Bodine was silent. He looked around the room.
“Okay, Mister Mysterioso, gimme a clue.”
“I’m looking for something little and round. A spy cam.”
Ray looked. “What—they were watching me sleep? When did they install it? Karl with computers is weird enough. He’s into spy stuff now?”
Bodine shook his head. He pointed to the laptop, which was open on the bed. “When they delivered that dead cat, they also sent emails.”
“Which woke me up. I was sleeping then too. Let me check.” Ray picked the computer up and looked. “There’s a new email. But it’s from five minutes ago, so it didn’t… It’s just spam. The same one came before.”
lazy susan, votive candles
Ray said, “Shit. The one before said ‘Susans’ plural. This is singular.” He opened it. There was no text, just a photo. It looked like a copy of the one pinned to the mannequin, only whole and in color. It was Susan’s face, all right, but not an expression he’d ever seen. A hand clutched a red cover to her throat. Ray set the computer so Bodine could see, and they both leaned over it.
Bodine said, “Susan?”
“Yes.”
“A young Susan. Looks like she did last time I saw her.”
“What’s that look on her face?”
“Not exactly lazy.”
“Scared?”
“Maybe.”
Her long dark hair was a mess, splayed over a pillow. “She’s in bed.” Ray pointed to an ornate headboard at the top of the picture. “This is the same period as the furniture in The House.”
“Victorian. I don’t know. So’s your couch upstairs, and this house.”
“True. But that red cover….” Ray found the cat video in his downloads and hit play.
Bodine said, “The cover looks the same. Though Karl was so fussy. It’s hard to imagine him having the same bedspread for thirty years.”
Ray stared at Susan’s face. It took him a moment to put it together. “Oh, God. I had nightmares, imagining this place. The Bedroom.” Ray gave it Karl’s funny intonation.
“The Bedroom?”
“Karl’s. That’s his bed. I never told you. Karl was …fucking Susan near the end. I guess I was kind of ashamed to tell you.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, man.”
“I assumed he was doing it in The Backroom, where he dosed people with acid.”
“I knew things were getting funky, but, Jesus. He did that to you?”
“Yeah. In pitch dark. It was after you left. But there wasn’t any bed there. It was the last time I tripped before you gave me that Owsley last week.”
“I never would have done that if I’d known.”
“It’s water under the bridge. But Karl took her up to his bedroom. Look at that face again.”
“She’s tripping her brains out.”
Ray said, “Exactly. He dosed her up there.”
“Susan wasn’t much into drugs, if I remember.”
“She wasn’t into drugs at all.”
This concrete reminder of Susan and Karl’s betrayal pitched him back to the day her trip must have happened. He’d spent it hoeing in the garden. If only he’d known. Then what? What difference would it have made? He pictured himself going inside with the hoe, upstairs, into The Bedroom. Ray shook the memory away and scrolled down the laptop screen. The caption was “She’s burning again.”
Ray flashed on Susan in the car, Susan on the roof in that dream. “The picture was on fire. Susan died in a fire.” He looked at Bodine. “It was seeing Susan’s obituary that started all this.”
“So Karl must have seen it too.”
“Not just that. She was coming from visiting him when she crashed. Which still doesn’t make sense.”
“Not yet. But I think we’re getting there.” Bodine scrolled the email up to the picture and studied it.
He had that odd look again. Ray said, “What is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’ll come later. The question is, where is that damned spy cam?” He closed his eyes. Opened them and grabbed the laptop. “Where was this when you were sleeping?”
“Right here on the bed.”
“Wait.” Bodine clicked around on the keyboard.
Ray leapt back. “Oh fuck!”
He and Bodine were staring from the screen. Looking at themselves, like it was a mirror, in real time. Bodine pointed to a little dark circle above the screen. “There’s the cam. This is a light that’s supposed to come on, to warn that the computer is recording video, but on this model it can be disabled remotely from another computer. Which can then see this.” Bodine pointed at himself on the monitor, and the image pointed back.
“They’re seeing us now!”
“No. Whoever set that fire is on their way back to Karl’s. And I’m about to poke their eye out.” Bodine popped the battery from the laptop. He pulled a little set of tools from his pocket, used a tiny screwdriver to tweeze the cam from above the screen and pocketed it. He tweezed a tiny microphone from the computer, too. “They’re blind now. Deaf too.”
“So they were also listening?”
“I’m afraid so. Not to get too personal, but do you always sleep with the laptop?”
“Yeah. I like to read the news last thing at night.”
“And in the morning?”
“First thing when I wake up.”
“They’ve been doing this for a while.”
“Watching me in bed?”
“Yep. Today as they carted that monstrosity in here they kept an eye on their phone. Soon as you woke up, so would your computer. And they’d see. They heard it crash on the floor first.”
“They heard the real crash, because they were downstairs setting that thing up.”
“Yes. Then you woke the computer, and they saw the virtual you. And saw you go in the shower. And heard you in there. They deliberately slammed the door so you’d come down and see their work before it burned your house down. At least they weren’t trying to kill you.”
