Reclaim

by Beth Yarnall

  “What is it?”

  “An empty folder where the coroner’s report should be.”

  “I couldn’t enhance the video enough to figure out what was in the box anyway. Let me see.” He changes seats with me.

  I lean over his shoulder to watch. He does some kind of wizardry on the keys, bringing up black windows with white font. He clicks around some more and then reopens the coroner’s report to reveal a folder hidden within the folder.

  “Private folder,” he murmurs, then does some more computer magic. “Password protected.” He manages to get it open.

  “It’s gibberish.”

  “Not necessarily.” He starts copying and pasting lines of text into a new document. After a few moments he looks up and me and laughs. “He gets an E for effort, but an F for originality. He hid a message in transposition cypher within html code.”

  At my confused look he clarifies. “He wrote a bunch of words backwards and tried to hide it within html code, trying to make it look like it was part of the code. Except even a beginning programmer could figure this out. More than likely he did it to confuse someone who doesn’t know html code and wouldn’t know if there were any extra characters randomly thrown in.”

  “What does it say?”

  He types the words in the correct letter order, slowly revealing the message. “I think it’s an email.”

  “How can you tell? There’s no email address.”

  “It’s too short and informal. The format is more like an email than a letter.” He finishes typing the message and reads it out loud. “Got it. Meet you Sunday at three at the usual. Don’t forget to adjust your witness list accordingly. I’m counting on you.”

  “What does that mean? Was there any signature, email address or other identifying information in the code?”

  “Nothing. The rest is standard html coding.”

  “Coding for what?”

  “Let’s convert it to text and see.” He does some more magic and up pops what looks like the home page for the San Diego County District Attorney. “What the… This can’t be right.”

  He goes onto the Internet and pulls up the website for the district attorney’s office and clicks on the ‘About DA Clifford G. Billits’ tab. Sure enough it matches the page with the exception of the website banner at the top and the website navigation widget on the side.

  Nolan sits back in his chair. “Whoa.”

  “I think the words you’re looking for are holy shit.”

  “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “That the DA wrote this email to Martin? I think so. Why else would he put the email in the middle of the coding for the DA’s ‘about me’ page?”

  “I wish I could hack into Billits’s email and find out, but that’s a line I’m not willing to cross. Don’t look so surprised,” Nolan says, sounding genuinely affronted. “I do have my moral limits.”

  “I know you do. The look on my face was me reacting to my own thoughts, which for a moment actually entertained the idea.” I press my fingers into my eyes. “I don’t know what’s come over me lately.”

  “Must be my influence.”

  “It is, but not in the way you think. I just… I don’t know. I’m surprised at myself. I didn’t know I had this side.”

  “A wild side?” he asks with a sly tilt to his mouth.

  “An inappropriate side, a bending of the truth and the law side, a risk taking side. None of that is me. Or at least I never thought it could be me. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “Maybe it was there all along waiting to come out and you’ve suppressed it all these years.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You like it.”

  I sigh. “I do. And I can’t believe that either.”

  “If I do something here or…” He makes a sweeping motion, indicating the office in general, then gestures toward the rest of the apartment “…elsewhere that you’re not comfortable with let me know.”

  I shake my head. “You’re fine. It’s me.”

  “I get it now.”

  “Get what?”

  “Your reactions. When we watched the video I got the feeling that there was something wrong about the way that went down for you. That maybe it was… I don’t know…an experiment and that maybe you weren’t all that comfortable with what happened or perhaps you regretted it. Or that maybe you were using me.”

  “Using you?”

  It’s his turn to shake his head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “No. Tell me what you mean.”

  “That you were slumming it for the experience.”

  I honestly don’t know what to say to him. His words repeat over and over in my head. Slumming it for the experience. I’m not sure which of us should be more insulted by that statement—him or me. My emotions war with each other each, making their case to be heard. I don’t know whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of the statement or be furious with him for thinking so little of me and of what we shared. I don’t know how it was for him—I mean, I thought I did, although clearly I didn’t—but it was pretty cataclysmic for me.

  It obviously wasn’t for him.

  “And you were willing to let me slum it again for the experience?” I ask, incredulity coloring my tone. “Are you acting out some sort of penance or something? Was it that terrible for you or are you that desperate to get laid?”

  “No. No. Nothing like that. Shit. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was just a thought. A stupid, insecure thought that I should’ve kept to myself. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.”

  “Huh. Cause I’m pretty sure it was about nothing but me.”

  “Just forget that I said it, okay? I’m an idiot.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  “It wasn’t terrible,” he says after a long pause. “Far from it. It was fucking amazing.”

  “It was?”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  “Okay then. So we’re okay?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” And I don’t. “I’m still a little confused by your choice of words.”

  “They’re a reflection on me not on you. I think you’re incredible.”

  “You do?”

  He gives me a sweet, slightly lopsided smile. “Yeah. I do.”

