But by the time she’d returned to her desk, she was trembling for a much different reason. Somebody had evidently reached into the computer from a distance and tampered with the files, somebody to whom access codes and passwords presented very little difficulty. She could think of only two people with the necessary expertise: Roger Blass…and Dave Ragusz. Ragusz was the likelier possibility.
Approach with caution.
Anxiously, she glanced at the wall clock. Only one more hour until Ted Gaine was off duty. Realizing that the minutes would pass agonizingly slowly if she didn’t at least try to fill them, she made a half-hearted effort to locate her notes for the third article in her lower desk drawer. But her mind wasn’t on rebuilding her file. It was working hard to get comfortable with the fact that an infuriating detective named Sergeant Gaine had somehow become the single most important man in her life.
When at last the clock read 4:30, Sandy shut down Frank’s terminal with an almost tangible sense of relief. She snatched up her handbag and set out for the subway, visualizing dinner with Ted Gaine at one of the restaurants in the convention corridor of the city. Front and John was directly opposite the Skydome and the CN Tower, and a stone’s throw from the Toronto Convention Center, Harborfront, and the city’s three major theaters. All the eating establishments in the vicinity tended to cater to people who had been on the go all day and needed a private corner, with or without atmosphere, in which to unwind.
And, Dio, how she needed to unwind!
Sergeant Gaine was waiting for her on the sidewalk, in shirt sleeves, beside a street vendor’s hot-dog stand. No, he wouldn’t, she told herself, feeling her stomach twist with apprehension as he turned and spoke to the vendor. No fast food, eaten standing up. Not today. Today she needed to sit in a quiet corner with him and feel his protective aura surround her as they talked.
To her immense relief, Gaine turned away from the hot-dog vendor and strode across John Street to meet her.
“How about the Rose Garden Cafe?” he suggested, continuing to walk with her along Front Street to the next traffic light.
She gave him a grateful smile.
Over iced tea and a fruit-salad plate, in a booth at the rear of the cafe, Sandy told him about her disappearing files, and about the threatening message that had been left in their place, and watched his expression grow darker and darker.
“It might have been a warning, rather than a threat,” Gaine pointed out grimly. “Either way, somebody with access to the magazine’s computer system is trying to scare you off. Possibly the same somebody who erased Bert’s case file on Mr. Vanish.”
Sandy’s next breath was a gasp. “Could it have been Mr. Vanish?”
“Pray that it wasn’t,” Gaine advised, gazing steadily across the table at her. “But whoever it was, he obviously knows that you’re pursuing Bert’s investigation. Do you have any idea who that might be, Alessandra?”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “Besides you, there’s Dave Ragusz.”
As she’d expected, Gaine shook his head vehemently. “It wasn’t Ragusz. I’d stake my badge on it.”
Not feeling up to an argument with him, Sandy decided to change tack. “Then how about Roger Blass? I’m sure he was the one who left me that ledger page yesterday morning—”
“Blass couldn’t have tampered with your files this afternoon, either,” said Gaine.
“Why not? He certainly knows his way around computers. And he’s listed as a source in Bert’s case file. Maybe we ought to go out to the Beaches after dinner and ask him a few pointed questions.”
Gaine exhaled wearily. “Alessandra, after you left Homicide this morning, Sergeant Wegner and I decided to track down your computer repairman. He wasn’t at his office or out on a call, so we went to his house to look for him.”
“And?”
Gaine reached across the table and gathered her suddenly clammy hands into his large, warm ones. “We found him dead, Alessandra.”
“Dead?” The word came out a horrified whisper.
“He was shot to death sometime last night.”
Icy fingers began dancing across her shoulders, making her shiver. “He was one of Bert’s sources and he came to me with information. If he was killed because he gave me that piece of paper…!”
“We don’t know that.”
“Mr. Vanish won’t settle for just silencing a witness. You told me that yourself. He’ll go after anyone the witness may have spoken to.”
The air was becoming too thick to breathe. Sandy glanced down at the table, startled to find the plate of untouched food in front of her. She felt her hands being squeezed and looked up again into Ted Gaine’s determined face.
“I also told you I would protect you, Alessandra, and I will,” he told her fiercely.
Yes, she thought, feeling the heat of his hands warm her all the way to her soul—and beyond, if she let it—if anyone could find a way to keep her safe from Mr. Vanish, it was Sergeant Ted Gaine.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It’s the least I can do for my partner. Now, how about those subfiles? Did you learn anything new last night?”
Sandy sighed. They were back to business. And he still hadn’t smiled at her. “Two things. First, I began thinking about the idea of a killer posing as the victim to confuse the investigation, and I went through the case reports for instances where the pathologist had set the time of death within a three-hour range but the victim had been seen alive close to the end of the range.”
“And?”
“I found five cases where that happened, including the Parmentier murder.”
Gaine nodded thoughtfully. “We may have the beginnings of something here. Go on.”
“I tagged them and put them back into the pile. Then I began reading through the miscellaneous subfiles. One of them describes all the possible ways that a client might contact Mr. Vanish, and appended to it I found a list of ten retrieval codes for the newspaper morgue at the Toronto Daily News. I became friendly with the librarian down there while I was researching my articles, so I called her up to ask which pages the codes referred to.”
