by Matt Richtel
I was about to put my token into the box to pull out a Chronicle when I saw Sergeant Danny Weller pull up in front of Mel’s. I didn’t need a paper—my information about the explosion was coming from the inside. Danny stepped out of a brown sedan with a red cherry on top. He had parked in a loading zone.
“I’m having ham and eggs,” he said by way of greeting. “Side of flapjacks.”
“You are a man of great vision.”
“Tell me about your conversation with Aravelo.”
Talking to the police is like talking to parents. And schoolteachers. And elected officials. Except none of those people carry .40-caliber Berettas. Police represent the ultimate authority figure. You like them, want to please them, and you hate them. Just for their mere existence.
I’ve had friends who are cops. I had one for a neighbor once. He liked to smoke dope and he was more than happy to share. I got pretty comfortable with him, but I always knew the pecking order. Same with Danny. He’d let me get pretty comfortable, but with a turn in his tone, I could see who was pecking at whom. What did he want to hear from me? What was I prepared to say? The road was forking. I went down the middle.
“It was more like a monologue.”
“Monologue?”
My head pulsed again, accompanied by a leg twitch. This was new—a rapid-fire jitter of my foot. I excused myself to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. When I got back, I told Danny that Aravelo had shown me a picture of a woman and asked if I’d seen her.
“Had you?”
A newfound intensity. I shook my head.
“Then Aravelo told you to stay out of his investigation?”
His investigation. Not our investigation. Not the investigation.
“He accused me of causing the explosion,” I said. “Danny, I’m not really sure where this is . . . ”
“Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable. How could he . . . ”
Danny understood.
“You mentioned a laptop. Tell me about it.”
I reiterated to Danny that it had belonged to someone at the café. Danny asked me if I thought it was connected to the explosion. It struck me as an odd question, coming from a cop. I thought: Danny is a cop, isn’t he?
I looked at my empty coffee cup. Two cups and still not thinking straight.
“I would very much like to see it—the laptop,” he said. “Actually, that’s not true. I don’t want to see it. I want a brilliant technician I know to see it.”
“What the hell is going on, Sergeant?”
It was about as much tough guy as I could muster.
Danny laughed.
“Story time,” he said.
He took a sip of water.
“I want to know what your angle is,” I said.
Danny put his hands forward.
“Hear me out. Do you remember Valerie Westin?”
Valerie Westin.
“The Lingerie Larcenist,” I said.
“I busted her. Aravelo took the credit.”
The Lingerie Larcenist had gone into banks, opened her raincoat, and displayed a bodacious body—clad in black stockings and a lacy bra. She showed them a holster and a sexy little Glock .45 as well. She was more modest about her face. That remained covered with a ski mask. But the poor distracted bank tellers looked at her guns, and her gun, and forked over the dough.
“I put the case together. I found the tie to her earlier crimes in Omaha. I found her address through an ex. I’ve got zero to show for it.”
“That’s a great story,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“You want to see my cards. Here:
“Aravelo is a power broker inside the department. Maybe the power broker. That’s why he got this assignment. That’s why he controls who does what. And who gets what credit. And what promotion. And, by extension, what power and salary—and real money.”
Money, what money?
“I can’t prove anything. But Aravelo lives in a $750,000 pad on Fillmore, and I hear it’s mostly paid for. He’s just a savvier version of his punk brother.”
Implying what, exactly? Aravelo was dirty? That Danny would be willing to take graft too? He switched tones.
“If you want to swing in the wind,” he said, digging his fork into a pile of grease and cheese, “be my fucking guest.”
Interrogation. Peace offerings. Threats. Was Danny the good cop—just trying to set things right?
“Your father,” I said.
He put down his fork.
“What about my father? Leave him out of this.”
It was worth a gamble.
“You said he needed a transplant. You need the money.”
He took a long pause.
“Dad’s finances were vaporized by the dot-com bust. Netscape, the browser guys. The stock dove and dad chased after it. His whole life’s philosophy is that being right is less important than being decisive. Commit. FDR, JFK, McCarthy, Reagan, didn’t matter, if they had conviction, he respected it. He made up his mind about Internet stocks and away he went.”
He stopped himself by clearing his throat.
“I could have used my rightful promotions a long time ago. It won’t be near enough money to help my father. Not near enough. But every little bit helps. And there is a principle here. A man ought to have the right to take care of his family. I can solve this café explosion, and you can help me set things right.”
“What exactly are you asking from me? Why me?”
He had grown particularly calm. “Clues. Stuff Aravelo might be overlooking. Stuff I can put together with information I’m getting from inside,” he said. “Why you? Because you may have them—even if you don’t know it. Plus, this is personal for you.”
I flinched.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said. Did he know something about Annie? The note. I’d told him about the note. Is that what he meant?
“Jesus, Nat. You almost got blown up. And you’re a journalist. A good investigative journalist. I saw what you did to Aravelo’s punk-ass brother.
