computer is right,” LuEllen said, walking from one picture frame to the next. “You could hurt yourself doing some of this stuff.”

  “Think it’s up or down?”

  “What?”

  “The computer, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Up,” she said. She peered closely at me. “You okay? You looked cranked.”

  “It’s okay. It was that dog.”

  The computer was in the first room at the top of the stairs, an efficient little office with an IBM, two big lockable disk boxes, both unlocked, and a desk made of a Formica countertop set on a half dozen two-drawer filing cabinets. The only odd element was the clock on the wall. The face of the clock portrayed a nude woman seen end-on, her legs representing the clock’s hands. The view was unblushingly gynecological.

  I brought the IBM up and was shuffling through the disks when LuEllen called.

  “Hey Kidd, take a look at this.”

  “Just a second.” I popped my cracker disk into the machine and started it loading. When I stepped out of the office, I found LuEllen in the hall, holding a wad of Kleenex against her bleeding shoulder, and gazing into a bedroom.

  “Look.” She pointed into the bedroom. There was a waterbed with black candles on the head-board, and a mirrored wall. The main attraction was a photo mural of a woman’s face as she performed oral sex on a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.

  “Look at the size of that thing,” LuEllen said.

  “Shoot, I’ve seen donkeys bigger than that,” I said.

  “I meant the picture, not the guy,” she said, coloring a bit. “But I’ll tell you what, Kidd. These people aren’t a little weird. They’re a lot weird. There’s a picture like this in every bedroom. This might be some kind of whorehouse. Maybe that’s how they could afford to buy the place. Maybe that’s why they don’t have any alarms. They don’t want the cops coming in, no matter what.”

  “I got to get back,” I said. I returned to the office, and LuEllen started trashing the bedrooms. I loaded and reloaded the disks, looking for the communications program. The boxes were full of disks identified only by number. I was on the fourth or fifth one, all files, when LuEllen went past the door, stuck her head in, said, “Found two grand in cash, three guns, and six dildos,” and kept going. A second later, she went down the stairs to the living-room level.

  The communications program was on the seventh disk. I had pulled off the phone plate and was ready to wire in the bug, but took a minute to run through the program. There was a list of code words, but they looked too similar to the words used by Ebberly and Durenbarger. They might get me into all the system files, but I wasn’t sure they would give me access to the programming level.

  As the disk was being copied, I finished wiring the bug into the phone box, and put the plate back on. When the communications disk was copied, I dropped the copy into the tennis bag, and looked quickly at the rest of the disks. They were all files, mostly long lists of names and addresses. The files were protected by a commercial security program that wasn’t quite worthless: it slowed me down by about five seconds per disk.

  When I finished, I pulled out the file drawers under the counter and went through the paper files. Nothing of immediate interest. I was closing the bottom drawer when a flash of white on the inside front panel caught my eye. I pulled it all the way out, and found a piece of masking tape. Seven ten-digit numbers were written on the tape. That looked promising. I copied them out in the order they were written in.

  “Kidd!” LuEllen was shouting up the stairs. “C’mere, quick.”

  I pushed the drawer shut, shoved the copied disks and the list of numbers into the tennis bag, and headed down the stairs. There was no one in the living or dining rooms.

  “Where are you?” I called.

  “Down in the basement.”

  The windowless basement was divided lengthwise down the middle. In one half was the utility room, with a washing machine and drier, a tool bench, storage, and what looked like a small bathroom. With the exception of one room, the other half was nothing like the upstairs. It was a warehouse, a paradigm of efficiency, with fluorescent overhead lights and flat white tile floors.

  The exception was the neat little photo studio. It had a velvet couch, a pile of red and black velvet drapes, and a cardboard box full of sexual implements: dildos, handcuffs, a whip, masks. And dolls. The Army dolls that boys play with, and two old-fashioned fat, plastic baby dolls that cry when they sit up. There were three lights with umbrella reflectors, pulldown seamless paper, and a pair of Hasselblad cameras, each with its own tripod. Next to it was a professional color darkroom.

&nbs
p; The rest of the basement was stacked with cartons and envelopes. LuEllen had opened the cartons and held a sheaf of slender, full-color magazines.

  “Take a look at these,” she said.

