Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  With a few clicks of the mouse, he began his journey into the final chapters of Shelby Dwyer’s electronic life during the days before her husband vanished and was killed.

  He brought up the device’s options menu, as he’d seen Barbaric do just an hour before. He clicked the “e-mail sent” option and up popped copies of every e-mail that Shelby Dwyer had sent during the period recorded by the tiny hardware spy. He scanned the dates of the e-mails first, concluding that the device’s memory had retained about three days’ worth of data. Checking the time-stamps on each e-mail, he also concluded that they had all been sent during the day, before 5:00 p.m., and not at night.

  The sent e-mails appeared chronologically from top to bottom, with the most recent e-mail last.

  Deacon, please make sure the meeting agenda for next Thursday includes time for a brief overview of the Waymer Education project. It’ll come to the Foundation as a formal proposal next month. I at least want the board to be familiar with the idea of the project before they see the actual proposal. Thanks. Shel.

  The next half dozen were much the same, specific instructions to staffers at the Dwyer Foundation involving initiatives and projects underway. Starke was fascinated. She seemed to be someone in total control of Paul Dwyer’s charitable operations, hardly someone plotting his death. But how did the same personality coexist in a woman who apparently tolerated emotional and sometimes physical abuse from her hard-drinking whore of a husband?

  One e-mail went to an old friend who’d grown up with Starke and Shelby in Los Colmas. Starke recognized her e-mail address. She was one of the ringleader moms at the high school, and Shelby’s e-mail to her involved Chloe’s plans to attend a French Club outing at a creperie in Riverside.

  Starke scanned the rest. Nearly all involved the foundation. A few were personal e-mails to people whose names Starke didn’t recognize. They seemed to involve the mundane details of managing school schedules or children. One was an electronic birthday card Shelby had sent on Paul’s behalf to her husband’s mother. Another was a complaint to the manager of a local Neiman Marcus store involving a recently purchased pair of Christian Louboutin shoes.

  Nothing she e-mailed out during the three days prior to her husband’s disappearance seemed in any way relevant to the supposed affair her husband suspected, or to the circumstances surrounding his murder. On the other hand, nothing in the “e-mail sent” file suggested that Shelby had been reading or writing e-mails on her computer the night Paul first disappeared, as she claimed she’d been doing.

  Starke hit the “back” button and returned to the menu of icons, clicking on “e-mail received.” Dozens of e-mails popped onto the screen, almost all of them unsolicited spam, free stock tips, or scam appeals by unnamed African potentates offering money for Shelby’s assistance in transferring vast amounts into foreign bank accounts. CarbonCopy tracked their unceremonious deletion.

  Other than the back-and-forth correspondence with foundation staffers, only three of the received e-mails during the computer’s final days in Shelby’s office were unique or personal in nature. None of them seemed to suggest an ongoing romance or any sort of conspiracy to harm her husband. Again, though, the time stamps on those e-mails did not back up Shelby’s claim to have been working on e-mails at home late the first night Paul disappeared. If she had been working on this machine that night, she hadn’t been sending e-mails.

  The “back” button again took him to the menu of icons. Starke skipped around. He tried “file operations.” It was a listing of all the programs and documents that Shelby had used or accessed during her final three days with this computer. Starke couldn’t actually access the programs or documents, since she’d purged all that from the machine before she dumped it. Some of the program types were obvious—word processing, spreadsheet software, calendar, calculator. The document titles meant nothing to him. Shelby Dwyer had been a busy and industrious girl, no question, at least during the day.

  The “Online Chats” icon brought up nothing. She had electronically chatted with no one during the machine’s final three days in her hands.

  Her “Web History” log included about two dozen links. Some were obviously irrelevant—a link to www.neimanmarcus.com, probably regarding the shoe complaint, and a link to the local newspapers, probably to scan the day’s weather and headlines. But one link jumped out, the last one listed: https://angelquest.net/LoveSick/mygifttoyou/archive. He clicked the link, but his router wasn’t configured for Shelby’s computer. He wrote down the web address and double-checked to make sure he’d copied it correctly. He would check that one later on his own computer, just to see what it was.

