“I no want recycle. I keep like you. Social security numbers, passports, birthdays, hard drives remember everything. Then I make big server farm and let people look at pretty pictures.” He relaxes, hooking his thumbs into tight jeans.
I finally see it. He wants to mine the hard drives for identity theft. Worse still, to run a pornography ring. He’s started a series of porn sites and wants to grow it using old computers customers bring in to run them.
“But why hurt my friends?”
“You get caught with hard drives, mommy lose business,” he smirks. “She like me. I buy.”
I don’t know why he’s smiling in all this. He can’t get the business now. She doesn’t like him anymore. If he kills us, he’ll have to run. Surely they’ll know who it was.
He looks over at the wall. The scorch marks climb higher and thicken. I see the posters curling and it occurs to me that I could have figured this all out a lot sooner if I’d been a bit smarter. Chris Isaac has a song where the lyrics go: Baby did a bad, bad thing. It’s the same language Fenwick used in Frannie’s email—and the same song he was singing when I came home a few days ago. If I die here, I want to come back as an elephant so I’ll have a better memory. Unfortunately, what I deserve is to come back as a worm and not a very smart one.
Fenwick pulls out a phone and dials.
“I back. Have daughter and boyfriend,” he says. “Nice tries.”
“Mom!” I shout, realizing to whom he’s talking. Realize whom he must have been visiting while I fried his servers.
“Sign papers and give me business and I let them go.”
“Don’t do it, Mom!”
Foxy strides to me and slaps me across the face. Tears well in my eyes.
“Tell anyone, I find you.” His tone menaces. “Sign. Scan. Send to me. If ever you contact police, I be sure to kill your little girl—just try. I have friends.”
I swallow the lump in my throat.
“You’re going to jail whatever happens. You can’t run a porn business out of Assured Destruction,” I say.
“Oh, little computer girl? Porn not illegal. Not destroying hard drives illegal. Breaking into house illegal.”
Porn is wrong, but I realize I’ve got nothing. I can’t prove he hacked my network and did all those other things; they were designed to call attention to what I was doing, not to benefit him. I only have tapes showing his girlfriend coming into the store. We have a better run operation because of him, and I’d lied to the police. What could I actually prove? Even Peter’s first question to me was about what was going on.
“So, little, poor girl? You break into my house to rob me and cause fire. Very bad.”
My mom must be saying something back to him in the phone, because he clutches it tighter to his ear.
“Da,” he says into the phone, checks his email, and then grins at Foxy, who nods back. “Da.”
“Now we save you,” he grins at me. “Fenwick is hero.”
Fenwick bends and shoulders Peter, whose eyes are still partially rolled back into his skull. The carpet has begun to melt and Foxy drags me through scalding puddles of it. I cry out and suddenly I’m being lifted in strong arms while Foxy shouts at whomever is holding me, but at least her gun is gone, hidden away. Hidden until it’s needed again to enforce whatever my mom has agreed to.
I can hear other shouts and people; I try to look back at my rescuer but it’s smoky, my eyes are watering, and the man is hunkered down over top of me so I can’t see his face through the tangle of my hair.
We break into dusk. Fire trucks barrel down the block and a crowd of onlookers gather as smoke whirls into an evening colored red by the decaying sun.
“Janus!” someone calls.
I blink my eyes clear and brush away my hair. Ellie stands with the onlookers, and beside her I make out Hannah and Harry. What was everyone doing here?
Standing at the end of the walk is Jonny. His hands are tucked into his pockets and he’s gritting his teeth. But if that’s Jonny, then who is …?
I look back at my transportation, catching as I do the warning glare of Foxy at our side. A pair of startlingly blue eyes gaze down at me. My arms are wrapped around the neck of Karl.
“How’d you—?”
“Doesn’t everyone follow Heckleena?” His smile rends my heart in two. “We were all wondering who it was. So cool it’s you.”
When I look back toward Jonny, he’s already walking down the street into the flashes of oncoming emergency vehicles. Flames boogie in the living-room window of the house and I suspect nothing inside can be saved. Not the servers, not the evidence, not the happy-face laptop. My actions have cleared the way for Fenwick.
Karl lays me on to a gurney, and a worried paramedic inspects my ankle and another the burns on my arms. Nearby, Peter stares at me, lucid but with a trail of blood running from his hairline.
“Thanks, Peter.”
“Nothing to thank me for,” he replies and glances to see Fenwick lurking in the shadows.
“Don’t say anything, okay?” I ask and he studies my face. “My mom wouldn’t want you to say anything right now.”
“The police—” he begins.
“I know, but it isn’t over,” I vow as I’m lifted into the ambulance. Peter gives a little hopeless wave, either a goodbye or a signal of surrender.
Chapter 23
The operation on my ankle takes three hours but is over in a blink—for me at least. In post-op I’m drowsy when they show me an X-ray of my ankle with three pins through it. A cast wraps my foot and climbs up to my knee. When I see the cast, all I can think of is Jonny having a new canvas to doodle upon.
