When I stopped, John climbed out, with me a second behind, and we shut the doors quickly and as quietly as we could, to kill the interior lights. Dark as a tar pit, rain pelting down; the place smelled almost like a northern lake. We squished through the wet side yard to the porch, then walked up to the door. John hesitated, then knocked.
Nothing.
Knocked again, then quietly, to me, “Jeez, I hope there’s no alarm. I never even thought of that.”
“If there is, we run.” I tried the knob. “Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s open. Don’t touch anything.” I pushed the door with my knuckles, and immediately smelled the death inside.
“Got a problem,” I said.
“I smell it.”
The odor wasn’t of physical decomposition, but simply of . . . death. An odd odor that dead people gather about them, an odor of dying heat, maybe, or souring gases, not heavy, but light, intangible, unpleasant. Something best not to think about. I was afraid to use the flashlight, because nothing brings the cops faster than a flashlight in a dark house. Instead, I pulled John inside, closed the door, groped around, found a wall switch, and turned on a ceiling light.
The first thing we saw was the wheelchair, and then what looked like a pile of gray laundry in a corner. We both stepped that way and saw the nearly weightless, eggshell skull of a young black man, with a scattering of books around his head. There was no question that he was dead. His face had been wrinkled, maybe from pain, and though you could tell he’d been young, he had a patina of age.
“Ah, shit,” I said.
“I would have liked to have met him,” John said softly.
I moved closer, saw the gun in the corner, and said, “There’s a gun,” and then stepped over the body and saw the misshapen skull and the blood. “Somebody killed him.”
“Somebody . . .” John stepped over, saw the blood. “Oh, boy.”
“Let’s check around,” I said. I glanced at the wheelchair, noticed the tray with a series of clamps. “John, look at this.”
“What?”
“Looks like a laptop setup.”
“No laptop.”
We both knew that was bad. We did a quick run-through of the house and found a wi-fi router in a back closet, plugged into a cable modem. “No servers,” I said. “I wondered about that.”
“What?”
“He seemed to have servers, but that would have made him vulnerable. So he has virtual servers. All of his stuff is . . . out there, somewhere. What wasn’t on the laptop.”
John said, “Let’s see if we can find some gloves, so we don’t leave fingerprints all over the place.”
>>> BOBBY’S house was a mix of old and new. The entire house had wooden floors—board floors as in old southern farmhouses—covered in the dining room by a semi-threadbare oriental carpet that looked as though it came from the turn of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t cheap; it fit the room well and looked inherited. A dozen plants were scattered through the half-dozen rooms, including five or six orchids, one blooming with gorgeous white flowers like a spray of silvery moons. An upright piano sat in one corner of the living room, the keyboard cover up, sheet music for Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” perched on the music stand. There was all the usual stuff—a big TV, game cartridges, a stereo system with a CD player and maybe a thousand jazz and classical CDs, a modern turntable for vinyl records, and three or four hundred records to go with it. He liked Elvis Presley, I noticed, along with all the big blues masters.
There were photographs. Framed photos of single faces, and groups of people gathered around cars or standing in front of houses, black people, all, smiling at the camera, dressed in suits and dresses as if they’d just gotten back from church, maybe a wedding; and the style of the photos, and the contents, judging from the cars that were visible, went back to the 1930s, and came forward, perhaps, to the eighties.
And there were books. Big piles of computer stuff, but also detective and thriller novels, and general fiction. A copy of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole was split open over a chair that faced a wide-screen television. A comfortable house, a comfortable home, all come to a pile of laundry in a corner, with a starved-bony face and a pool of blood.
We found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer, and a box of vinyl gloves: actually, three boxes of vinyl gloves, which suggested that Bobby had had allergies, as well as the problem that had been killing him, whatever it was.
We spent an hour going through the house, working quickly, trying to cover everything. For practical purposes, the house was one-story—no basement, and while there was an attic space, access was through a ceiling hatch, and Bobby couldn’t have gotten to it. Anything important, we thought, would be on the main floor. We wanted computer disks, written files, anything that might involve Bobby’s complicated computer relationships.
I spent a half hour going through two file cabinets, mostly income tax and investment records. Nothing, as far as I could see, that related to his computer work except for computer purchase records from Dell and IBM. I took those, dropping them in an empty Harry and David fruit-delivery box.
Every time we went in the front room, we curled our faces away from the bundle in the corner—I saw John do it, and I felt myself do it. But there was the curiosity . . . what did the mysterious Bobby really look like? I couldn’t touch him, didn’t want to move him, but looking down at him once, forcing myself, I decided that he looked a little like photos I’d seen of Somalis on the ragged edge of hunger. He had been nice-looking, but there was not much left of him; and now he looked deflated, sad, unready to be dead. He gave us a sense of silence and gloom.
Under some shoes in the bedroom closet, John spotted a board that looked out of place. When he rattled it, and then lifted it, he found a green metal box, and inside that, an expired U.S. passport with the photo of a teenaged Bobby inside, a small amount of inexpensive, old-fashioned women’s jewelry—his mother’s?—and $16,000 in twenties and fifties.
