THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3)

by Jake Needham

  Tay hadn’t thought of food until Kang mentioned the East Coast Seafood Centre, but now he could almost smell the sweet and savory chili sauce they poured over the plates of stir-fried mud crabs.

  “You do occasionally come up with good ideas, Sergeant. I should listen to you more often.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kang said. “You probably should.”

  They found an empty table in front of Jumbo Seafood. Jumbo Seafood wasn’t Tay’s favorite of the half dozen or so restaurants at the Centre since it attracted far too many tourists for his taste, but the table was far enough away from the other diners that they could talk without being overheard and Tay didn’t argue when Kang headed toward it.

  They ordered fresh limejuice made with little Calamansi limes, sweet and tart at the same time, and a plate of crispy squid as a starter. The tiny squid were so crunchy they were like bits of bacon coated in sweet, vinegary chili-laced sauce. For their main course, they naturally ordered a platter of chili crabs. It wasn’t until they were done cracking the crabs with their hands and dunking the meat in the sauce, then sopping up what was left of the sauce with big chunks of Chinese fried bread rolls, that they scrubbed their hands with the hot towels the restaurant piled on the table and turned their attention to the printouts Julie gave them.

  The table was cleared and a clean tablecloth spread over it to cover up the chili sauce stains. Tay paid the bill, and then he ordered fresh glasses of limejuice and stacked the printouts between them in the center of the table. Kang examined the top sheet on the stack, flipped quickly through a few more sheets, and looked up at Tay.

  “This might take a while, sir.”

  Tay shrugged. “I’m in no hurry, Sergeant.”

  “That’s not what I meant, sir. It’s just that it’s late and—”

  “I’m a very patient man, Sergeant. I’ll just go over here and have a cigarette while you get started.”

  “But, sir, it seems to me—”

  Tay pushed back his chair and walked away from the table without saying anything.

  He leaned against a tree in the little park between the restaurant and the ocean, lit a Marlboro, and watched the lights of a ship slipping silently east through the strait. The night was heavy and still all around him. The restaurants were emptying out and only occasional snatches of indecipherable conversation disturbed the silence.

  He had only a few days now and very little to work with. If they didn’t learn anything from Tyler’s disk drive, then he would have nothing at all. Two people were dead, and there was no doubt in his mind that had something to do with The Future and Zachery Goodnight-Jones. But what?

  What had Tyler discovered that frightened him? What had Emma found out that made her so dangerous they killed her? What could a company that claimed to be writing software for driverless cars really be doing that was so secret they were willing to murder people to cover it up?

  Tay had no idea. None at all.

  He had been out of his mind to get involved in this, but now that he was he couldn’t let it go. If he did, whoever had killed Tyler and Emma was going to get away with it. And Tay hated one thing in this life more than anything else: people who got away with it.

  Who was left to speak for Tyler and Emma if he didn’t? Maybe to some the idea of speaking for the dead was a lot of romantic foolishness, but Tay didn’t see it that way. He saw it as a moral truth that somebody had to do it. Maybe he didn’t believe in much, but he believed in that.

  Tay took a last puff on his cigarette, dropped the butt on the ground, and pushed it into the dirt with his toe. Kang still had his head down studying the pile of printouts so Tay lit another cigarette. He was going to have to quit, he knew he had to, but this was hardly the time to think about a thing like that, was it?

  Tay had finished the second Marlboro, and to his shame was considering lighting a third, when Kang called out to him.

  “Sir, could you come have a look at this?”

  Tay walked back to the table and sat down. The ice in his limejuice had long since melted, but he picked up the glass anyway and took a drink. The sweet tartness of the Calamansi limes mingled with the tobacco on his tongue to produce a tingling sensation that was as pleasant as it was unexpected.

  Kang turned two sheets of paper around and pushed them across the table toward him. Tay studied them for a moment, but all he saw were columns of numbers that meant nothing to him.

  “What am I looking at, Robbie?”

  “These are the file modification timestamps for a file on the drive that’s called 196MAS.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a list of every occasion on which that file was opened or closed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look at the last three entries at the bottom of the page. The left-hand column shows when the file was opened, and the right-hand column shows when the file was closed.”

  Tay ran his finger down the lines of numbers on the second sheet until he came to the last three entries.

  “The file was opened at 2311 on March 15 and then closed at 2347 on March 15. It was opened again at 1807 on March 16, and then closed at 1809 on March 16. It was opened again at 1031 on March 19, and then closed at 1032 on March 19.”

  Tay looked up at Kang.

  “So what?” he asked.

  “When was Tyler Bartlett’s body found, sir?”

  Tay thought about it for a moment, glanced back at the sheet of paper in his hand, and then up again at Kang.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Exactly, sir. Tyler Bartlett was last seen by anyone on March 15, and his body was found hanging in his apartment on March 16. When this file was opened on March 16 and again on March 19, he couldn’t have been the one opening it. Maybe he didn’t do it when it was opened at nearly midnight on March 15 either.”

