Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “My father gave it to me.”

  “Your father gave you an airgun?”

  “Well, I sorta borrowed it, really. He’s got a collection. He buys ’ em on eBay. Replicas of legendary guns.”

  “Doesn’t he know it’s missing?”

  “I strongly doubt it. He’s got a lot.”

  “What’d you say he did?”

  “Real estate.”

  “In Florida?”

  “Florida. The Carolinas. He’s got some property in Colorado, Wyoming. You want to hold it?” he said, extending the gun out to him.

  Jim shakes his head no, averting his eyes from the weapon. “What do you need that thing for anyway?”

  “You spend any time in East Palo Alto?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you spend any time in EPA you’re going to need a piece. Even if it’s just for show.”

  “What’s in EPA?”

  “Whatever shade of brown I want.”

  “Charming.”

  “Don’t you worry about what’s in EPA, Mr. P. You worry about what you’re going to do about the present predicament.”

  “You tell me,” he says, because he knows he’s going to tell him anyway.

  Watkins smiles at his pre-emptive strike.

  “How much do you think he knows?”

  Jim considers lying. But as soon as he hesitates, he knows he’s lost; Watkins won’t believe him and he’d soon be in another headlock. Fuck him, he thinks. The doc knows a lot. We’re fucked. We’re going to get caught. But it’s not my goddamn fault. I wasn’t the scumbag, STD-infected motherfucker. So let’s see what you do with this: “He asked me whether I knew anybody who had an STD.”

  Watkins doesn’t say anything at first. He just stares at him in what appears to be shock, and Jim smiles inside. Then Watkins explodes. Clenching his fist and stomping his boot, he shouts, “Dammit. Dammit fucking all.”

  “I don’t know how he knows,” he decides he’d better interject. “She—Kristen—must have said something to someone at some point. I don’t know. I told him I didn’t know anybody. He seemed to buy it.”

  “Fuck me,” Watkins says. “Fuck me with a drain pipe. Did he say anything else?”

  “No. Those were the two main things. He wanted to know whether I’d seen her with anybody else and whether I knew of anybody who had a VD.”

  “What’d he ask first?”

  “About the VD.”

  “And what was his tone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was he being pissy about it? Or was he just asking?”

  “Just asking. I swear, I don’t think he knows who was involved. He’s got a clue, but he’s just fishing.”

  Watkins starts pacing back and forth in the small space that’s afforded him, muttering a mix of profanities while hosting his own question-and-answer session. “How much does he know? If he’s asking specific questions like that, too much . . . and who knows what Mr. P. really told him . . . did he walk out of here with the answer he was looking for? Depends on how P. said what he said . . . subtle nuances to take in to consideration . . . how much time?”

  He goes on like that for several minutes. It’s pretty disconcerting to watch. Watkins pacing and ranting, waving around the gun a little too liberally even for a fake, lost in his own world. And then he stops all of a sudden, pivots toward him and asks, “How long was he in here?”

  “I don’t know. Not long. Maybe seven, eight minutes max.”

  “Did he touch anything?”

  Jim starts to say no, but then he catches himself and exclaims excitedly, “Yeah, he did actually.” He goes to the dresser. “This photo,” he said, reaching for the frame.

  Watkins grabs his wrist, stopping his hand short of its destination. “Show me where. Did he touch the frame or the glass?”

  He doesn’t know exactly where. Maybe both. He wasn’t really watching. He just remembers him picking it up and looking at it.

  “Do you have a magnifying glass?”

  “No.”

  “Well, go to the bookstore and get one.”

  “Right now? I’ve got a final to study for.”

  “If you don’t go right now, it may be the final final you study for.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “Me being a fucking genius,” he says. “I’ve got a brilliant idea.”

  “What sort of idea?”

  “I knew a girl once, back in Florida. She had this guy who liked her a lot.”

  “So?”

  “So he sent her a pizza. A special pizza that had all these funky toppings on it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like rose petals. Like candied hearts. You know, those little Redhots. Sappy shit.”

  Jim’s still puzzled.

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “You’ll see. Just go get the magnifying glass.”

  36/ THE PIZZA

  May 11, 2007—9:24 p.m.

  THE CALL COMES IN LATE, AROUND 9:30 THAT SAME FRIDAY. Madden’s at home, helping his son set up a model roller-coaster in the basement, when his wife knocks on the door to tell him his cell phone is ringing. She hands him the phone at the top of the stairs.

  “Detective Madden?” he hears a woman’s tense voice ask.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Samantha Pinklow,” she says, a little out of breath. “Carrie’s mom. I’m sorry to disturb you, but you said if anything came up we should call.”

  He feels a little butterfly flutter in his stomach. “Yes, Mrs. Pinklow, what can I do for you?”

  “Someone delivered a pizza to our home a few minutes ago.”

  “OK,” he says, not knowing quite what to make of that.

  “For starters, we didn’t order a pizza.”

  “So you don’t know who delivered the pizza?”

  “No. It just . . . well . . . appeared.”

  Carrie, she explains, peeked out the front door to check why their dog was barking, and there it was, a large pizza box, sitting on the welcome mat. There was no note, no bill, nothing except the box. They thought maybe it was a wrong delivery.

