Afraid of the Dark

by James Grippando

  That, or the crazy conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork.

  “Refill, Mr. Goodwrench?”

  Neil handed Theo his empty cup, and Theo poured more hot water. It was a simple thing but a pivotal moment for Jack: the man who’d mentored him at the Freedom Institute served hot tea by a former badass from the ’hood who had been the only innocent man Jack and Neil had ever represented.

  Had been. Until Jamal came along.

  “Mr. Swyteck, are you still there?”

  Jack was still taking in his Neil-and-Theo moment, and though it wasn’t technically accurate, another word came to mind to describe his mentor. “Doctor, can I call you right back?” Jack said into the phone. “I need to consult with my partner.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The Internet café on Bethnal Green was open twenty-four hours. At half past midnight in the middle of week, he expected to have his choice of terminals, especially on such a cold and nasty night. The rain was turning to sleet, and the sidewalks were deserted, but he was unlike most of his fellow Africans in Somaal Town. January’s bite didn’t bother him, and he actually preferred the shorter days of winter. The late sunrise and early sunset were his friends, and if that meant living in a colder climate, so be it. His given name was Habib.

  To his victims, he was known as the Dark.

  He shook out his umbrella and entered the café. The fluorescent lighting assaulted his eyes and, for some reason, triggered a yawn. His quick trip to Miami and back had left him drained. As a rule, he didn’t sleep well on airplanes, no matter how exhausted he was. This time his work had been especially taxing. Everything had come off without a hitch, thanks to his 24/7 approach to preparation, coordination, and execution. After landing at Heathrow, all he could do was climb into bed and sleep for eighteen hours. He still didn’t feel rested.

  The clerk behind the desk was reading a graphic novel online. She looked up and directed him to a terminal. He pulled up a chair in front of the monitor, logged on, and created a new Internet account. Using the same account twice was out of the question; it was important that his messages never be traced back to him. This account would be in the name of Doris Lader, a fifty-two-year old woman from Las Vegas who had provided her credit card number and other personal information in response to a phishing e-mail that she had thought was from Citibank.

  Americans had to be the stupidest people on earth.

  He quickly entered the necessary information to create the account, then typed in his screen name. It was the same one he used for all his phony accounts, the same mix of lowercase letters and capitalized initials:

  ruaoTD.

  Are you afraid of The Dark.

  He was up and almost ready to go. The only remaining step was to choose the preferred language. Sometimes he used English, sometimes he used Somali modified Latin script. It didn’t really matter this time. The message was short, and he banged it out in just a few quick keystrokes. He always created the message and proofread it before typing in the address. It was good practice to prevent a half-baked message from sailing off accidentally. He read it one last time.

  “I killed your son. I wanted you to know that.”

  Satisfied, he typed in the address and hit SEND. It was gone in an instant, headed to Mogadishu.

  He logged off, and the clerk didn’t even look up from her LCD as he exited the café. A cold blast of wind hit him as soon as the door opened. His flat was just a block away, but even so, he was tempted to go back inside and wait for the weather to improve.

  Which could be June.

  He popped open his umbrella and headed out into the night, walking with purpose. There was one more thing to accomplish tonight. He rounded the corner, passed the street entrance to his flat, and walked down the alley to the cellar door.

  The international call from the pay phone had pissed him off in a big way. It was her first offense, and a very foolish one at that. Did she think she could buy a calling card without his finding out about it? Did she think she could do anything without his knowledge? He turned the key and shook his head with amusement as he unlocked the door. There was no doubt in his mind that she would tell him who she had called, why she had called him, and what she had said. If she lied, he would not be fooled—because he already knew everything there was to know about that call. He just wanted to hear her say that she was sorry for what she had done.

  Oh, so sorry.

  He entered, closed the door behind him, and climbed down the steep stairs. The cellar had just one small window at street level, which had been made translucent with a streaky coat of paint on the outside. The streetlight glowed behind it, and the shadow of iron bars cast a zebra pattern across the floor.

  He watched her sleeping on a mattress in the corner. Finally, she seemed to sense his presence.

  “Who’s there?” she said, only half awake.

  He didn’t answer. She reached for the lamp switch.

  “Leave the light off,” he said, and his command halted her.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  It was that frightened and timid voice that had lured him into complacency. The one that had led him to believe that, after almost six trouble-free months, she could be trusted with a modicum of supervised free time. The one that had made it almost inconceivable that she would find the courage to venture out to a pay phone.

  He grabbed the covers at the foot of the bed and peeled them back. She jerked away, but he grabbed her by the ankle. The monitor was still in place.

  “I never really left,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Douglas Road,” the driver said as the Metro-Dade bus squeaked to a stop.

  Vince rose and offered a sincere “Thank you” on his way out; bus drivers were supposed to call out stops for the blind, but not all of them did. The smell of diesel fumes engulfed him as the bus pulled away, and Vince could hear the click-clack of Sam’s nails on the sidewalk as his four-legged friend led him to the crosswalk.

  “Time for a doggy pedicure, buddy.”