“Take the money?” I asked John.
“If we don’t, the cops might,” John said, looking at me over the cash. “I don’t need it.”
“What if, uh, he has a will, and wants it to go to somebody?”
“We find that out and send it to them,” John said. “But I’m afraid that if we don’t take it, it’s gonna disappear.”
We put the money in the Harry and David box.
The biggest find came in the front room, in a built-in book cabinet not far from Bobby’s outstretched hand. It was hard to see—it had been designed that way—but the cabinet was deeper from the side than it was from the front. In other words, if you looked at it from the side, it was a full fifteen inches deep. If you looked at it from the front, it was barely deep enough for a full-sized novel. Some of the novels that had been in the shelves had been pulled out and were scattered around the floor by the body.
I turned and said, “Come look at this.”
John stepped carefully past the body and I pointed out the depth discrepancy. It took a minute to figure out, but if you pressed on one corner of the back of each shelf, a board simply popped loose. When you removed the board, you found a narrow little space behind the books. It was convenient, simple, and mostly effective.
Inside were seventy DVD disks: Bobby’s files. We put them in the Harry and David box. Working around the body, John said, morosely, “That smell—Jesus, Kidd, I feel like it’s getting into me.”
“Keep working. Don’t look.”
When we were done, we put our raincoats back on, put the Harry and David box in a garbage bag, and toted it out to the car. The rain was constant, but not cold, and I could hear it gurgling down drainpipes off the tin roof—a sound that was sometimes light and musical, but tonight sounded like Wagner. Before we finally closed the door and wiped the doorknobs, John said, “I hate to leave him like this.”
I looked back at the crumpled body on the floor and said, “You know, we really can’t.
Somebody killed him and the sooner the cops get here, the more likely they are to catch the guy.”
“So we call the cops?” John didn’t like cops.
“We call somebody,” I said. “We’ve got to think about it. The thing is, we didn’t find a computer, and it looks like whoever came in, took it. That means that Bobby’s main machine is floating around out there.”
“You think . . . no.” John shook his head at his own thought.
“What?”
“Wishful thinking. I was gonna say, maybe this was neighborhood thieves, and he caught them at it, and they killed him. But then, if it was just a burglary, they would have taken other stuff. There was all kinds of stuff that thieves would take, just sitting around.”
“Yeah. But they only took the laptop. That means that they came for it. And were willing to kill for it,” I said.
“Shit.”
“If we’re lucky, he encrypted the sensitive stuff. Every time he wanted to send me something serious, I’d get the key, and then after I acknowledged it, the file would come in. If he whipped some encryption on it, we’re okay.”
“But if we’re not lucky and he didn’t encrypt . . .”
“Then we could be in trouble,” I said.
Chapter
Four
>>> WE WERE AN ODD COUPLE, wandering around in the middle of the night, in a monsoon. If we’d been noticed at Bobby’s house by an insomniac neighbor, and if the cops later said something in the newspaper about looking for a white guy and a black guy seen together in the rain, I didn’t want the desk clerk at the La Quinta to have that memory.
Instead of going back to the motel to talk, we drove a loop through Jackson, windshield wipers whacking away, windows steaming up, talking about what to do. We had two problems: getting some kind of justice for Bobby, and finding the laptop. The lives of a lot of us could be on that thing. Events, dates, times, places. Bobby knew way too much—it was as if the legendary J. Edgar Hoover files were out wandering around the country on their own.
“It’s gonna be tricky,” I said. We drove past an open space with orange security lights inside, and a chain-link fence around the perimeter. We couldn’t see much of the buildings, which were huddled low and gray, as if depressed by the rain. “If we call the Jackson police, we’re gonna get a homicide guy with a notebook or maybe a desk computer, but most of what he figures out he’ll keep in his head. Calling up people on the phones and so on. There won’t be any way to track the investigation. If the killer-guy is a sophisticated outsider, which he probably is . . . they’re not going to come up with anything.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve gone into enough places to know the signs. The guy didn’t leave much. Besides, I was dating a cop, remember? And I’ve done some, mmm, preliminary research into the Minneapolis cops’ computer system.”
“That’s cold, Kidd.” He was a romantic, and offended.
“Hey, I wasn’t dating her to get at the system,” I said defensively. I fumbled around for the defroster and turned it on, blowing hot air on the windshield. All the heavy cogitation was steaming things up. “I was dating her because I liked her. It just happens that the system was sitting there.”
“All right.” He wasn’t sure he believed me. “So what do we do?”
“If we call in the FBI and tell them that the dead guy is the Bobby that everybody’s been looking for, they’ll be all over the case. Then, we might be able to track the investigation—half the people in the ring are inside the FBI system. But what if they find the laptop? The worst thing that could happen to us is to have the laptop land at a computer forensics place, and have it turn out that the files aren’t encrypted.”
“Even if they are encrypted, the FBI’s got those big fuckin’ computers. They’ll crack it like a walnut.”
John’s not a computer guy. I said, “No, not really. If Bobby encrypted the files, and kept the keys in his head, they’re safe.”