  “So you’re telling me somebody else had access to this disk drive and accessed Tyler’s files after he was dead. It had to have been his girlfriend. The drive was right there in her apartment.”

  Kang looked down at the table. He drummed his fingers on it for a second, then picked up his nearly empty glass of limejuice and took a sip. Tay could see that he looked a bit embarrassed.

  “What is it, Robbie?” Tay asked.

  “I don’t think you understand how this works, sir.”

  “You know I don’t, but you just told me somebody accessed this drive after Tyler was dead, didn’t you?”

  “I said somebody accessed the files.”

  “But the files are on the drive and—”

  “Listen to me, please, sir. The drive that Julie took this log off of is just a wireless mirror of a computer that was somewhere else. Whatever files were on that computer were mirrored on this drive using a Wi-Fi connection. So when the log shows a file opened or closed, it was being opened or closed on the computer the wireless drive was mirroring. Not on the wireless drive itself.”

  “Do you know what computer was being mirrored?”

  “Not for sure, but I think—”

  “It was Tyler’s laptop, wasn’t it? The one that the police took?”

  “That would be my guess, sir. It looks to me like the hard drive on his laptop was being mirrored through Wi-Fi to the drive from which these timestamp logs were taken.”

  “So the drive copied everything Tyler did on his laptop. You’re saying we have an exact copy of everything Tyler had on his laptop.”

  “We do if we can read it, sir. You remember what Julie said about the double encryption. It’s not going to be easy.”

  Tay thought about that, and he thought about the timestamps that showed the files had been opened after Tyler was dead. He automatically reached for his Marlboros.

  “I don’t think you’re permitted to smoke here, sir.”

  Tay shook out a cigarette and lit it. “I’d like to see somebody try to stop me.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Tay drew on the Marlboro, exhaled slowly, and thought for a moment about what he
knew now that he had not known before.

  “The access to the file on March 19 could have been the police checking through Tyler’s laptop,” he said.

  “It probably was, sir. The file access on March 17 was probably the police, too. You can see that the file was only open for a minute or two each of those times. Somebody was just skimming through the files to see what they were. The time was too short for anyone to do more than glance at a file this large.”

  “How do you know how large it is?”

  Kang thumbed through his stack of papers, selected one, turned it around, and placed it on the table in front of Tay. He stabbed his finger at a number about halfway down the left side of the page. Tay saw it, but it told him nothing.

  “That’s the size of the file called 196MAS, sir. It’s 327Mb.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “It is if it’s just text. Not so big if it’s a picture, but I don’t think it’s a picture.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the access just before midnight on March 15. Somebody kept that file open then for thirty-six minutes. Nobody looks at a picture for thirty-six minutes.”

  “So you think it’s a text file and somebody was reading it?”

  “Maybe, sir, but… well, I think there’s another possibility, too.”

  Tay said nothing. He just waited.

  “Tyler was working on computer security routines,” Kang continued. “This could be code he was writing for some security application he was designing.”

  “And you’re saying someone opened the file and read the code?”

  “For thirty-six minutes? More likely, sir, they were changing some of it.”

  “Changing computer code Tyler had written?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could it have been Tyler?”

  Kang hesitated. “Yes, I suppose it could have been.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, sir, I don’t. I think Tyler was already dead by eleven o’clock on March 15. Whoever killed Tyler accessed that file and made some kind of a change in it.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because the code Tyler had written did something they didn’t want anybody to find out about.”

  Tay and Kang divided up the rest of the logs. They went through them line by line while Tay smoked another cigarette and Kang finished his limejuice. When they were done, they had found sixteen files that were opened and closed again between ten o’clock and midnight on March 15.

  “Call Julie and give her the names of those sixteen files, Robbie. Tell her to concentrate on decrypting them first. If it was Tyler’s killer who opened them, knowing what he was interested in might tell us who he was.”

  Kang took out his cell phone and Tay stood up and walked away from the table. He had intended to light another cigarette, but he didn’t. He didn’t need a cigarette. Now that they were getting somewhere, that would keep him going better than the best nicotine hit he had ever had.

  The restaurant was almost empty, and Tay could saw the staff eyeing them impatiently from inside, willing them to leave so that they could close the place for the night. Tay knew exactly how they felt.

  When he saw Kang punch off his cell phone and slide it back into his pocket, he started walking toward the parking lot. Kang followed him without another word.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHEN TAY WOKE up, his mother was sitting on the end of his bed. He glanced at the glowing numbers of the clock on his bedside table.

  4:28am.

  A dull, orange-colored light leaked around his shades from the street lamps on Emerald Hill Road and illuminated his bedroom just enough for Tay to see his mother sitting there. Her legs were crossed at the knee and her hands were folded in her lap. She wasn’t looking at him and seemed to be studying something on the other side of his bedroom. She was as still as death, which Tay thought made sense. After all, she was dead.