  Vince stopped at the crosswalk, checked his GPS navigator, and waited for the familiar female robotic voice: “Go one hundred yards, and your destination is on the right.” The traffic light changed with an audible click, and Sam led the way across the street.

  Vince had visited MLFC headquarters before, but his mental image of it was sketchy. Although he had received a full tour, Chuck Mays’ idea of being descriptive for the benefit of his blind friend was simply to add his all-purpose adverb to everything. The offices weren’t big; they were f-ing big. The computers weren’t superfast; they were super f-ing fast.

  “You have arrived,” announced the navigation system. Sam stopped, and by Vince’s calculation, they were directly in front of Chuck’s building.

  “Over here, Paulo,” said Chuck. “What are you, fucking blind?”

  The guy had a way with words.

  “Too nice of a day to sit in the office,” said Chuck. “Thought we’d walk down to the pond and feed the ducks.”

  Vince hesitated. No matter where they were, whenever Chuck said something about a walk down to the pond to feed the ducks, Vince detected the distinct odor of marijuana in the air. Some guys just seemed to get a rush flouting the law under a cop’s nose, even if the cop was blind.

  “There’s no pond here,” said Vince, “and probably no ducks, either.”

  “Busted. Guess I’ll settle for a cigarette.”

  They found a bench in the shade on the other side of the building, away from traffic noises. A light breeze felt good on Vince’s face. He opened his backpack and emptied a water bottle into a travel-size bowl for Sam. Chuck was wired on caffeine overload and dominated the small talk—everything from his new receptionist’s great set of tits to the latest stupid bureaucrat at the Division of Motor Vehicles to hand over twenty thousand driver’s license numbers to hackers in the Ukraine by clicking on a bogus link for free porn. Finally, Chuck took a breath, and Vince got strai
ght to the point of his visit.

  “This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” said Vince, “but sometimes I can’t remember what McKenna looked like.”

  It was a rare occurrence, but Chuck was actually silenced. Vince heard only the breeze stirring the palm fronds overhead.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Chuck, clearly not knowing how to respond.

  Vince sensed his uneasiness—“a guy thing”—but there was something he needed to say. “It’s strange. My grandmother, who has been dead for over two decades, I can picture perfectly in my mind. But with my brother, who I see every week, it’s now almost impossible for me to attach a face to his voice.”

  Chuck lit up another cigarette. “What about me? How can you forget my ugly mug?”

  Vince stayed on a serious track. “The way I described this to Alicia is to imagine that there is a big photo album in my mind. If people are part of my past, they stay there forever, just as they were. But if I make them a part of my new life, their image fades. The more contact I have with them, the more they are defined by things that don’t depend on sight.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you remember McKenna?”

  “She’s the exception. When I think of that night, I don’t see McKenna the young woman anymore. I see McKenna the five-year-old girl who used to jump into my arms when I came to visit. It’s getting so that my memory of that day—that horrible day—is one of a five-year-old girl.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “On the surface, you’re right. But she wasn’t five when she was murdered. And no matter how much evidence we concealed, we weren’t going to make her five.”

  “Nobody hid any evidence, Vince.”

  “I’m talking about the text message from her cell phone. FMLTWIA.”

  “I know what you’re talking about. Hacking into her provider’s network and zapping it from her cellular records was my version of child’s play.”

  “And I never told anyone a thing about it.”

  “There was no reason for anyone to know.”

  Vince shifted uneasily. He hated moments like these, when people could see the angst on his face and he could see nothing on theirs.

  “Look, at the time, we were of one mind,” said Vince. “The last thing we wanted was a rag-sheet reporter dragging McKenna’s reputation through the mud. But without that text message, the only evidence we had was the recording of her dying declaration—which I screwed up. The text would have put Jamal Wakefield at the scene of the crime. What nineteen-year-old guy wouldn’t have come running in response to a message like that?”

  “It’s hard to run from a secret detention facility.”

  “You don’t really believe that line Swyteck has been selling, do you?”

  Chuck took a long drag from his cigarette. “Jamal didn’t kill McKenna.”

  “Don’t patronize me. If I had stayed on the line with the nine-one-one operator and let McKenna talk to her, the case against Jamal would have been a lock. There was only a hearsay problem because I recorded it to something as unreliable as my home answering machine.”

  “You need to stop beating yourself up over that. The text message doesn’t convict Jamal. It actually proves his innocence.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “For one thing, McKenna would never have sent a text like that. Not that I knew everything about my daughter, but that much I did know. The man who killed her picked up her cell phone and texted Jamal. It was all part of setting up her ex-boyfriend.”

  Vince paused, confused. “When did you decide this?”

  “After I heard Jamal’s alibi, I did the math.”

  “Math?”

  “The time of death was a time certain. So was the time of the text message. We also know the severity of McKenna’s wounds. With a little input from medical and forensic experts, I was able to make a fairly reliable calculation of how long a healthy teenage girl of McKenna’s height and weight could survive those injuries. That gave me an approximate time of the attack. The bottom line is that McKenna was probably stabbed before the text was sent.”