  “In that case, yes, we’re okay.”

  “Good because I was looking forward to setting up those cameras later.” He takes my hand and tugs me close.

  My whole face goes hot and some other places too. “Me too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I lean down and kiss him.

  He tries to pull me into his lap, but I resist. If we get caught up all the time we’ll never figure this case out. I tell him that and he reluctantly releases me. My attention goes to the computer screen and DA Billits’s photo. I met him once shortly after finishing law school. He seemed like a nice man. But first impressions can be deceiving.

  White with brown hair and blue eyes Billits matches Carla’s description of the man who paid to have sex with her and popped his head into the room while she was talking to Martin. I can’t help but think that brief visit was no coincidence. That maybe Billits wanted Carla to see him and to know that he was pulling the strings. This explains so, so much about what happened with Carla’s case.

  “Can you print me out that photo of DA Billits?” I ask Nolan. “I want to show it to Carla the next time I see her. He might be her mystery man.”

  Nolan loses his smile. “Double holy shit.”

  My thoughts exactly.

  13

  Nolan

  “He certainly fits the description,” I tell Lila. “But then the description is vague enough to fit my cousin Joe, my friend Dominic, and half the guys I went to school with. If my eyes were blue it would describe me.”

  “Yes, but remember the tattoos? She said he had one on his chest and another on his left calf. She described them in detail.
”

  “Gotchya. I bet if I surfed the web long enough I could maybe find a photo of our friend the DA here on the Internet with shorts on and no shirt. He might not have posted a pic of himself, but maybe a friend or relative did.” I give Lila her chair back, dropping a kiss on her forehead. “Keep going through the stuff you found on Martin’s computer. See if anything else weird pops up while I work on this. Good catch by the way.”

  “I’m going to go through the rest of this with a fine tooth comb, but you might want to check for anymore hidden files when I’m done just in case.”

  “Download everything onto that computer then give me the thumb drive and I’ll go through it on this one.”

  “You got it.”

  I get to work scouring the Interwebs for photos of the DA, using variations of his name, his wife’s name, and their kids’ names. Someone really needs to talk to the DA’s teenagers about setting social media accounts to private. The stuff they post is shocking and I work for an online porn company. Don’t they know that the Internet is forever?

  It doesn’t take long before I come across vacation photos from the Billits’s trip to Cancun three summers ago. There’s a shot of him playing volleyball with his sons and daughter, but he’s wearing a tank top and the shots are mostly from the waist up. I scroll through until I find a shot of him kissing his wife on a lounge chair. They’re both lying on their stomachs, but Billits’s left calf is just visible in the side shot. And there right where Carla described it is a tattoo of a jagged knife with a banner wrapped three times around it. There’s some wording that if I just… There. Death before dishonor.

  I’m shaking as I take a screen shot, documenting where the image came from. I glance over at Lila. She’s concentrating on the screen in front of her. I’m almost afraid to go on with my search. We just inadvertently stepped in the big, giant pile of shit. If this is the guy… A part of me doesn’t want to believe it’s him. Especially after going through all of the pictures of Billits and his happy, happy family.

  I force myself to close the photo and continue the search. And it’s there on Billits’s sister-in-law’s Facebook page that I find a photo of him at a pool party. He’s smiling and holding a beer, his arm slung around his oldest son’s shoulders. And right across his left pec—over his heart—is the word sacrifice in bold letters.

  Cold splashes over me. This is our guy. This is the guy who paid to have sex with Carla. This is the guy who likely fixed it so she’d be convicted for murder. This is the guy we’re up against. I have a feeling once he finds out what we’re doing and that we’re onto him, this investigation is going to take a turn that could be disastrous for us all, but Lila in particular. In her line of work she’s going to come up against this guy and his office in defense of her clients. He’s bound to have friends in high places, friends like judges who would see no problem implementing the good old boys network to squash a no name bug like Lila. I bet when she took this case on she had no idea it could jeopardize everything she’s worked so hard for.

  I screen shot the photo and bring up the other pic so that they’re side by side. There’s no doubt this is the man Carla described. We’d have to show her the photos to be sure. I take a moment to find photos of men about the DA’s age and coloring and save those as well, putting together a photo array that Lila can show Carla. I then crop the tattoos from copied screen shots and then print those all out too.

  Now I have to break the news to Lila. She looks so calm reading through the files from Martin’s computer. I’m sorry I opened my mouth earlier about my doubts. I shouldn’t have said that stuff to her. It’s not her fault I’m an insecure jackass. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on between us other than we both want it to continue. Right now that will have to be enough and I’ll have to bite down on my tongue to keep from saying something stupid again and screwing it up.