  The magazines ran the gamut of the sexual activities usually portrayed by porno magazines, with one significant difference. In each picture, one of the participants was a child. And the shots had been taken in the neat little photo studio.

  “These are those child-porn assholes you hear about,” LuEllen said. She was wearing a pink blouse, not her own, holding her shoulder, and shouting. “I’m going to burn this fucking place down.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her tight. “We can use this. You get everything you’d normally take—guns, money, jewelry, and grab those Hasselblads and all the lenses you see; those are worth a bundle. Let’s hurry. Take one copy of each magazine, but don’t mess them up. And for Christ’s sake, don’t get prints on them.”

  I ran back up the stairs and started making copies of all the file disks. If they were what I thought, I’d have a complete mailing list for the child-porn ring. It took fifteen minutes to copy the files. While I did it, LuEllen went through the place with a vengeance. She came into the office once, to get my tennis bag, and when I finished, I found her with two fat garbage bags in the kitchen.

  “We’ll take twenty grand out of here,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Jesus, if a cop sees us carrying those bags, he’ll stop us for sure,” I said. “There’s way too much stuff.”

  “I know. So we leave them here in the kitchen, except for your disks, and go get the car, come back, load them up, and take off,” she said.

  “Oh, man, I don’t know.”

  “It’s what a doper would do with a load this size,” she said defiantly. “He’d take the risk.”

  So did we. We brought the car back, and I jumped out, while LuEllen waited with the car running in the driveway. I walked up to the front door, knocked, pushed through, got the bags, brought them out, tossed them in the backseat. On an impulse I walked back to the house, took the Schiele off the wall, carried it out to the car, and handed it across the seat to her.

  “That was stupid,” she said fiercely as we drove away. She was hurting.

  “Yeah.”

  A few minutes later she said, “I feel bad about the dog. He was doing his job.” A minute later, she punched me on the arm. “Saved my ass, Kidd.”

  LuEllen went up to the apartment ahead of me, and when I came in, carrying the bags, Dace had her wrapped up in his arms.

  “We’ve got to get a doctor,” he said.

  “Can you handle that?” I asked. “Somebody who’ll keep his mouth shut?”

  “Yeah. I know a guy.”

  “Tell him the dog was a neighbor’s, and we’ll make sure it’s quarantined, and not to sweat it, we don’t want any trouble, no reports,” I said.

  “I knew something was going to happen,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

  “What are you going to do about those freaks?” LuEllen asked.

  “If the number codes get me into the system, I can make some changes that will give me the same status as the systems programmer,” I said. “I’ll be able to go anywhere in the system. After the operation is running, we’ll write to the cops. Tell them the truth. That we broke in, what we found. I got a copy of their whole subscription list, we’ll print it out and include that, say we found it with the magazines. Child pornography is not appreciated in the state of Virginia. They’ll be looking at ten years in the joint.”

  “What if the burglary scares them so much that they dump all the stuff?” LuEllen asked.

  “They’ll freak out, but they won’t dump it,” I said. “There’s too much money involved. Especially if they think they were hit by a crackhead who wouldn’t be any further threat.”

  “What about the kids who get fucked between now and then?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not a perfect world. If you want to nail these people, put them out of business, this is the way to do it.”

  She wasn’t happy. Dace, on the other hand, was pleased in a grim sort of way.

  “This is a major story,” he said. “Major-major! We’ll drop this thing on Whitemark like an atomic bomb. We’ve got to do it right and wait until they’re already in trouble, and then boom. This could sink them.”

  Dace took LuEllen to see his doctor while I sorted through the stuff we’d taken in the burglary. There wasn’t much we could save, but I would keep the Schiele drawing—he was among the best draftsmen of the twentieth century, and his erotic pieces are stunning. This was a good one. It could tie me to a burglary, but I looked at it, and looked at it, and knew I’d keep it.

  THAT NIGHT DACE and LuEllen dumped the rest of the loot, and I went into the Whitemark computer using the system programmer’s codes. The word codes got me through the first line of protection. The number codes got me into the programming level. It was there that I found the complete list of passwords for every file in the computer, no matter how confidential.