Gaine’s eyes widened with alarm. “You did what? Alessandra, I thought we’d agreed not to interview any leads until we’d gathered all the information we could from the file.”
She frowned, puzzled. “I wasn’t interviewing a lead. And in case you’re interested, Sergeant, each of those pages was from the classified section, and each from a different edition of the paper.”
Slowly, his cheeks began to flush as he scolded in a whispered voice, “Listen, it’s one thing to sit at your kitchen table and make notes. It’s quite another to discuss them with an outside contact. What if the person who placed those ads also bribed the librarian to let him know if anybody expressed an interest in them? What if he would kill to prevent you from learning his identity?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she murmured, shamefaced.
“All right, maybe we lucked out and your librarian isn’t the pipeline to Mr. Vanish.” He sighed. “Just don’t talk to anyone else until we’ve wrung everything we can out of Bert’s file, okay? There’s no sense alerting Mr. Vanish before we’re ready for him.”
Paranoid, she thought bleakly. The only way to be ready for Mr. Vanish was to be completely and utterly paranoid.
One down, one to go. Smiling faintly to himself, he withdrew the parcel from his well-traveled Samsonite suitcase and unfolded the tissue paper. He wanted to be tall for tomorrow’s meeting.
He had ordered both the lifts and the shoes they fit into while disguised as a well-known Lebanese entertainer. It was the one and only time Mr. Vanish had knowingly impersonated someone he didn’t intend to kill.
Setting the shoes side by side in the closet, he took a large leather briefcase down from the shelf. This, too, he’d had specially modified. Slowly, he un
locked and opened the case. Then he lifted out the two removable trays, shook them each gently to level out the contents of their many small compartments, and placed them on either side of the briefcase. The trays had clear plastic lids, permitting him to see everything with one sweeping glance.
He’d spent years collecting these. The first tray held noses and chins, one per cubbyhole; the second displayed various scars and wrinkles, as well as an assortment of appliances for changing the slope of his cheeks or forehead, the angle of his ears, the shape of his eyes. At the bottom of the case, in fixed, larger compartments, lay a kit for applying facial hair, a selection of tinted contact lenses, and a complete range of masking foundations and shading pencils.
Unhurriedly, he selected the pieces of his disguise and placed them inside a second, smaller case, which already held a short-handled brush and a bottle of spirit gum. Then he closed and locked both cases.
Smiling to himself, he extracted the minicassette player from the special pocket he’d built for it inside his suitcase. Then he reached into his shirt pocket for the book of matches and placed it beside the telephone.
The number written inside the matchbook connected with an answering machine. “Hello,” said a woman’s prerecorded voice. “We can’t talk right now, but you may leave a message at the sound of the tone, and we’ll get back to you…”
Mr. Vanish had once attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate Charlie’s answering machine. All he’d been able to determine was that it wasn’t attached to a stationary telephone. Charlie was obviously a careful man. It was a trait Mr. Vanish couldn’t help but admire, because he, too, was careful. When the prerecorded message had ended, he brought the cassette player close to the mouthpiece of the receiver and pressed Play; and someone else’s voice, a voice surreptitiously recorded while Mr. Vanish had been studying an earlier problem, spoke into the telephone. “This is L’Estrange. You will meet my representative tomorrow morning at the usual time and place…”
Mr. Vanish permitted himself another brief smile at the irony of one machine talking to another with the voice of a dead man. Then he hung up the phone.
Chapter Seven
Wednesday, June 13, a.m.
Sandy had ordered a sandwich and a club soda to eat in, but it was a mistake. The snack bar was right across the road from the magazine office. As she sat toying with a lunch for which she had no appetite, she had a clear view of the Police Digest logo, reproducing itself across the bottle-glass windows on the second floor of the building opposite.
This morning had been the final straw.
First, there had been the police interrogation yesterday. Then her computer files had been sabotaged. Then Ted Gaine had told her about Blass’s death, and it had taken the rest of the evening for her to shake off the feeling that there was a murderer lurking around every corner. Gaine had no sooner delivered her to her front door than her mother had phoned, frantic because Tommy had yelled at her for driving away all his friends and then had packed his gym bag and run away from home. Sandy’s darkly churning thoughts had kept her awake most of the night, and she’d slept through her alarm and not arrived at work until nearly eleven o’clock this morning. When she’d stepped into Paul’s office to explain her lateness, he had lambasted her for carelessly shorting out her keyboard again, waving in her face an empty soft drink tin he’d scavenged out of her wastebasket as evidence.
And then something inside Sandy had snapped. She wasn’t sure whether she’d exploded then or simply caved in under all the pressure of the past few days. But somewhere inside her a dam had burst, releasing a torrent of resentment and fear. She couldn’t remember all the things she’d yelled at him, only that at the end of her tirade she had quit her job.
Or tried to. Paul hadn’t accepted her resignation. He had told her to go cool off and come back later. Maybe he would believe she was serious when she sent him a postcard from Hawaii.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to play with your food?” Sandy’s heart leapt as the familiar soft voice floated over her shoulder.