  I can’t even manage to not fuck up the best sex of my life. You’d think that would be a no brainer, but apparently not for me. I need to stop questioning her motives for wanting to continue this thing between us and just enjoy it for however long it lasts. Speaking of…

  I sneak out of the office, grab the two extra cameras out of the hall closet, and go into my bedroom. Where to put them? Glancing around the room, I calculate the best angles. If I had more I’d set them all up. I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to this. Voyeurism has never been my thing. Working for the sex websites is the perfect side job for me because I’m not tempted to sample the merchandise. But this is different. This is Lila. And watching Lila come is almost—okay not even close—as good as being inside her when she comes. An experience I very much want to have again.

  If I don’t manage to fuck it up.

  The cameras are a quick install since there’s no need to hide them. I set them to activate with motion and head back to the office where I find Lila leafing through the photos I printed.

  She looks up at me with wide, dark eyes. “It’s him isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah, damn. Damn it. I have to report this.”

  “To who?”

  “The police.”

  “What exactly are you going to report? What’s the crime besides prostitution, which will only come back on Carla?”

  She looks down at the pictures. “I will have to report it. If we can definitively connect the DA to Martin and show that he influenced Carla’s defense.”

  “What would happen to him? Realistically?”

  “Realistically? Probably not much—sanctions, maybe ejection from the California Bar Association—unless we can prove he had something to do with Martin’s disappearance.”

  “Martin could’ve disappeared himself. People do it all the time. He had a lot of secrets, a wife who was spying on him and took whatever was in the box he was hiding, money coming from who knows where, and he was a public defender who was in the pocket of the DA. He had a truckload of reasons to vanish. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on an island somewhere telling barely legal women how to touch themselves while he jacks off.”

  “If you were to disappear, how would you do it?”

  “Some might start with a new identity, but that’s too obvious and not as easy as it sounds. Although with Martin’s occupation he probably came across a lot of people who could help him in that regard. Establishing himself with a new identity wouldn’t be easy. He could get a bank account, but wouldn’t have a credit history to rent an apartment or set up utilities or buy a car.”

  “Then he has to be using a different identity.”

  “Not necessarily.” I lean against the doorframe, cross my arms and rub my chin, really getting into this. “He’d need access to his money. Unless he set up a new identity before he tapped into whatever it was that was funding his porn habit—and the fact that he had a bank account in his own name proves he didn’t think that far ahead—he’d have needed his ID to get his money out of the account.

  “I think… Of course.” I come off the doorframe and go to the computer Lila was working on. “I want to see his bank statements again.” I pull them up and scroll through looking for the one weird charge. “There.” I point it out on the screen. “Goddamn this guy is an idiot.” I jump back over to my computer.

  “What? What is it?”

  “The only out of place charge on the account.”

  “A book store? He could’ve bought anything there.”

  “Maybe. But here’s the thing, Martin’s not smart enough to have disappeared on his own. He had help. The trails he left all over the place prove that.”

  “What kind of help?”

  I do some not-exactly-legal maneuvering on the Internet and hack into Martin’s online account with the bookstore. And there in his order history is the help Martin got—How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numbskulls.

  “Idiot,” I say out loud. “He violated the first rule of How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numbskulls—buy the book with cash.”

  “You’re kidding
me. There’s a Numbskull book for how to disappear?”

  “There’s a Numbskull book for just about everything, including how to give a woman an orgasm. Which I’ve read by the way.”

  “Clearly. So you think Martin used the book to disappear?”

  “Yeah. I think that’s exactly what he did. The only other option is that he’s dead.”

  “But we’d know if he was dead. There’d be a death certificate and the police—” She gasps. “You mean murdered.”

  “That’s a possibility, but it’s a distant second. The police haven’t come across anything so far that leads to his having been murdered. Hang on. I’ll be right back.” I go out to the living room and pull my copy of How to Vanish Without a Trace for Numbskulls and bring it back with me to the office.

  I flip through the book to a section I’d highlighted. “Here.” I tap the page. “Disinformation. Leaving behind a trail so wide and tangled that it would take forever to sort out. That’s why we found the bank statements in his office. He needed them to be found. It’s part of his disappearing act. I bet if we pull his credit report we’ll find that he applied for utilities and a place to live in another state. Maybe even a couple of different cities. But none of them will be for where he actually is. Disinformation. It’s brilliant. Except that we have access to the road map he used, which means we know that all of the clues he left are really dead ends.”

  “So how does that help us find him?”

  “We’ll have to hope he slipped up somewhere. I’m betting it’s the online porn sites. That level of addiction will be hard for him to break. He might think he’s clever using different services than he used on that bank account, but I have no doubt he’s regularly visiting those sites. We just have to figure out which one or ones.”

  “You said you couldn’t access their billing records.”

  “I can’t. It’s on a different server than the cameras. But I can access user names. Using his bank statements I can try to recreate his pattern—the days and times he’s most likely to be online and for how long. From that I can look at the user names online during those times. You’d be surprised how many times people use the same user name over and over.”