by Peter Sexton
“I wasn’t serious,” Miranda said. “If I’d wanted to do that, I’d have just gone and done it and not involve you, not get you deeper into this.”
“It’s all right that you called me. Actually, I’m glad that you did. I haven’t stopped worrying about you since you left.”
Miranda wasn’t sure how to feel about his concern, this man whom she had met less than a week earlier. She hardly knew him, yet it felt right to trust him completely.
“Do you have any idea where my mother might be keeping the key?”
“Yes,” Lawrence said without hesitation. “I know exactly where it is.”
“Do you think she’ll let you bring it to me?”
“She’s not here right now, she’s at the gallery. She said she needed to check her messages and email, then talk to the gallery owners and arrange to take the next few days off.” Miranda waited through his long pause. “She’s really worried about you. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
Miranda considered the danger she was putting Lawrence into by asking him to help her. She could hang up right now and leave him out of it. He had no way of tracking her whereabouts. She knew she could get into the box without the key. But at what cost? Hasn’t there already been too much violence.
But then Lawrence said, “Just tell me where you want me to bring the key?”
Thirty-One
“I think we found the girl,” Puckett blurted, as he followed Anderson into his office.
“Tell me,” Robert Anderson said. He made his way around his desk but didn’t sit down. He glanced around for a moment, letting his eyes stop and hover on the empty desktop.
The detectives were gone now, finished with their preliminary investigation. The crime scene techni- cians were finished dusting the two offices for finger- prints. No one seemed to be wondering how Miranda August managed to leave the building alone carrying two heavy computers, as he had suggested as an explanation for why they were both currently missing.
Anderson finally looked up from the desk and stared at Puckett. Puckett’s nose was still quite red though it appeared to have stopped swelling. “Well?”
“Stone traced a couple of calls made to Gillian Blackwell’s home. The calls originated in Nevada.”
“He able to get the exact number?”
“Took some doing, but yeah. He got it.”
“Who does the number belong to?”
“That’s where it starts getting weird, man. When he dug a little the number came up as unlisted. Then when he dug deeper still, it came up as not assigned.”
“Not assigned?”
“Yeah. According to phone company records, the number hasn’t been assigned to anyone for more than ten years. Whoever made the calls must have been scrambling the signal or something. Whoever it is is trying really hard to make sure they can’t be tracked down. Who else would be doing that? It has to be the girl.”
Puckett’s voice didn’t sound as wet and garbled as it had earlier. He didn’t seem to be in as much pain.
“You have your nose looked at?”
“It ain’t broken.” Puckett paused. “Fuckin’ felt like she broke it, though. Doctor gave me some Percocet.”
“Good,” Anderson said, studying the young man’s nose a little closer. “So you think Miranda’s in Nevada?”
“Negative. We—”
“What?”
“We think she was in Nevada. But there was another call made to a post office box place in Oak Hill, California, not far from August’s home. We think she’s heading there.”
Anderson had considered this possibility; he pondered the fact that the videotape had not been found at Edward’s home. And also that Miranda didn’t seem to have it on her person.
But maybe she knows right where it is and is on her way to retrieve it, Anderson thought.
Thirty-Two
William Puckett parked beside the rented blue Toyota sedan occupied by Steven Trammel and Toni Lee, exited his own rental car, and let himself into their backseat. Lee didn’t turn to look at him, nor did she say anything or seem the least bit interested in who had just joined them.
The parking lot servicing Your Postal Partner appeared moderately busy. No one seemed to be paying them any attention.
“Any sign of the girl?” Puckett asked.
Trammel shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Sit tight,” Puckett said. “I’m going in to have a look around.”
“What’s your plan?” Lee asked, breaking her silence.
“I wanna make sure we don’t miss the girl if she shows.”
He got out of the car and walked away without another word. Soft jazz music played low within the establishment. The lone employee sat behind the counter reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. A textbook lay neglected on the countertop. Puckett approached her, presented his fake FBI credentials, and explained that he needed her help.
Three minutes later he climbed back into the car with Trammel and Lee.
“Well?” Lee asked, gruff, all business.
“I talked to the girl behind the counter. Gave her some names and asked if any of them belonged to people currently renting a box here.”
“And?”
“Edward August opened a box about two weeks ago.”
Toni Lee didn’t seem surprised to hear this.
Puckett continued. “The counter girl said there’s nothing in the box right now. Said she doesn’t know if there has been or not. But she only works here part-time. She needs to check with her coworkers in order to be sure. She’s gonna call my cell if she finds out anything or if anyone comes in to access the box.”
“How can we be sure she’ll call?”
“She’ll call,” Puckett assured Lee. “She thinks this is like a James Bond movie or something, thinks she’s gonna be doing some great service for her country, protecting us from terrorists or some shit like that.”