  “Is there a pizza inside?” he asks.

  “Yes, but it has an unusual set of toppings.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can you please come over? We didn’t touch it. Carrie, she’s hysterical.”

  “Mrs. Pinklow, what’s on the pizza?”

  “Horrible things,” she says. “Please come. And hurry.”

  About ten minutes later, Madden is on his haunches, looking down at the mystery pizza. Standing next to him is Bill Kroiter, who’d turned up a little before he had, after getting a similar call from Samantha Pinklow.

  Holding the lid open with a ballpoint pen, Madden stares down at the custom-made pie. He’s seen some strange things in his time, but this has to be one of the odder pieces of evidence he’s going to have to book. Indeed, it’s a pizza—cheese with tomato sauce all right—but instead of pepperoni, mushrooms or peppers, this pie has a set of toppings you’d order from a hardware store, not a pizza parlor. He counts a total of six toppings on eight slices: Two X-Acto knifes, mirroring each other on opposing slices; wax lips with six staples punched into them haphazardly; five pieces of clear, broken glass of varying sizes; scattered red rose petals (on two slices); a few little mounds of a powdery substance that could be detergent or Ajax, and what appears to be pieces of computer memory modules. Three or four sticks have been broken up and sprinkled on a portion of the pizza, whose container bears the markings of Round Table Pizza, a west coast chain.

  The message is as clear to him as it is to Bill Kroiter: Remember to forget.

  “She say whether it was warm when they first opened it?”

  “I don’t think they checked,” Kroiter says. “But I bet it was ordered hours ago.”

  Madden nods. He looks at the pie again, then back up at Kroiter. The guy looks keyed up yet haggard at t
he same time, with bright, eager eyes that have dark moons under them. Before Cogan had been arrested, he’d been calling Madden almost daily for updates. But in recent days they hadn’t spoken, and he hadn’t seen him in person for three weeks, maybe longer. The wait for a more final resolution seems to have taken a heavy toll on him. He probably hadn’t been sleeping and he guesses his marriage is suffering. If the marriage was strong before a tragedy of this magnitude, it could be sustained; it might even get stronger. But if there are weak links—and Madden has heard there are—chances are they wouldn’t make it another year, especially with their remaining kids off at school. He feels bad for him.

  “Well,” he says, “I’ll bring it in and have one of the guys canvass the Roundtables in the area, and we’ll see if we can track our delivery boy down.”

  “Somehow I doubt he paid with a credit card,” Kroiter remarks, and just then Carrie appears in the doorway, with her mother at her side. She has an anxious look to her, and her eyes are puffy from crying.

  “Hi, Carrie,” Madden says. “You OK? Got a little scare, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she says quietly.

  “You have any idea who might be behind this?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Anybody been bothering you at school? Anything like that?”

  Again, she doesn’t respond audibly. She just shakes her head.

  “Well, we’re going to take a whack at seeing if we can find out where this came from and who might have delivered it.”

  “I saw him,” she says suddenly.

  They all look at her.

  “Saw who?” he asks.

  “Dr. Cogan. A few days ago. At the Borders in the New Varsity.”

  “You saw him?” repeats Madden, a little dumbfounded. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Yeah, we talked.”

  “You talked?” Now he sounds truly flabbergasted. Why hadn’t she told them right away?

  “Yeah, it was casual. Like a conversation.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Lots of things, I guess. About Kristen. About that movie The Thomas Crown Affair. About why he got divorced. Stuff like that.”

  She says everything nonchalantly yet she knows very well the impact her words are having.

  “Did he threaten you?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. I mean, it was just an accident we were both there. He even said something about how he wasn’t supposed to say anything to me.”

  “You think it’s him?” Kroiter says, asking what they’re all wondering.

  Madden doesn’t answer right away. He’s tired and doesn’t know what to think except that he finds the whole situation extremely disconcerting. It never ceases to amaze him what people are capable of doing when they’re in a tight spot—so sure, Cogan could have sent the pizza. But it just as easily could be a couple of kids from Kristen’s high school pulling a stupid prank. Or more likely, someone who wanted them to think Cogan had sent the pizza.

  “I don’t know, Bill. I just don’t like the blatancy of it.”

  “I know what you mean,” Kroiter says.

  37/ THE MOTHER TERESA OF HACKERS

  May 12, 2007—2:06 p.m.

  THE NEXT DAY, HE CALLS BURNS AT HOME TO TELL HIM HE’D booked a menacing pizza the night before. It was disturbing the peace in front of Carrie’s home.

  “What the hell?” Burns says after he finishes the recap. “You think he sent it?”

  “If I were a betting man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gotta say it doesn’t feel like his style. It’s a little too creative. But I got a partial off one of the pieces of glass and it’s a likely match.”

  “So it’s him.”

  “Maybe. The thing is, it’s the only print we found on any of the contents in the package. There’s nothing on the razors, the computer chips. I got a couple of nice thumb prints off the outside of the box, but I bet they’re from one of the guys at the pizza shop.”