“And after the café exploded, you went out there and found that waitress. Didn’t you?”
That waitress.
“I need eyes and ears, Nat. My whole job is amassing eyes and ears, and putting together what they see and hear into a coherent picture,” he said. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind having an insight into what is really going on. We can work as partners on this.” The words were trite, but the tone sounded sincere.
“Horse trade,” I said.
“How’s that?” He leaned back.
“I’m not blindly feeding you information. You’ve got to give me something. At least to establish . . . ”
We both waited for me to finish my sentence.
“Trust,” I said.
Danny pulled out a wallet. He took out twenty and put it on top of the check. “The café is owned by Idelwild Corporation. It’s an investment arm of some of the major big-time corporations.”
Hardly a revelation. I’d already read it in the newspaper.
“C’mon, Sergeant. Is that a test to see if I’m paying attention?”
Danny put his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. He craned his neck back.
“Okay,” he said.
Okay. Okay what?
“The waitress,” he said.
The waitress.
What about her?
“Did she tell you about Michigan?”
“Yeah. She told me—she grew up there.”
“It’s also where she almost spent the rest of her life—in jail.”
“Erin? For what?”
“Blowing something up.”
26
Romp Studios.”
“This is a joke.”
“The offices of an adult film production company went to the ground. She beat the rap. But then she got sued.”
He handed me a printout from the East Lansing Superior Court. It had the name Erin Iris Coultran, a date six ye
ars earlier, and a long number that I guessed to be a docket number. I listened to Danny’s explanation in a daze. He said that, as near as he could piece it together, a pornography company had started shooting films in East Lansing, trying to recruit women from Michigan State University. Not long after a profile of the company appeared in the local weekly alternative newspaper, its offices were destroyed. Erin was part of a small group charged with what looked to be a political or religiously motivated attack. She was not convicted, Danny said, but she still faced a mountain of debt from the civil suit.
“So are you saying that Erin blew up the café?” I asked.
“I have no evidence that the waitress caused anything.”
He said he had a friend at the FBI run down the names of people at the café and Erin Coultran’s was in the database.
“I don’t know if the charges were dropped, or if she was acquitted—or precisely the dispensation.”
Erin. Blew. Up. The. Café. I let the words rain down. They didn’t go together. Did they? Something tugged at me—something unresolved about Erin. Too many coincidences. At the least, she had been way less than frank.
“Lieutenant Aravelo asked me about her.”
For a second, it looked like Danny’s eyes widened. “Anyway, I’m expecting details soon about the Michigan case. I will forward those that don’t violate her right to privacy.”
I looked at the paper and shook my head.
“I take it you don’t think Erin is capable of such an act of violence.” Sounding more like the sergeant with every passing moment.
“Nope. Can’t be.”
He pulled out a stick of gum. He offered the package to me.
“I do my puzzles with a pencil.”
I asked him why, what he meant.
“I put a lot of words in the crossword puzzle that ultimately don’t fit. But you can’t be afraid to put down some words that ultimately don’t work. Do the same with Erin. Take your time, see what fits.”
“Why not just ask her to fill in the blanks?”
“I’d advise against. You’ll scare her off. She won’t tell you anything and she might run.”
He suggested I continue spending time with Erin, if that’s what I chose to do. “Use your listening skills. Try on different ways of looking at her. See which one is the best fit. She’ll get clearer. They always do.”
After Danny drove off, I considered the essential question: Could Erin have blown up the café?
She’d given me no indication of violent tendencies, yet she’d been violent enough to attract the attention of the FBI. On its face, anything underhanded by Erin seemed implausible.
Unless.
There had been a fire at Simon Anderson’s house. Possibly started by a female electrician. Arson. Explosion. Fire.
Then again, if she was as straight as my initial gut instincts told me, what did that say about Weller? Why would he impugn her?
Maybe there was a third possibility: Erin and Weller were on the up-and-up. Weller was exploring options and alerting me to pertinent evidence; Erin was on my side, but simply hadn’t told me something about her story. It could be a coincidence. That seemed plausible enough, given what I had learned so far about each person. Just then, Erin called. I sent it to voice mail.
I beelined to the nearest Internet café—the modern public library. I did a search on Erin Coultran, cross-referencing her with Michigan, East Lansing, Arson, Lawsuit. Each search turned up empty. Most newspapers don’t keep their archives online, and hadn’t even started building them until recently. I found a brief reference to the demise of Romp Studios. An item at the site of an adult film magazine mentioned a fire at the studio as one of the examples of backlash against pornographers in the late nineties.
Then I researched Danny Weller. There were a handful of stories about his crimefighting, including one about the Lingerie Larcenist. He was a bit player, and a stand-up guy. A brief mention in a column in the Examiner mentioned that Weller and his junior partner, Officer Velarde, were among those assigned to rotation on the homicide shadow investigative squad. He checked out.