  Vince considered it. Some things weren’t measurable with mathematical certainty, but if anyone could do it, Chuck could. “So Jamal was framed?”

  “That’s my calculation.”

  Sam rested his head on Vince’s leg. Vince patted his huge head, then scratched him in his favorite spot: on the forehead, right between the eyes. Sam’s eyes. Vince’s eyes. “Which means that the son of a bitch who did this is definitely still out there.”

  “Three years and running,” said Chuck.

  “Which means Swyteck was right.”

  “Yeah,” said Chuck. “So right that Jamal’s mother intends to sue me under some bullshit theory.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Jamal’s uncle called me. He said he was hiring Jack Swyteck, and that it was going to be the courtroom equivalent of jihad.”

  “Well, if it’s war they want . . .”

  A puff of smoke hit Vince in the face.

  “I got a better idea,” said Chuck.

  “Tell me.”

  There was another cloud of smoke, then Chuck turned into Marlon Brando. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Jack entered the MLFC Computer Center through a fireproof door and in the company of Chuck Mays, Vince Paulo, and a security guard who made the other men look like Lilliputians.

  “Watch your step,” said Mays.

  Boxes of records and supplies cluttered the ramp, and it impressed Jack the way Paulo negotiated his way with just a walking stick. The guard left them at another glass door, which Mays opened with a passkey. It led to a large open space that was so well air-conditioned that Jack felt an immediate chill. Inside, rows of supercomputers hummed beneath an expansive drop ceiling with cool fluorescent lighting.

  “This single computer center is bigger than my entire first company was,” said Mays.

  Jack didn’t fancy himself a computer whiz, so rather than interrupt with a stupid question, he simply let Mays keep talking.

  Mays continued. “If you pulled up these floors, you’d see miles and miles of cables. That’s our information pipeline. Every minute of every day we’re sucking in new names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses. We get records on your marital status, employment, home values, estimated income. Your children’s ages, your ethnicity, your religion, the books you read, the products you order by phone or online, and where you go on vacation. And that’s just the purchase behavior and lifestyle data.”

  “There’s more?” asked Jack.

  Mays smiled. “Follow me.”

  He led them around a pod of work cubicles to another row of smaller computers.

  “Don’t let the size fool you,” said Mays. “These are my fastest ever, and they hold more information than you can fathom. Ever heard of a petabyte, Swyteck?”

  “No, but I’m sure a shot of penicillin will clear you right up.”

  “Funny. The computer memory here is measured in petabytes.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Imagine a stack of King James Bibles that’s fifty thousand miles high. That’s one petabyte.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ verily I say unto you.”

  “We call it grid computing, which is basically a network of supercomputers. All day long we’re analyzing and matching the information we gather to create a detailed portrait of hundreds of millions of adults. And it all happens in seconds, because each portrait has its own sixteen-digit code unique to each person.”

  Jack’s gaze swept the room. Each computer looked identical to the one beside it, except for a somewhat goofy motif that was unique to each machine. Some were marked with the characters from The Simpsons or SpongeBob SquarePants. Others were identified by muscle cars, like Maserati or Ferrari.

  “What kind of information is collected here
?” Jack asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Mays. “But you might have guessed that the shark fins are for legal actions—divorces, foreclosures, and bankruptcy filings, mostly.”

  Jack wondered what nuggets from his own divorce were in there.

  “So that’s the end of our tour, ladies and gentlemen,” said Mays. “Now let’s talk settlement.”

  “Settlement?” said Jack.

  “Jamal’s mother wants to know who killed her son,” said Mays. “I want to know who killed my wife and daughter. My friend Vince wants to know who turned him into the only guy in the room who can’t see what’s going on. So let’s cut through this bullshit about Jamal’s mother suing my ass because it’s somehow my fault that her son is dead.”

  “What are you proposing?” asked Jack.

  “After you left my house the other night, something stuck in my mind. Basically, we shared information. I gave you a copy of a text-message exchange between my wife and the man who the police think was her killer. You told me something that Jamal said to you in private.”

  “That his interrogators in Prague threatened to kill McKenna if he didn’t talk.”

  “Exactly,” said Mays. “You said that it was technically still covered by the attorney-client privilege even though Jamal was dead.”

  “Fortunately, it was something that Jamal had already authorized me to make public, so I was free to share it.”

  “Yeah, brilliant,” said Mays. “Jamal’s dead. Now we want to nail the son of a bitch who killed him and the two most important people in my life. So fuck the attorney-client privilege. You have information straight from Jamal that I can’t get from any other source, am I right?”

  “That’s a fair statement,” said Jack.

  “Here’s the deal: We pool our knowledge. Everything Vince and I know about McKenna and Shada goes into the pot. Everything you and Jamal’s mother know goes right in with it. And I mean everything. Anything you learned from anyone about Mr. Chang who died at the Lincoln Road Mall. Everything you know about the girl who called you from London. And most important, everything Jamal ever told you.”