“Really?” A little skeptical. “What about the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and those other three-letter agencies?”
“Some of the software that Bobby used—that everybody uses, now—can encrypt stuff so deeply that if the entire universe was made of computers, and they did nothing but try to crack the message, there wouldn’t be enough time in the life of the universe to do it.”
He thought about that, then laughed. “You’re bullshitting me.”
“Nope.”
“Why would anybody encrypt something that deep?”
“Because they can. It’s easy. So why not?”
“Okay. But still, the idea of calling in the feds is scary,” he said. “I hate messing with those guys. If we only knew what was on the laptop. . . .”
“That’s the problem,” I agreed.
“Maybe, as a security thing, Bobby kept all the good stuff on the DVDs.”
We bumped across a set of railroad tracks. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I was lost. I did a U-turn and headed back the way we’d come. I picked up on John’s suggestion: “I don’t think so. Access is too slow. No computer guy wants to thumb through a stack of DVDs and then wait for ten seconds for something to load when he can get it in a half-second. That’s just the way it is. He’d keep the good stuff on the laptop.”
“Then maybe he backed up the laptop on the DVDs, so we can figure out what’s on it, without finding it.”
I shook my head. “There are what, seventy DVDs? That’s a huge amount of stuff. You could probably put the Library of Congress on those things. There’s so much stuff that we won’t even have time to read the indexes, if there are indexes.”
“I could take some time off . . .”
John used to work on a law firm’s computer system, and he was about as far into computers as a typical high school teacher. He didn’t have any notion of what I was talking about, and I struggled around to find an explanation.
“Look,” I said finally. “A few weeks ago, I put the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my laptop, since I had lots of space. Okay? That’s seventy-five thousand articles, thirteen hundred maps, ten thousand photos. That’s what the advertisement says. Something like that. It sucked up about 1.2 gigs. That means you could put about, uh . . .”—I did some quick calculation—“something like thirteen Encyclopaedia Britannicas on one DVD. And we have seventy DVDs. They might not be full, but if they are, that’ll be like paging through what, sixty-seven million articles and eight million pictures, looking for your name or your picture. You don’t have enough time left in your life to do it.”
“Then what use are they?”
“Bobby didn’t look piece by piece. He knew what he had. I’d bet he’s dumped whole databases to the DVDs and the index is on the laptop. It’s like a hacker’s reference library. When he needs something, he can look it up.”
>>> WE FORDED a couple of low cross streets and came up to a well-lit intersection. I took a left on a major street, no idea what it was. John had been silent for a few minutes, then said, “So we gotta get the laptop.”
“Yup. Or destroy it.”
“But we gotta get the guy who killed Bobby, too. That’s just as important—to me, anyway. The local cops won’t do it. I think we’ve got to call in the feds.”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly. Then, after a few more minutes, “I wish there was some way to get the feds interested in Bobby, without them knowing that he’s Bobby. Some way to get them chasing the killer. Like seriously on the job.”
More thinking, then John half-laughed, looked at his watch, and said, “Well, I know one way. If we got the time.”
John’s a smart guy. When he told me his idea, it made me laugh, as it had made him laugh, the heartsick sound you make when somebody presents you with an insane proposition that would probably work, and that you’re probably gonna do.
After a little more talk, I said, “Ah, boy.” I couldn’t think of anything nearly as good. I told him so, and added, “Or as fuckin’ nuts.”
>>> WE FOU
ND an all-night convenience store where I bought some cookies and candy and a couple of cans of motor oil and two gallons of spring water from a sleepy clerk. John dumped the spring water out the window as we drove along, poured in the oil, and, after wiping them clean, threw the oil cans out the window into a roadside ditch. We stopped at an edge-of-town gas station, parked so the filler cap was away from the station, filled the tank with gas, and then added gas to the two water jugs until they were three-quarters full.
Then we went back to Bobby’s, nervous as cats, cruised the neighborhood, saw only two lights—it was past four in the morning now, and working people would be getting up in the next hour or two. Everything around Bobby’s was quiet, though, so we pulled in and went inside.
Tried to ignore the body, though John said, talking to him, “This is for you, Robert.”
We were planning to use clothes-hanger wire if we had to, but Bobby had a long roll of picture-hanging wire that worked just fine. We used the heavy side boards from the bed for the main frame, and the picture-hanging wire to strap a couple of old cotton blankets around the boards.
We’d been working frantically, gloved again, fumbling everything so we had to do everything twice, but we were ready to go by four-thirty. I carried our creation outside and soaked it with the gas, then threw the empty jugs in the backseat of the car.
“I’m going to hell for this,” John said to me across the yard, as he wired it to a front-porch upright.
“Think of it as performance sculpture,” I said. “Don’t light it until I’ve got the car in the street.” I backed the car out of the driveway, got it pointed, pushed open the passenger door, and John struck a match and threw it at the gas-soaked rags.
I can tell you from experience that when you’ve got a lot of gas, it doesn’t just flame up, like paper: it goes with an audible whump. The thing was burning like crazy, even with the rain, and John was running and then he was in the car chanting, “Go, go, go,” and we were out of there.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 74