Finally they wheel me out of post-op, and from down the hall, the small squeaks of wheels steadily grow louder. A smile cracks my lips, and my mom shoots beside me, grabs my hand, and buries her face in it.
“Janus,” she says. “Janus.”
And I’m crying and she’s crying. “I’m sorry, Mom.” My throat hurts.
“You’re okay, you’re going to be fine.” Her tears are soaking the bandages that cover the burns that run from my hand to my shoulder.
“I’m okay.” But I know how I must look. I haven’t showered yet, and soot is thick over the areas not bound or cast.
She releases my hand enough for the orderly to pass through into the hospital room where I’ll stay for the next few days, and then my mom waits for him to leave.
In the next bed over, an old woman breathes through a chest tube. I wish I qualified for the pediatric ward where it would be kids and bright colors. The only flowers here whither in a yellow vase next to the old woman’s bed. Silence and wheezes fill the room until my mom draws a deep breath.
“Why’d you do it?” she asks. “What happened? Why didn’t you tell me about Fenwick?”
So I explain about Shadownet and where it came from. I tell her about Ellie and Tule and Harry and Hairy. I explain the missing abortion clinic laptop and about how the anonymous website really wasn’t mine. I say how I couldn’t tell her because she’d go to the police and the police would fine her, or worse, for not destroying the hard drives. I tell her about Jonny’s ultimatum and how everything made sense at the time. But it all went wrong.
“And now you’ve sold the business to Fenwick,” I cry. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t care about the business,” she says. “I’ll find something else.”
“Mom, you don’t have the money to start anything else and …” I look at the wheelchair.
“Of all the people who should know better,” she whispers. “You know I can still do whatever I want.” Her eyes cloud—not a filmy, senile cloud, rather a-storm-is-here cloud.
“I know,” I say.
“And if I didn’t know how to overcome a challenge m
yself, then you’ve certainly showed me how this week.”
“What do you mean?” I look up.
“Don’t you realize how amazing you are?” Her expression makes me shift around on the bed. “The app development, this Canvas—Peter says you’ve had thousands of downloads, it’s going viral—and hacking into someone’s WiFi, tracking down dangerous criminals. I can’t condone it, but it’s amazing.”
“But I—” I almost died, I was about to say. “Thousands?”
“Thousands,” she says. “And yes, what you did was dumb and you’re grounded for a year. But it was also very brave and smart.” She takes up my hand again. I’m so confused. “I was worried about you, who you were going to become, but Peter says I was worried about the wrong thing. I need to support you more. Support this passion of yours. If I had, maybe I’d have been able to help you do all this the right way.”
She laughs and I’m stunned.
“This Shadownet of yours,” she continues. “It wasn’t really those other people. It’s you, pieces of you fragmented on the Internet, but together it’s you. And it’s full of friendship and fans and followers. You’re very lucky. I’m very lucky.”
It’s funny because I’m not so sure she’s right. I do think of the Internet as real and the people on it are real, but it’s like there is a level of reality I’m missing. One of flesh and blood.
I lean over, feeling my skin stretch and crack like I’ve had the worst sunburn ever. I wrap my arms around my mom’s neck and kiss her cheek. “I love you,” I say. And it’s been a long time since I’ve told her so. “But I still want to nail those bastards.”
My mom draws back, her mouth pinched.
“And how do you intend to go about that?”
“I think I have proof of a felony, a real felony that wouldn’t be traceable to us. I just need some time on Shadownet.”
“I’ve already signed over the business.” She says this carefully.
“You don’t have my computers?”
“That was part of the deal.”
I glare at her, but she holds up the palm of her hand. “You were in a burning house and kidnapped, Janus. What was I supposed to do?”
“You’ve got a key?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“I have to get back in, just for a minute.”
“No way,” she shakes her head. “You’re hopped up on pain killers and are thinking crazy. Fenwick, whoever he is, has connections.”
I slump back in my bed. The hard line of my mother’s lips makes me realize I’m in over my head again. I need help.
“Do you trust me?”
My mother narrows her eyes, but nods.
“Can you find me a laptop?” I ask. “For homework,” I add with a coy smile.
“Right,” she says, “I guess I can manage that.”
I push my luck. “And I need your phone.”
She reaches to the back of her chair and pulls it out, but it’s not her old clunker, it’s an iPhone.
“Yeah, Mom!”
“It’s yours—or Peter’s, rather. He wants you to have it. Said you should see what people are creating on top of Canvas. Get some rest,” she says. She rolls to the door and then pauses. “I love you too.”
I settle on to my pillow and turn away from my wheezing bunkmate. After a few minutes I turn to a touch on the shoulder and open my eyes. It’s like I’ve gone to Heaven. Karl’s face shines beside a bouquet of roses.
“Hey,” I say. “My hero.”
He beams.
“How are you doing?” He places the flowers on the side table and sits on the edge of my mattress.
“Pretty good really,” I say. “Ankle still hurts but they keep feeding me stuff if the pain gets too bad.”