“I suppose.”
“I must hand it to the asshole who’s doing this. It’s some serious hacking.”
“How did this spy cam get in my computer?”
“I’ll bet if I check that original Lazy Susan email that it has an attachment.”
“How’d they get in the house?”
Bodine led the way down to the back door. He pulled a credit card from his wallet and a moment later they were inside again. “Like that. This lock is ancient.”
Bodine helped Ray shovel the mess into a couple of garbage cans.
Ray’s leather jacket was ruined. “This is the only winter coat I have.”
“Why am I not surprised? I have something that should fit you. And let me get rid of this crap for you.”
“Hey, you took care of the dead cat too.”
Bodine waved his hand. “Maybe I can put it in the museum? No. It’s too awful. And stinky. I’m going to get my car. You can come.”
“I’ll be all right.”
Ray sat at the edge of his desk, waiting for Bodine to return. His chair was ruined. He’d have to buy a new one.
When did the camera hack become active? Had they been watching him write? His breath came in short gasps. His imagination let loose. He saw his oculus upstairs, his eye on the world, shrink down to the plastic eye on his computer. He recalled the dream when it rained marbles and he ran from the Eye of God. He’d had it right. They were watching him. Literally. And he should run.
He was about to. The energy which had coursed through his hands, which had him writing, no matter how badly Karl wanted him to stop, had over the last minutes spread into arms and legs.
He wasn’t running from them. He was going to run after them. He couldn’t stay here and just let them get him.
And if
they saw him through the eye of his computer, he needed to see them. Not with his computer, or by writing. Those were new for him. He needed to see using his old, reliable tool—the naked eye he was born with.
He needed to see, because he needed to know. The questions swirled in his head again—where’s Karl, and what’s he doing? Does he have a group, and, if so, who’s in it? He couldn’t retreat to the writing anymore. It was done.
He’d known for a while what he had to do.
Bodine came in the back door carrying a coat and hat. “These are pretty warm.” He glanced at Ray and said, “What?”
“I’m going to The House.”
“And doing what?”
“I’m going to find out who’s there.”
Bodine slowly nodded. “Okay. But I’m coming too.”
“No. This is my business. I’m just planning to look. Then I’ll come right back, and we can figure out what to do.”
“You’re not confronting anybody.”
“No!”
“How long are you going for?”
“Long as it takes.”
“Well, you’ll need some things.”
They loaded the garbage cans into Bodine’s car and drove them to his house. Mingus came out and went crazy sniffing. Bodine said, “This shit is going to the dump first thing, or I’ll have bones all over the place.”
They sat in the office. Bodine said, “What’s your plan?”
“I need a place to spy from where I can’t be seen.”
“Given the lay of land as I remember it, that’s going to be tough.”
“Yeah.” Ray pointed to the closet. “You have maps in there?”
“Of course. But there’s one right here.” He pointed to his main computer. He sat at it and pulled up Google Maps as Ray looked over his shoulder. “First I have to find The House. It was close to that little town, what was it?”
“Piedmont.”
“That makes sense. Piedmont means ‘foot of the mountain.’” Bodine searched. “Here it is. All this map has is street and town names. I’m going to the US Geological Survey site.”
Bodine opened another map in a new window. “This is more useful. These contour lines are every twenty vertical feet. Houses appear as little squares.” As he scrolled around, he pointed. “Here’s Piedmont. And a road headed east. See this square icon with a flag on it? That’s the church we turned past. Below it, to the south, the contour lines bunch up in a band extending east to west. That’s the escarpment below the plateau. So if I scroll to the west, here’s our dirt road, snaking up the escarpment. At the top of it, the contour lines bunch together so they almost make a thick black line. That’s the cliff at the top of the escarpment. Counting contour lines, it’s a hundred feet tall. See the gap in the road? That’d be that slot. And this little square is …The House.”
The dinky icon didn’t do Karl’s place justice.
Bodine pointed at symbols on the map as he spoke. “This crossed-pick symbol right next to The House, to the east is the old quarry, where the gardens were. The same symbol south of it is the newer quarry. The road runs to the west of The House, then switchbacks up onto the top of the plateau. And here, about a quarter mile south, is the road that heads to the new quarry.”
“How old is this map?”
Bodine scrolled. “From the seventies. Let’s see how it looks now, with Google Earth.”
He opened a third window. The screen was blank for a second, then filled in a square at a time with blurry green and brown blotches, which then snapped into clear focus.Fields and forest with actual trees visible.
Ray said, “The Earth.”
“From outer space.”
“The Eye of God.” Ray wasn’t sure if his tone of awe was ironic or the real thing. But it roused Mingus from his bed. He came over and looked up at the computer.
Bodine said, “Huh?”
“Just a dream I had. Never mind.” His Googling Susan was child’s play. And his oculus? It was a quaint tool from another century. “Everything looks all squashed down.”