  “So you’re saying that whoever put the package together was being too careful to leave even a nice little partial.”

  “Seems odd, doesn’t it?”

  “The whole thing seems odd,” Burns says.

  There are other facts to consider: In the last forty-eight hours none of them had logged Cogan in the vicinity of a Roundtable and he’d been at home yesterday at 8:30 p.m., the last time Billings checked up on him. But they didn’t have him nailed down at the delivery time, which was a problem.

  Even so, Madden thinks it doesn’t make sense. What would Cogan hope to accomplish by sending a menacing pizza to the girl’s home? There were other, less obtuse ways to spook her. Like through the media. Two short articles had appeared in the local editions of the Mercury News and The Chronicle, but the case had yet to attract major publicity. Dupuy had told Crowley that her client preferred it that way—both for his sake and for the families involved. But at a certain point, they would have to resort to more hardball tactics, go to a scorched-earth approach. “I will sensationalize this thing if I have to, Dick,” she’d warned.

  “Maybe Kroiter delivered it,” Burns suggests. “You think of that?”

  He actually had. But the same question applied. What did it gain him? More heat on the doc perhaps. Yet, at the same time, if his ruse were uncovered, it would totally jeopardize the case. The guy would have to be nuts. That wasn’t totally out of the question, but still, it was a stretch.

  “Where are you now?” Burns asks.

  “I’m outside of a Starbucks. The Santa Cruz Ave. one in downtown Menlo. He’s inside with those kids.”

  “The next-door neighbor?”

  “Yeah, and his friend.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I’m not sure. They’ve got a laptop. They’re hanging out. Maybe they’re playing a game. I can’t tell.”

  “How long you going to keep this up, Hank?”

  “It’s going to break, Burnsy. I got a feeling. It’s going to break soon.”

  “How soon?”

  He knows what Burns is really asking. He’s tired of the flying-under-the-radar act.

  “We’ll talk to Pete and Crowley on Monday, OK? We’ll lay out what we’ve got and see how they want to proceed.”

  “Hank?”

  “What?”

  “You think he purposely gave Billings the slip the other day? You get any indication he knows he’s being followed?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for all we know, he wants us to follow him.”

  May 12—1:40 p.m.

  “OK, here’s the deal,” Josh says, placing the empty envelope next to Cogan’s laptop on the small, square café table. “She says she wants you to put the thousand bucks in the envelope, then I walk over to FedEx and send it to the address on the envelope. When she sees the receipt, she’ll hack in.”

  Lifting an eyebrow, Cogan looks at the name. If it weren’t neatly typed, he would have thought it was misspelled. Diafongon Babdo is the name and he or she lived in Mali, Africa.

  “You’re serious? I’m mailing a thousand bucks to someone in Mali?”

  “She sponsors some kids over there,” Josh explains. “This is the teacher at the local school. She says over there a thousand dollars is the equivalent of twenty thousand here, maybe more. It’s really a lot of money. You’d really be doing someone a lot of good.”

  “She doesn’t want anything?”

  “She wants you to pay for her coffee.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What is she, the Mother Teresa of hackers?”

  “Something like that. Except she’s an atheist.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he says, truly awed that such a person, especially one so young, exists. “And she thinks she can do it?”

  “She knows she can get in. She’s done it before. She just doesn’t know whether she
can find the info you’re looking for.”

  He glances in her direction. The virtual teammate he only knows by the call handle Vas (short for Vaseline) is sitting in the flesh at a table on the other side of the café with Steve, who would be assisting her in her little extraction. The Starbucks they’re in is one of the largest in the area and, since it’s a weekend afternoon, is more crowded than usual. Between the wood-paneled columns and all the patrons, he’s having a hard time getting a good look at her. Petite, with a wide face, dark-rimmed glasses and brown, medium-length hair pulled back in a ponytail, she reminds him of the actress Janeane Garofalo—from a distance, anyway. She’s older than the boys, but only by a year; she’s a junior at their high school.

  Some of the patrons are shoppers taking a break from store browsing, but a fair number are high school and college kids who’ve made the place a hang out. Where’s his shadow? Madden—yes, it has to be Madden this time—is sitting outside in his car, wearing sunglasses and an A’s baseball cap turned around backwards. He’s drinking his own coffee and reading a newspaper. How long will he remain out there? Or better question: How long will they be in here?

  “She’s not going to get in trouble?”

  Josh laughs. “Ted, I’m telling you, she’s not even going to use her computer. It’s untraceable. Don’t be a wuss.”

  “It’s traceable to some poor schmuck.”

  “Schmucks,” Josh corrects him. “She’s going to use every computer that’s logged onto the Net in here.”

  This Starbucks, like most of the others in the area, offers broadband wireless Internet access, and a handful of customers, he among them, have laptops perched on their tables and are surfing the Web. With a little luck and a lot of help from a rogue program that Vas and a friend had created as “a goof,” each one of them would soon be sharing a piece of their bandwidth to hack into the university’s allegedly iron-clad network and then, hopefully, the student records at the infirmary, which he’d confirmed were computerized.

  “I hope you’re right,” he says and just then he hears a chime alerting him that he has an instant message.