“Rough.” His hand slips across the sheets to hold mine.
I realize I need to say or do something. I’ve always liked Karl, but— “Karl,” I squeeze his hand and then let go. His smile twitches off kilter. “Can we be friends for a bit? I need friends right now.”
He cracks his neck before responding and pats the spot where my hand had been. “Sure,” he says. “We can be friends.”
“Thanks.”I swallow hard. “And for the flowers too, they’re pretty.”
“Something beautiful,” he replies.
We sit for another minute in silence before he stands and leaves with only a wave.
It was hard, but I feel good about it.
Four hours later, I have a laptop. A scratched-up Dell, but to me it’s a thing of beauty; it’s a prosthetic limb. My mom has also left me my copy of The Bell Jar.
By the time Constable Williams enters the room, I’ve got everything I need.
Chapter 24
“What can I help you with, Ms. Rose?” Williams demands from the doorway. Her arms are folded across her chest.
Hmmm. I haven’t made the best impression on this woman.
“I’ve evidence of child pornography,” I say and nod toward the laptop.
She steps further into the room and peers at my computer screen. It simply reads: Server not found.
“Looks like the server is down.”
“Yes,” I say, “If I’m correct, the server that used to house this webpage is from a certain house that recently burned to the ground.” I pause to see if she knows what I’m getting at, but she’s unreadable. “But … if I search Google and pull up the cached site from before the server burned …” Google keeps an image of all the sites it crawls, so even if you can’t connect to it directly, you can usually see what was there. “Now check this out.”
She cracks her neck and her eyes sparkle with sudden interest. “That’s the girl from your school, isn’t it?”
The page is the same page I found when searching for the naked photo of Astrid. The same photo Harry allegedly posted.
“Astrid,” I agree. “But this one isn’t from Harry’s Facebook page.” And here’s what I suspect. Fenwick couldn’t resist adding Astrid’s picture to his despicable collection. An underage picture.
“So who hosts the site?” Constable Williams asks. “Is this what was on the servers in the house fire you were in? Is this why you were there?”
“How much time would someone do for possessing child pornography?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Depends, but in this case we’re looking at possession and dissemination of child pornography. That’s more. Could be as much as twenty to thirty years in prison.”
I nod. The fact that the porn site’s server is down is too much of a coincidence for Fenwick not to have been involved, but it won’t be enough for Constable Williams. She needs the smoking gun and I know where there’s lots of smoking stuff. But that might be a problem.
“So?” she demands, taking out a pad of paper and pencil.
“If there’s a fire, say ...” I lick my lips; my tongue rubbing painfully over the cracked edges. “Can you recover computer files from a server or computer?”
She sighs. “If the damage isn’t too bad, but generally yes, we can recover a surprising amount, but it’s expensive so we don’t normally do it unless there’s suspected foul play. You are talking about the house fire.”
All my searches on the Web turned up the same thing. But Google is sometimes closer to Hollywood than to the realities of a true computer forensics team. So, not easy, but possible—there may be evidence of Fenwick’s wrong doing yet. Best of all, it won’t be tied to me or my mom.
“I believe you’ll find photos of Astrid on the servers of the house that burned down,” I say, and I sag into my pillows as if it’s a huge weight taken from me.
“Wait a minute. You’re the one who called the tip line?” Williams’s hands are at her hips. “I knew there was something more to your involvement in all of this. You
called about screaming in a car trunk?”
Damn her powers of deduction. I clear my throat. My voice rasps and I try to sound as pathetic as I can. “Just a coincidence,” I say. It is an anonymous tip line. What I need to do is give her something she can prove.
Her face remains stony.
“In the basement of the house is a rack of servers and other old computer towers. Recover the files on them and you’ll have all the proof you need to book two criminals.”
Williams taps her pen back on her legal pad. “Okay, I’ll check it out.”
On her way through the door, she passes my mother, who wheels in without a word.
“You tell her what you told me?” my mom asks.
I shake my head vigorously and a shadow of disappointment darkens her expression.
“Do you have everything you need?” she asks.
“Hope so,” I reply, running my hand through my stringy hair. My room is full of balloons and flowers and a humongous teddy bear from Karl, but nothing from Jonny. Even the wheezing woman is off of her chest tube and smiles between rather gooey meals and lets me watch whatever I want on television.
“Can I go see Peter?” I ask.
“I think he’d like that.” My mom beams again, and right then, I can tell she’s falling in love. For once I say the right thing.
“I’m happy for you, Mom. He’s a great guy. I have a good gut instinct for these things.”
“Do you?” She laughs.
I feel my cheeks heat thinking of my own disastrous love life. One Everest at a time, I tell myself.
Peter has a bandage wrapped around his head and suffers from a severe concussion. He gets waves of headaches, but they’re growing a little duller and less frequent. His hands press against his temples when I enter in my wheelchair. He calls us the twins and looks a little frail under all the blankets. It reminds me how much older he is, but then I remember him giving Fenwick an uppercut.
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