  Starke returned to the CarbonCopy icon menu. The program’s default setting was to record a snapshot of the computer’s screen every ten minutes when the computer was in use. Starke clicked on the “scheduled screen snapshots” icon.

  He scrolled down the sequence of dozens of captured glimpses of Shelby Dwyer’s actual computer monitor, each one time-stamped to show when it was taken. Some were simply shots of e-mails in progress, sent or received, many of which he’d seen in full in the “e-mails sent” and “e-mails received” portions of the CarbonCopy log. None of them were from the night Paul disappeared. Others were of web pages she’d been visiting at that particular moment, and he could triangulate the “web history” links to the screen shots and account for most of those.

  The last screen snapshot, though, jolted Starke upright in his chair. He slid forward for a closer look at the tight, disturbing color image of Paul Dwyer’s face and neck. He had been turning his head violently as the snapshot was taken, blurring the image, but certain details stood out. Dwyer appeared to be bare-chested. His eyes were wide open. His nostrils flared and his mouth was twisted into a disturbing grimace. His elegant silver hair was an unruly mess.

  When Starke saw the time and date stamps on the image, he felt the earth move. The image had been captured at 11:14 p.m. on the first night Paul Dwyer didn’t come home, during the two hours Shelby said she was working alone on the computer in her office and wondering where her husband might be. That frozen image of her husband’s face, blurred by motion, apparently was one of the last things Shelby saw on this computer before she wiped its hard disk clean and disposed of the machine.

  Starke stood up, breathing like a man who’d just run a sprint. He crossed the room, turned, and looked at the image of Paul Dwyer again from a distance. He tried to match the cues on Dwyer’s face to the forensic evidence, and to other possibilities along the sweeping spectrum of human emotions. He couldn’t imagine another interpretation.

  The man was being tortured. On camera. While his wife watched on her home computer.

  Another thought: Shelby Dwyer had waited almost another twenty-four hours to say anything to police. And when she did, it was simply to report him missing.

  Starke crossed the room again and clicked his mouse, closing the window. He couldn’t look at Dwyer’s tormented face any longer. Even after it disappeared, he could see it lingering, if not on his screen, then alive like a ghost image on his retinas. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to erase what he’d seen.

  Starke sat down again. He moved his cursor to the last unchecked icon on the CarbonCopy menu. He clicked on “instant messages” and began to scroll through the keystroke transcripts of Shelby Dwyer’s final conversations, which she had apparently conducted anonymously as the avatar LonelyMrs. The conversations were all with the same person, LoveSick.

  Starke knew right away that Paul Dwyer had been right. His wife had a secret life online. It was immediately clear from the transcripts, too, that her late-night forays into cyberspace involved an online lover. Many of the conversations with LoveSick, recorded during the three days before Dwyer disappeared, were literate, graphic, and highly sexual, alternating narrations of desperately intimate acts. He scrolled to the middle of one.

  LoveSick: i kiss the inside of your thigh, once, twice, then bury my face in the soft fles
h there. i’ve never felt anything softer. i tell you so. you hook your other leg over my shoulder. ur scent excites me. i trace a path toward the intersection of your legs with the tip of my tongue. u moan as I kiss you there. what do you want? say it. i want to hear u say the words.

  LonelyMrs: Push. Right… there. I press myself to your mouth, and that pressure alone is enough to make me come. I buck and gasp and pull your hair. When I open my eyes, I see you smiling and can tell my weakness pleases you.

  Starke closed his eyes, remembering the last time he’d made love to Shelby Dwyer. They’d taken a bottle of Cold Duck up to Shepherdsen’s pond and swum naked on a moonlit night. They’d held each other in the cool water and the warm air, tried to dance in the mucky bottom of the shallows, hauled out a blanket and explored one another for hours. That was nearly twenty years ago. He’d made it his mission that summer to memorize every inch of her, to commit the sights and sounds and smells of her to a special place in his mind, forever. It was all still there. So was the sting of their parting conversation.