She glanced up just as Ted Gaine, wearing a charcoal-blue business suit, dropped into the chair opposite her. “Are you still upset about Blass, or is this something new?” he asked.
Sandy tried a smile and found her lips wouldn’t cooperate. With a sigh, she told him about the stormy scene in Paul’s office that morning. Life, she concluded, had become incredibly complicated in the past week.
Gaine nodded agreement. “I did try to warn you, Alessandra,” he pointed out. “But never mind that. How would you like to hear some good news for a change?”
She leaned forward expectantly.
“It’s possible that Blass was responsible for your disappearing files after all.”
“What? But I thought he—”
“We found out that he called in a lot of favors to get assigned to repair your keyboard on Monday. While testing the newly installed gear, he could have gained access to the system through a back door and installed a worm program.”
Sandy was lost. “A what? A where?”
“It’s like a little bomb ticking away inside the computer. Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet and urging her out the door. “Ragusz is setting up a demonstration for us right now.”
Ragusz?
Instinctively, she dug in her heels. “Sergeant, wait a minute. Are you really sure about this guy Ragusz? I mean, breaking into large systems and tampering with files is what he does best. What if you’re wrong and he was the one…?”
“Absolutely not,” Gaine declared.
Sandy glanced up just in time to see him nod to someone or something down the street before he turned his attention back to her. She tried to follow the direction of his nod, but saw only the usual lunchtime crowd milling randomly along the sidewalk. Then the traffic light changed and Gaine hurried her across the street to where he’d parked his car.
“How do you know he didn’t do it?” she persisted. “Bert suspected him, you know. There was a warning in one of the subfiles to approach Ragusz with caution.”
As they pulled out into traffic, she heard Gaine’s exasperated sigh. “Alessandra, do you know the meaning of the term ‘dragnet’?”
“Of course.”
“Think about it, and that will be your answer. Meanwhile, please trust me on this—Ragusz did not leave that threatening message in your file.”
Sandy opened her mouth to protest, thought better of it, and sank uneasily into the car seat.
A dragnet was a police roundup operation. Unlike a sting, in which police baited a trap and waited for the criminals to come to them, a dragnet involved going out and gathering up a group of suspects, to be sorted out afterward by the process of elimination. Gathering up and sorting out, just like trawling for fish. Or like the research she’d had to do for her series of articles, Sandy thought.
Suddenly she made the connection, and she sat up with a gasp. “He’s a cop?” she exclaimed.
“I didn’t say that,” said Gaine, poker-faced.
“If he’s a cop, then Dragnet is a front,” she mused, “probably for digging up information about suspects. Which proves nothing, Sergeant.”
“Oh?”
“You may be incorruptible, but others aren’t necessarily. Ragusz’s position of power—”
“Alessandra,” said Gaine, sighing, “who do you think taught Bert how to hide things inside the magazine computer? If Raggie were tapping into the Police Digest system—”
“He certainly wouldn’t let you know about it,” she pointed out sharply.
Gaine fell silent, his features contracting in a scowl. Fifteen minutes later, wearing his official police face, he formally introduced Sandy to Dave Ragusz, “the D. Rag in Dragnet”.
Ragusz grabbed her hand in his huge fist and declared heartily, “Well, I’m glad to see that two of you have gotten together at least.
Come into the back room—we’re all ready to start.”
The demo lasted half an hour. At the end of it, Sandy’s head was swimming with more information about modems, worm programs and back doors than she’d ever thought she wanted to know—but they were no closer to determining who might have been responsible for the computer tampering that had so unnerved her Tuesday afternoon. Ragusz’s explanations had actually widened the field of suspects.
“According to Ragusz, anybody with a telephone and a keyboard could have installed that worm program by remote control,” she said as they got back into Gaine’s car.
“Anybody with a telephone, a keyboard, access to the system, and sufficient knowledge to create the program in the first place,” Gaine corrected her. “But I hasten to point out that because of the timing delay, Roger Blass could have installed the program on Monday, setting it to run a day or even a week later, depending on when you called up the file that would trigger it.”
Sandy shook her head slowly. “Blass gave me the ledger page. That means he wanted to help the investigation. Why would he immediately turn around and try to frighten me into dropping it?”
“I only said it was possible, Alessandra.”
Abruptly, he fell silent. Sandy turned and saw him staring darkly through the windshield, and immediately felt her heart give an odd little twist. She sensed pain behind the stubborn set of his features. What was he thinking about now? If only she knew more about him!
Say something, she commanded herself. He’s comforted you often enough, after all.
But words wouldn’t come, and she didn’t dare try to put a hand on him. Tough, smart Sergeant Gaine would rebuff her immediately, making her feel small and foolish for even thinking he needed reassurance. If only they could have met in a different way. Bumped carts at the supermarket, been introduced by a mutual friend at a party…
He sighed and shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
He looked up, startled. “For what?”
“You went out of your way today to try to lift my spirits, and instead of thanking you I picked holes in your arguments.”
No Pain, No Gaine Page 11