  When LuEllen and Dace returned, LuEllen was laughing. “We’re going to get a crowd if we dump any more stuff in that alley,” she said. Her shoulder had been bandaged, and the doctor gave her a small envelope of pain pills. She took them all and was looking very relaxed.

  “I’m in, and I’ve got to stay with this,” I told them, nodding at the terminal. “I’m going to build my own back door into the computer, so I won’t have to use the operator’s codes. I’ll have my own.”

  I picked up the second telephone, looked Whitemark up in the phone book, and called. When the operator answered, I asked for the computer room.

  “Systems.”

  “Hey, I heard a rumor that you’re shutting down early tonight. Is that right?”

  “Nope, I don’t think so. Let me check.” The receiver on the other end clattered onto a desk, and lay there for a minute. Then the voice returned. “Nope. Regular time.”

  “So how late can I stay on? If I push it?”

  “All the way to four o’clock. If you want to stay for another hour, give us a ring and we’ll leave it on. But we have to shut down by five for system maintenance.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  I WORKED THROUGH the night, setting up my own back door. The next day we started breaking into the key files, Dace looking over my shoulder as I worked. Letters, memos, plans, and budgets rolled up the screen and into oblivion. By six o’clock, we were getting tired. A long, white snake of computer paper twisted across the table. Two wastebaskets in the corner were crammed with more jumbled printouts and with empty Coke cans.

  “What’s next?” I asked. So far we had rifled the confidential, personal, and private files of a half dozen top Whitemark officials. There was some interesting paper, but nothing incriminating.

  “Vice president for materials,” Dace said. He yawned and shuffled through a Whitemark phone book we’d printed out early in the process. “His name is Bell, I think.” Dace ran a finger through the Bs, and I started looking through the filing lists for a Bell.

  “Hold it,” Dace said suddenly. He was looking into the phone book with a frown wrinkle across his forehead. “Heywood Beltrami?”

  “Say what?”

  “They’ve got a guy here named Heywood Beltrami.”

  “So what? You know him?”

  “Yeah. He’s a hairball. I had no idea he was working for Whitemark.”

  “With that name, there sure as shit couldn’t be two of them,” I said. “What’s he do?”

  “It says here he’s in corporate relations,” Dace said.

  It took two minutes to find Beltrami’s files. It took another five minutes with the master list to figure out which code words were his, and another minute to run them. Beltrami wasn’t a technical man, and there was nothing technical about his files. They were all letters and memos.

  “Let me in there,” Dace said. I gave up the
seat at the computer and went to get a beer. LuEllen was watching television in the front room.

  “Got anything yet?”

  “Dace found somebody he knew. Says he’s a sleaze,” I said. I went into the kitchen, got a beer, and stopped to watch the game show for a minute.

  “I couldn’t do computers,” LuEllen said after a while. “I mean, it sounds neat, but it’s really just sitting in front of a TV tube and pushing buttons, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and no. You could say that reading a newspaper is looking at long lists of letters, but it’s obviously more than that. Same thing with computers.”

  I was about to go on, but Dace interrupted.

  “Got ’em,” he yelled from the office.

  LuEllen got off the couch and followed me back. Dace was grinning at the computer screen.

  “An old dirtbag never changes his grease spots,” Dace said. “I knew we could count on Heywood.”

  He tapped the computer screen with a fingernail.

  “This is a letter to a very heavy Air Force acquisitions guy at the Pentagon. Two stars. There’s a whole series of letters in here. They talk in circles, but when you see them all at once, it’s pretty clear. Some of them talk about employment, and some of them talk about problems with specs on the Hellwolf. You have to look at the dates, and what’s going on, before you realize that Whitemark is promising to take care of this guy and his buddies when they retire. Consultant jobs. Big bucks. Big offices. Cars. Goddamn. All Whitemark wants is some help with spec changes. It restores your faith in mankind to know that people like Heywood are still out there oozing around after all these years.”

  Dace was happy. He looked, in fact, about ten years younger. LuEllen squeezed his shoulder, and I said, “Right. Let’s get it printed out.”

  We dumped everything in Beltrami’s files into our memory. As it came chugging out of the printer, we decided on the next step.

  “We can work through the stuff tomorrow, decide the best way to leak it to the media,” Dace said. “And we’ll get a package together on our pornographer friends, so we can hand it to the cops.”