  Summer had ended with his love-drunk infatuation intact. Down deep, he knew Shelby’s ambitions went well beyond him. Still, he’d let himself imagine a future together, and it hurt when she began to pull away. No explanation; just weeks after that night at the pond, she stopped taking his calls. When they saw each other around town, she kept their conversations cold and distant. Months later, when he’d had enough Jack Daniels to finally demand an answer, he caught her off guard one evening as she left the small Los Colmas home-design firm where she was working. Shelby delivered a three-word answer freighted with so many levels of meaning and insult and pain that it left Starke gasping for breath in the parking lot.

  “I was pregnant.”

  He remembered the air leaving his chest in a rush. When he recovered, he reached for her hand. “Shel—”

  She’d pulled away. “And if you tell anybody, I’ll say it was rape.”

  Her threat hung in the air as Shelby walked away, and they never talked about it again. Within a year, she’d married Paul Dwyer. A year after that, they had a daughter. He didn’t hear from her again until two years ago, when she wrote him the condolence note about Rosaleen.

  Starke scrolled deeper into the log of conversations. LonelyMrs never said exactly where she lived in Southern California, but there were references to previous conversations. In some exchanges, Shelby seemed grateful for the chance to rant, mostly about her husband. She alluded to the often miserable details of her life—the indignities Paul heaped on her, the threats and intimidation, the egg-shell wait with Chloe every night as they dreaded him coming home drunk and angry. They’d clearly talked about those things before. Starke noticed that, at least in the three days logged by the CarbonCopy device, LoveSick revealed almost nothing. Just listened. To a woman as distraught and alone as Shelby, Starke imagined that willingness to listen might have been what attracted her most.

  Each conversation ended the same way, with LoveSick typing: i love u in a place beyond space and time. Sometimes Shelby replied with the same.

  Clearly, in terms of accumulated keystrokes, this was where Shelby Dwyer was spending her late-night computer time, talking to and making imaginary love to an avatar named LoveSick. Their back-and-forths went on for pages, artful descriptions of extended scenes, whispered desires, moments of explosive passion. It was the end result of an extended seduction, and theirs seemed like the kind of refined passion that Starke recognized from his years with Rosaleen, and which he’d never been able to equal again in life, certainly not during his own online forays. Those were just titillation, another way, along with watching screwball comedies, to get through his loneliest late-night hours. Shelby’s conversations with LoveSick were different. All of it virtual, none of it real, but apparently no less satisfying for either of the people involved.

  It was everything Shelby had said her marriage to Paul was not.

  Did their affair extend into the real world? Starke found nothing on the transcripts to suggest that it did. But he knew better than most that it probably didn’t matter.

  He found the second-to-last transcript. It was just a straight conversation. No rants. No professions of love. No sex.

  LoveSick: alone?

  LonelyMrs: As usual. Paul’s out. We both know what that means. Chloe’s in bed. Why?

  LoveSick: i have a gift for u.

  LonelyMrs: A gift?

  LoveSick: something you want more than anything. u told me so many times. i listened.

  LonelyMrs: OK, now I’m intrigued.

  LoveSick: it’ll change your life.

  LonelyMrs: Now THAT would be nice.

  LoveSick: hoped u’d see it that way. remember that as we move into this next phase.

  LonelyMrs: Stop talking in code. Next phase of what?

  LoveSick: of us.

  LonelyMrs: Meaning what exactly?

  LoveSick: https://angelquest.net/LoveSick/mygifttoyou

  LonelyMrs: I don’t get it. What’s that?

  LoveSick: webcam. it’s live. go there.