The interior of the car fell silent. Trammel continued to stare at the entrance to Your Postal Partner, while Lee continued to scan the parking lot. Puckett stared at the back of Lee’s head, fantasizing about drawing his Beretta 92, putting it right up to the back of her head, and blowing her fucking brains all over the windshield. See how tough the bitch would be then. Puckett smiled as he reached under his coat and stroked the grip of the pistol. He closed his eyes and let the fantasy play out as though he were watching it on the big-screen. He saw himself standing over the cold, dead body of Toni Lee, laughing as he kicked her repeatedly in the stomach, yelling, “Not so fuckin’ tough now, huh, bitch!”
So engrossed was Puckett in the self-gratifying pleasure of his fantasy that he barely heard Lee’s cell phone ring. She pulled it from her pocket and glanced at the LED screen.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. She opened the door and started to step out of the car.
“What the—? Where the hell are you going?” Puckett snapped.
Lee didn’t answer him as she continued out of the car, closed the door and walked a few yards away.
Trammel watched her for a time before he glanced back at Puckett.
“Where the hell’s she going?” Puckett asked.
“Beats me,” Trammel said. “She’s been even more quiet than usual. Like she’s dwelling on something.” He followed her with his eyes a bit longer. “I don’t like her. She makes me uncomfortable.”
“Well,” Puckett said, “the psycho bitch is lucky I didn’t cap her ass this morning. I was this close.”
Puckett didn’t have the opportunity to elaborate because Lee returned to the car. She pulled open the door and addressed Puckett.
“I need to leave,” she said. “You’re going to have to sit on this place without me.”
“What? Leave to where? What the fuck’s going on?”
Lee didn’t answer any of Puckett’s questions. Instead, she reached out and demanded his car keys. When Puckett refused, she said, “Don’t make me have to take them from you.”
Puckett made no move to
produce the keys or anything else. He stared at Lee for another moment before Lee closed the front passenger door and pro- ceeded to yank open the rear door. She reached into the car, grabbed Puckett by the front of his shirt and pulled him partially from the vehicle.
“Okay! Okay!” Puckett said, instinctively pro- tecting his nose with one hand. He produced the keys with the other hand and passed them over to Lee. She pushed him back into his seat and slammed the door shut. He watched as she climbed into his rental car and sped away.
Trammel said, “Maybe you should have popped a cap into the psycho bitch’s ass.” Then he laughed.
“You think you’re pretty funny?” Puckett snapped.
Trammel held a smirk on his face. Then he asked, “Where do you think she’s going?”
“Who fuckin’ cares? All I know is I’m getting pretty tired of playing babysitter.”
An hour after Lee had left Puckett and Trammel, there was still no sign of Miranda August. Inside Your Postal Partner, the young woman walked the last customer to the door, let her out, locked the door and switched the sign to CLOSED.
“Maybe we’re simply on a wild goose chase,” Trammel said. “Maybe Miranda isn’t planning to come here at all.”
“Right now it’s the best lead we have,” Puckett said, “so we stick with it. Let’s find a couple rooms for the night and be back here tomorrow before they open.”
They rode in silence for several minutes while Trammel navigated the city streets looking for a motel. Then Puckett said, “This’ll give me time to try and figure out where the hell Lee went.”
Thirty-Three
The 8mb flash drive Miranda had left with Sarah containing the information from Anderson’s comput- er was filled nearly to capacity. Most of the files were simply named by date. Sarah selected one at random, opened it, and found herself staring at an email file. She read the message and found nothing of signi- ficance. She closed this file, opened and read another. Again, nothing. She repeated this process several times over the next hour, each time finding nothing of interest or use.
Sarah suddenly realized that her house had fallen quiet. The music she had been listening to had ended some time earlier, so she went to the stereo and popped in another CD. The first haunting notes of Bob Dylan’s “Love Sick” from Time Out of Mind filled the room as she returned to the computer. In her chair once again, Sarah scanned the file index once more, this time focusing on dissimilar file names, anything that didn’t appear to belong. She found three.
She opened the first one: EXPERIMENT IV.
“Whoa,” she said when the document came up on the computer screen. A quick glance at the status bar along the bottom of the screen told her there were two hundred and twenty-seven pages in this particular document. She recognized the format of the information immediately: it was another list, exactly like the sample Miranda had shown her.
Sarah read one of the dates from the page taken from the locked desk drawer, then executed a search for it on this particular file. The search lasted only a moment and came up with a match. She searched for another date on the sheet and found that one, as well.
“Hot damn,” she said to the empty room.
She studied the list a moment longer before closing it, scanning the index again and opening another file, this one named SHIPMENTS.
Again, she recognized the format of the infor- mation in the file. Though these lists were nowhere near as long as the list of dates, these, too, were lengthy. A random check of files confirmed that the information on the sheet Miranda had provided earlier could be found on this electronic file. And there was something else, something that confirmed Sarah’s earlier assumptions. Each of the two lists in this file contained a single-word heading: one said NATURE’S, and the other FABER’S.