  “Cat got your tongue, Samuel?”

  “That’s an awful cliché, Mother.”

  His mother gave a small shrug and turned her head toward him.

  “One of the advantages of being dead is you don’t care very much what anyone says about you. Your criticism used to hurt me, Samuel. Sometimes it hurt me a lot. But now I am impervious to it.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite fair. Most people don’t consider pointing out a cliché to amount to personal criticism.”

  “And I do? And you don’t consider telling me that I am too sensitive to your criticism to be yet another form of criticism?”

  “You’re going around in circles, Mother.”

  “More criticism. You just can’t stop, can you, Samuel?”

  Tay didn’t believe in ghosts, which made these nocturnal visits from his mother even more exasperating than they would otherwise have been. Each time this happened, he resolved the next time he would refuse to acknowledge her at all and stay completely silent. After all, refusing to carry on a conversation with someone who was not really there could hardly be considered rude, could it? But try as he might, he was unable to keep that resolution. There was always something he just couldn’t resist saying.

  Tay sat up and pushed his pillow behind him. Then he leaned back against the headboard and folded his arms. He was embarrassed about the fat around his belly. He hoped his mother wouldn’t make a humiliating comment about it.

  Generally his mother’s appearances were somewhat more abstract than this. A bunch of dancing lights, a swirling vortex of energy, or something along those lines. She hadn’t yet done the burning bush thing, but he was sure that was coming. This fully-fledged human-looking materialization was rare. In fact, he could only remember it happening once before. He made a mental note never again to eat chili crab so close to his bedtime.

  “You’re telling yourself I’m not really here, aren’t you, Samuel? You’re probably blaming me on the chili crab you had for dinner. Well, if it makes you feel better, just go on telling yourself that.”

  The dead do not easily leave this earth. Tay had been a homicide investigator for most of his adult life. He knew that all too well. Every time he stood over the body of a murder victim, he could feel around him the presence of the living being that had once inhabited that body. Even here in his bedroom he could sometimes feel the presence of those who had lived in his house before him. But feeling the presence of those who had died and seeing one of them sitting on the end of your bed at 4:28am were two very different things.

  It was the chili crab. Had to be.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake not believing, Samuel. I could be a great help to you. I have been a great help to you. There is more to the cosmos than the rational world you believe in so fervently. Open your mind, boy! Be a bit more of a romantic.”

  “I am very romantic, Mother.”

  Tay’s mother made an unpleasant snorting sound.

  “I’m certainly not going to argue with you about my personality,” Tay said. “Especially since you’re not really here. You’re part of my past. That’s all. You do not exist in the present, nor will you exist in the future.”

  “He who understands the past controls the future.”

  “You’re trying to quote Orwell, Mother, and you’re making a mess of it. The line is He who controls the past controls the future.”

  “You stink of cigarettes, Samuel. No wonder I always find you sleeping alone.”

  “Bless me, Mother, for I have sinned.”

  Tay’s mother uncrossed her legs and crossed them back in the opposite direction. Tay could almost feel her weight shifting on his mattress. It was really quite remarkable how realistic these delusions were.

  “If we’re all done with the witty dialogue now, Samuel, would you like to know why I’m here? It’s not easy, you know. I don’t just materialize and dematerialize with a snap of my fingers like I was in a cheap movie. It really takes quite a bit of effort for me to visit you like this.”

  That was inter
esting, Tay thought to himself. He wondered if the dead had to pass through a terminal when they came back to earth? Sort of like traveling through a big international airport, a place where all the dead line up and wait for some idiot to x-ray their hand luggage. Okay, maybe not that.

  “Do you want me to ask why you are here, Mother?”

  “Yes, Samuel, that would be very polite of you.”

  “I am nothing if not polite, Mother. So let me ask this: why did you come to visit me tonight?”

  “I am here to warn you that you are in great danger, Samuel.”

  “And am I also going on a long journey, perhaps to meet a tall handsome stranger?”

  “Always with the jokes, Samuel. Is there anything you take seriously?”

  “Yes, Mother, I take a great many things seriously. But one of those things isn’t chatting with a ghost when I’ve eaten too much chili crab.”

  “I will say this only once, Samuel, and then you are on your own. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Mother. I’m listening.”

  “You are in mortal danger. You must carry a weapon at all times. Someone will try to silence you very soon and, if you’re not prepared to defend yourself, you will die.”

  “Then I would be able to join you, Mother. Wherever you are.”

  “I’m not quite ready for that yet, Samuel. I’m doing fine on my own.”

  “So you’re warning me I might die, not because you want me to live, but because you don’t want me to come there? Do I have that right?”

  “Of course, I want you to live, Samuel. I’m your mother. But I also want—”

  “You want to keep me here so that you won’t have to put up with me wherever you are.”