  Starke read the final words of Shelby Dwyer’s next-to-last conversation with her online lover. Already his skin was electric. The pieces of a grotesque and unimaginable puzzle fell into place. He closed his eyes, and the screenshot of Paul Dwyer’s tortured face popped back into his head, a snapshot of terror captured live via webcam. What else could it have been?

  The final entry in the CarbonCopy device’s circuitry apparently was logged as Shelby toggled between the webcam site and her messaging window. It was an explosion of blurted horror.

  LonelyMrs: No, no, no, no, no! Not this. Please God no!

  LoveSick: u wanted your life back. remember? u wished there was a way. there is. my gift to you. after this, we can be together, flesh to flesh.

  LonelyMrs: No, no, no, no, no. That was just words, not real. Please God no.

  The exchange ended with Shelby Dwyer at her keyboard, typing the last words she may have ever typed on this computer. By the next morning, she had wiped its hard drive clean and sold the machine into the Wild West of the electronics marketplace where Starke had found it. Now he was looking at Shelby’s final exchange with her patient online lover, the one who listened so well but revealed so little, the one she trusted beyond reason with details of her life offline—her real life.

  LonelyMrs: You’ve got no idea what you just did, you stupid, stupid fuck.

  Starke immediately booted up his own laptop and brought it from his bedroom into his kitchen. He set it beside Dwyer’s computer on his folding table. As soon as his wireless connection was active, he opened his Web browser and typed: https://angelquest.net/LoveSick/mygifttoyou/

  His apartment was always hot and damp. But that was not why he was sweating as he brought his pinky finger down on “enter.”

  45

  The link took Starke to a simple home page. It contained no images or graphics, only a single hypertext phrase in bright red letters: “My Gift to You.” Starke clicked it, and another page appeared. Same thing. Only this time, the red lettering spelled out a date—the date of the first night that Paul Dwyer disappeared. Starke could tell this was a site created for a single purpose in a secluded cove of the Internet, intended for an audience of one.

  Starke clicked the date.

  Another screen appeared, this one with two hypertext options, “Live Webcam” and “Archive.”

  The first link was dead. Starke moved his cursor to the other link and hoped, but it, too, brought nothing to the screen. Whoever had posted the video to the Web had since removed it.

  Starke sat back. Was that it, then? A dead end? He wished he knew, wished he was smarter about the mysterious world inside these humming boxes. He returned to the CarbonCopy device’s main menu and studied the options again. The only one he hadn’t yet tried was the last one listed: “Empty Cache.” It opened to a list of sequentially numbered files, arranged by date but grayed out. In the foreground was a prompt: “Are you sure
you want to delete these files?” Starke clicked on the “no” button, and the list of grayed-out files popped into high-contrast relief.

  Sure enough, Starke’s own keystrokes on Shelby’s computer were being tracked, which he found oddly reassuring. The record could come in handy if he ever had to explain his solo exploration of the machine in court. He scrolled deeper. After his own logged activity, there was a nearly four-week gap in dates. The sequence resumed on the date Paul Dwyer disappeared. Starke moved his cursor to the CarbonCopy log’s final entry for that date, and clicked.

  The screen suddenly filled with an image, and the video began. No introduction. No narration. Only a tight, static shot of Paul Dwyer lolling his head from side to side, trying to make sense of his circumstances. He looked like a seated man coming out of anesthesia.

  Starke leaned forward, felt himself tense.

  Behind Dwyer’s head was what looked like a solid metal post, about as wide as the basement support pillar in a typical suburban home. Almost no background was visible. Starke knew from Eckel’s autopsy that Dwyer’s wrists and ankles had been tied with hemp rope. He also got the same impression he had from the screen snapshot: Dwyer was not wearing a shirt. The bottom of the frame cut off at a point just below Dwyer’s prominent Adam’s apple, and no shirt collar was visible, only bare skin.

  “The fuck?” Dwyer said, lifting his head and looking around, trying to find his hands.

  Starke heard a movement off camera, the soft rustle of clothing, the scrape of a chair. Dwyer’s head bobbled, and he turned toward the sound.