“This may be the Eye of God, but the dude’s got shitty depth perception. The wages of omnipotence. But check this out.” Bodine zoomed in. “Here’s The House. We’re looking straight down on the roof. See the chimneys? This is the last place I saw that asshole Karl.”
It was one thing seeing that dinky square on a map. It was another whole story to view the actual house. His pulse ticked in his neck. “How am I supposed to hide with Google watching me? Won’t they be able to see on their computer, just like whoever it was saw me at my house?”
Ray’s eyes bugged as he stared at the gardens at the back of The House. He imagined
Karl standing, waving up at him, Ray, It’s been so long….
Bodine laughed. “Don’t worry. This isn’t in real time.”
“When was it recorded?”
Bodine shook his head. “That’s probably some huge secret down at Google. But it wasn’t this time of year. See—there’s no snow. Up in those mountains, there will still be some now.”
Bodine studied the screen. “This was shot in the morning. If you’ll remember, cliffs tower over The House on all sides.” He pointed to a jagged dark line to the east of The House. “These are the shadows of trees on top of the east cliff, stretching down onto the garden. This line is the north cliff. This patch of light gray is the south one. So wherever you watch from, you’ll be looking down on the place. That’s always an advantage in combat.”
“Who says I’m going into combat?”
“A manner of speaking.”
Ray relaxed a hair. Mingus lay down on the floor but stayed awake. Ray pointed to the cliff across the road from The House, to the west. “Why can’t I watch from here?”
Bodine zoomed out and traced his finger on the screen. “You’d have to hike miles across these open fields. Someone might see you.”
“Right. And I need to be able to peek into the window of The Bedroom. Where do you think it is?”
“Remember those LOLcat photos? There were two reflections in the computer monitor in the picture. According to the clock on the screen, they were taken in the morning. So we’re talking about a corner room, with eastern exposure. Either the northeast or southeast. If you’re lucky, it will be the southeast.”
“Why?”
“Because the south cliff is the only reasonable one to get to. To the east—he scrolled the map—“there isn’t a road for miles, so you’d have to bushwhack it. You can’t get to the north cliff without going through there. Unless you want to scale the one above the escarpment.”
Bodine zoomed in. “Here’s another problem. See these dark lines? They’re cracks in the limestone, some of them tens of feet deep. They’re a feature of karst topography. I was up there one time. You go wandering in there, you’re going to break a leg, or worse.”
“That leaves the south cliff.”
“Yeah.” Bodine scrolled the map down and pointed. “Bordering it is this saddle between the old and new quarries. If you can find a way into the new quarry, you can reach it by following this fence line along the edge of the workings. Once you’re there, you’ll be able to look right down on The House and gardens and right into the windows of the room, if it’s the one on the southeast side.”
“If it’s the other one?”
“You’ll still see a light at night.”
“But I want to know who’s in there.”
“Then you’re going to have to bushwhack. But you’ll have to do it in daylight. And be quiet.”
“You think the quarry is still open?”
“This is as far as we can zoom in. These buildings and vehicles look funky, but that’s the nature of quarries. It would obviously be easier if it’s closed.”
“It was operating then. Working in the garden you’d hear the rumble o
f trucks and explosions. You ever go up there?”
Bodine laughed. “Remember that big-ass stone, Karl’s fucking ‘Threshold’?”
Ray said, “How could I forget? He said, ‘A door is a portal. Be especially aware when you step through.’”
“The Portal to his realm. That’s our Karl. Never passed up a chance to be pretentious. He never just walked through a door in his life. The front steps were crumbling, made of some soft stone. Not a fitting entrance for our great leader. So Karl brought me out there one day, said, ‘Find me a threshold for my house. Can you believe we bought into that shit?”
It was hard to believe. Especially of Bodine. But they had.
“We snuck into the quarry in the night. Climbed the fence. What a pain in the ass—it was fifteen feet high if it was an inch. We found the perfect stone—flat and a nice shape. But we could barely lift it. It was at least four hundred pounds. No way was it going over that fence. We wheeled it there on a cart.”
“How’d you open the gate?”
“It had this big old padlock.” Bodine grinned. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the closet and returned with a key and a can of Liquid Wrench.
Ray shook his head. “You still have it. Where’d you get it?”
“I made it.”
“Same as you make programs to hack into other people’s computers.”
He nodded with a little smile. “Some say.”
He handed Ray the key, then the Liquid Wrench. “You’ll probably need this.”
“What do I do if the quarry’s still in business?”
“You’ll figure something out.”
Ray was having doubts. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”
“Most things are once you get into the details.”
Bodine returned to the closet and emerged with a sleeping bag and a fistful of Power Bars. Provisions for camping solo in the Adirondacks when he did his yearly acid trip. Ray followed him into the theater, and Bodine headed for one of the museum cases. It was labeled Dead Eyes and contained antique viewing devices. Bodine cranked the lid open.
A monocle, spyglass, and Victorian microscope. Bodine handed Ray a cracked leather case. “These binoculars were the best.”
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 22