“Fuckin’ A!” Sarah muttered to herself, grinning. “I knew it.”
But it was a short-lived celebration, because there still remained the fourth list, the list that had thus far remained a mystery to her. She closed the file named Faber’s and scanned for another, scrolling so fast down the list of names that she feared she might miss it if something was there.
Sarah finished checking the drive without having found anything else that appeared promising. She dragged the scroll-bar back to the top and started again. Halfway through this second run she stopped. It wasn’t a one-word file name like the other two lists, but a date like most of the other files. The familiarity of the date is what caught her eye. The file name read: 12/23/99.
At first glance this file appeared to be the pay-off Sarah had been hoping for. It couldn’t be a coin- cidence. It had to have something to do with the message Edward August had written at the bottom of the sheet of paper Miranda had found.
“Here we go,” she said, as she double-clicked the file name.
She had expected a list similar in appearance to the unidentified list on the sheet Miranda had given her; she had expected the last piece of the puzzle to present itself. But her double-click was rewarded with a dialogue box prompting her to input a password.
“Shit!”
She stared at the screen, instantly annoyed with the blinking cursor, which seemed to be highlighting her failure, mocking her with its blinking. In the background, Bob Dylan was singing about trying to get to heaven before they closed the door. And the computer screen continued to beckon for a password.
Sarah started with the obvious:
EARTH’S.
Password incorrect. Please try again.
“Bet your ass I’m gonna try again,” Sarah told the screen.
FABER’S.
Password incorrect. Please try again.
“Shit!”
After trying both names without apostrophes and receiving the same result, she racked her brain for more possibilities. She tried August, Miranda, Randi and Caffeine. Still no luck.
Sarah knew she could always get in through a backdoor, hack into the system and bypass the pass- word security of this document. Any system could be penetrated, some far more easily than others, but it always made things easier when you could simply figure out the password. It certainly saved time, and Sarah sensed time was definitely of the essence.
Then she remembered the significance of the date in question. That was it. Had to be.
Sarah took a deep breath, held it without real- izing she was doing so, and typed:
MAREN.
Pay dirt. The folder opened to display an array of document icons. A quick scan told Sarah they were all word processing documents.
She double-clicked the first one and waited the few moments while the application launched and brought the document up on the screen. It was an inter-office memorandum addressed only to Edward August and sent by Robert Anderson. The subject line read: Potential Complications.
Sarah read through the memo, trying to get a sense for the subject matter. It appeared that Anderson was asking Edward what effects a larger concentration of caffeine would have on the children consuming the product. Suppose we were to double the quantity.
As Sarah was closing the document to open another, she noticed the line at the bottom of the memo that instructed the recipient, in this case Edward August, to delete after reading. She stared at the words for a moment, then proceeded to close the document and open another.
The second memo was a response to the first. Edward August insisted that altering the caffeine levels already discussed and approved would undoubt- edly produce deadly results.
Sarah opened more memos and read through each of them as rapidly as possible before reading some- thing that nearly stopped her heart.
Assuming a higher concentration, by employing your process, would the presence of the caffeine remain un- detectable?
“Oh my God!” Sarah muttered as she stared at the open document. “They actually meant to kill all those children.”
She sat staring at the computer screen, unable to completely believe what she was reading. Up to this point, Sarah had been clinging to the possib
ility that this entire ordeal had been one great big horrible mistake that they were desperately trying to cover up. She checked the date on the memo: June 21, 2001. Thursday. She reached up and closed the document.
“Bastards,” she said.
Sarah believed that if the people behind this madness truly suspected Miranda had this infor- mation, copies of all these documents, she was in more danger than she realized. Sarah pushed herself away from her desk and rose to her feet with so much force that she sent the chair rolling back into the wall. She crossed the room, paced back and forth a few times. She needed to reach Miranda now.
She hurried back to her desk, picked up her cell phone, and called her friend. The call went immedi- ately to voicemail. Without identifying herself or Miranda, she simply instructed Miranda to call back as soon as she received the message.
Sarah proceeded to scan the remaining files. If she couldn’t get in touch with Miranda, she would at least keep going through this disk and figuring out what more she could.
After reading through seven more emails, Sarah discovered another nugget of troubling information. According to this last message, a delivery of some thirty thousand “altered” units would reach their destination on July 27, 2001. Sarah calculated the days mentally. That gave them less than a week to figure out what was going on and stop it. However, neither the actual destination address nor the intend- ed targets were mentioned.
“What are you fucking people doing?” Sarah said aloud. “Units of what? Tainted baby food? And to where?” She had to figure out the intended des- tination if they stood any chance of stopping it from happening.
Six days.
And Miranda must have information that could prevent them from carrying out their plans. That’s why they’re after her. That’s why they’re desperately trying to stop her. Sarah picked up her phone and tried Miranda again, and again it went directly to voicemail.
“Damn it! I need to talk to you.”