I checked my e-mail. My editor, Kevin, had sent three messages. The last one was just a subject line: “What’s up?”
When I was a sophomore in high school, the dog ate my homework—a six-page paper on The Red Badge of Courage. I’d set the paper down under a well-lit window, and put my uneaten peanut butter and honey sandwich on top of it. The sun did its job of melting everything, and then the dog came in and cleaned up the mess. The teacher did not believe me. It should have taught me to come up with better excuses.
My phone brain story was due that afternoon. I needed something better than: The café explosion ate my homework. My subject line read: “I’m just polishing off the final draft.”
I was going to have to come up with something better soon, but I had bigger things to worry about. Like the intensifying pain shooting down my back, which felt like linebackers were performing Swan Lake on my spine. I looked at the clock on my phone and realized it had been an hour and a half since I got to the café. If I wanted to make it to Stanford Technology Research Center on time, I was going to have to speed again.
During the ride down to Palo Alto, Erin called twice, but I sent the calls to voice mail. I had a meeting with a geek about a laptop. What was hiding in that laptop that she wanted so desperately to see?
27
Mike’s office was a study in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everything was stacked, ordered, and dusted. Five pencils sat in a row on the desk, their tips of identical length. It seemed almost dainty compared to Mike, who had played linebacker at Stanford. He had a slight but chronic bend at his elbow from arthritis, caused by blows of helmet to joint, that was noticeable to anyone with anatomy training. When he typed on the computer keyboard, the pain in his left arm caused him to peck letters one at a time with his index finger.
On his wall were two posters. One was of Douglas Engelbart, the man credited with inventing the computer mouse, and, in turn, with making computers more user-friendly. Engelbart was an icon for people who wanted to make bits and bytes a little more human. The other was of Eldridge Cleaver, a man who wanted to make humans a little more human. Whether its presence had anything to do with Mike’s own heritage—African American—never seemed relevant to anything. One of Silicon Valley’s attributes was that it never seemed to give a damn about race. If you could make the green, you were on the team.
Mike’s only trouble was that he suffered the social condition of being overly friendly. He would try anything, go on any outing, hang out with any group, say yes to any invitation, and become ever present if you let him. He was reliable, smart, and nearly funny, but he was just slightly tone-deaf and so he couldn’t understand that not everyone was that happy all the time, eager to have fun, or altogether sincere in their social planning. He had to be kept at arm’s length or his friendship could be overwhelming.
“Dude, was your friend a hacker?” he said. He was fond of the title “dude.”
He was relatively social for an engineer, but he was still a geek. We weren’t going to distract ourselves with niceties. He didn’t ask why I was interested in the laptop. We went right for the technology.
“This encryption program is a doozy.”
Hackers get a bad name. The term can refer to the jerks who break into computers and destroy Web sites. But not all hackers are malicious. Some hackers take apart systems in order to improve them, work outside corporate channels, find new ways to attack problems. When the title is said in a certain tone, it is a tribute to someone who, tech-wise, has got it going on.
“I might have overlooked it. But the disk seemed way too full given the applications. There had to be something else on there.”
I mustered enough of the two required ingredients—concentration and patience—to follow his thinking. He was saying that when he first looked at the computer, he noticed its memory was very full. But on its face, there weren’t enough big
programs to be taking up so much space.
“I did some digging,” he said. “And found this.”
He was in the computer’s directory—about fifteen submenus down from anywhere a person without a PhD would look. All that popped up was an icon for a computer application with the title “GNet.” Just like Mike had told me on the phone.
“The program is half a gigabyte. Huge—especially considering that it wasn’t showing up in any of the main directories.”
A big program. Possibly hidden.
“So what does it do?”
“Can’t tell you, dude.”
He had his index finger on the computer’s nipple, controlling the onscreen prompt. He put the prompt on the GNet icon. He clicked. Nothing happened.
“Cut to the chase,” I said.
It was uncharacteristic for me. Mike looked up at me dispassionately, like he was examining a computer with a virus, and jumped ahead. He said he thought, at first, that the program was corrupt, but it had been activated recently.
“Activated?”
“The logs show when a program is working. Just like you can tell in your word processing program when you most recently worked on a given document.”
He showed me the computer’s log. It had a date. Three weeks earlier.
“I tried about five hundred ways to open the app. I even loaded some all-purpose software I thought might pry it open enough for me to glimpse its raison d’être.”
He paused.
“It should have hit me a hell of a lot earlier. Most times when a program is encrypted, it asks for a password. Or it tells you that entrance is forbidden. That’s how you know it’s encrypted.”
“But you weren’t asked for a password?”
“Nope.”
He leaned back. He was in the Geek Teaching Zone. He explained that he was able to see in the computer logs that each time GNet was activated, so was a different program, AXcs*82.