by Jeff Carson
“Well, yeah. They could be persuaded to vote for another person as Sheriff instead. Because of what I did.”
“Oh, okay. So, is there another candidate for the job?”
“Yes,” he said. “The guy I hurt pretty bad before I left.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Ah, I get it,” she said. “He may try to convince the others to vote for his son, especially since you just hurt his son. Also, of course there is the matter of your brother here, which you want to make sure is taken care of before you go home.”
They both resumed eating.
She paused. “So, you think that that Town Council member would have voted for you before you hurt his son? I’m confused.”
He laughed. “Yeah, it’s confusing as all hell. But, yes. He probably would have voted for me over his own son. That’s probably the reason his son and I got into it the other day.”
She nodded her head as if all was crystal clear, and then she finished her last bite and wiped her mouth. “Alright. So let’s figure this whole mess out soon so you can bring your brother home and go win your job.”
He liked this girl.
Chapter 21
Lia parked the Alfa Romeo right in front of the Albastru Pub, which sat in a piazza that looked otherwise restricted to vehicle traffic.
The pub had a large dark wooden sign with hand carved lettering above the front door, with a blue, yellow, and red square flag hanging from a pole above it. A single deciduous tree grew thick from a small brick square in front.
“Romanian.” Lia pointed at the sign as they got out, answering Wolf’s forthcoming question.
They entered the pub, Wolf noting the nautical-looking clock on the wall that said 2:10 pm. It looked like the bottom rung customers were there at the moment — a few older men slumping over a yellow beer or a brownish clear liquor in their squat glasses. Punk rock music Wolf didn’t recognize buzzed softly from out of the large wall mounted speakers. Two muted televisions showed the same channel, a sports highlight show.
No one was behind the bar, nor was there any indicator bell or anything to telegraph their entrance.
Lia took off her hat. “Buon giorno!”
A thin face with buggy cobalt eyes peaked around the corner from a surprisingly tall height — higher than Wolf’s eye line.
Almost imperceptibly, the eyes widened, then a stringy arm appeared holding up a finger, “Buon giorno! Un momento per favore,” the second half of the sentence retreating away from them. There was a fast clipped conversation just audible over the music somewhere in the back, a door closing, and then the man returned.
He was tall. What Wolf thought to be a man standing on a step stool and peaking around a corner was in fact a man that stood a few inches taller than Wolf’s six foot three height. His head was shaved on the sides all the way to the skin, with tapered ridged spiked on the very top with copious amounts of gel, giving the illusion of even more height. His ears protruded from the side of his head like two open car doors. He had a large nose, with a tight small mouth below it where white spittle had built up on the corners. A gold necklace jostled around his neck, well displayed on his bared chest above his mostly unbuttoned white silk shirt. He hurried over.
“Ciao, sono Cezar,” he extended a huge hand across the bar to Wolf.
A pattern of five dots in between his right forefinger and thumb caught Wolf’s eye as they shook, like a five on a dice. He’d seen the tattoo countless times. All on bad people.
Wolf shook. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, I speak English, why?” The faint sound of a car engine fired up toward the back of the building, revved, and gradually faded.
“Because I’m from America. I’m Wolf.”
“Wolf! What is that, German?”
“No, actually it’s not,” he said. “Do you mind answering a few questions for us?”
“Of course I do not mind! I’m Cezar.” He slumped down on his elbows giving Wolf his undivided attention. “How can I help you?”
Cezar blinked long and hard while turning his mouth downward, ending the move with a hard sniff. Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s in a black box, a type Wolf didn’t recognize ever seeing. He pointed the box in Wolf’s direction. “Would you like one?”
“Uh, no thanks,” Wolf forced himself to say. He held up his brother’s driver’s license. “I need to know if you’ve ever seen this man before.”
Lia cleared her throat next to him.
Cezar paused a pulse with a blank look. “Yes! I know this guy. He and his friend come in sometimes.”
Wolf pulled the license back and Cezar pulled out his cell phone, apparently all his undivided attention used up.
“You own this place?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah, it’s mine, all mine.” He raised his arms out showing off his pterodactyl wing span.
Lia stepped forward and put her elbow on the bar. “Did you happen to see him this weekend? On Friday night?”
Cezar paused for a few seconds swiping his finger on his phone.
“Cezar?” Lia reached across and put her hand over his phone screen.
Cezar inhaled a sharp breath and burned a look at Lia. He blinked hard and sniffed, eyes transformed to a cool gaze as he opened them again. “I don’t think so, I normally remember everyone who comes in, and I don’t remember seeing him that night.”
Wolf pulled out the receipt and laid it on the bar counter.
Cezar glanced at it, then back to his phone. “He might have been in here, I don’t know. It was pretty busy that night.”
“This is my brother’s receipt from that night —”
“Yeah, I get it. Look, I didn’t see him that night, okay? Sorry to disappoint you.” He stared with a sad look on his face, head tilted to the side. A shrug was added for good measure.
“Yeah. Okay.” Wolf stared icily. “Hey, you have a bathroom in that back room I can use?” He looked over Cezar’s shoulder to the back hallway.
His eyelids drooped lazily as he pointed to the far wall. “The toilet is over there.”
Wolf stood still, returning his unblinking glare to Cezar.
Cezar held up his arms in a defensive gesture, a vaudeville look of fear twisting his face, then laughed through his bean-toothed smile.
Wolf opened the car door. “He knows something.”
“That guy is creepy.”
“Yeah, that too.”
Lia’s phone trilled loudly, and she talked for a minute.
“Valerio is going to meet us at the station with the police report. Let’s go pick up your brother’s computer and head down there.”
Chapter 22
Wolf followed Lia into the Caribinieri station. She darted up the stairs to the left without a glance to the chaos below, which Wolf saw had escalated to biblical status.
Upstairs was light and smelled refreshing after the mid day rains. The lake in the distance was white capped once again, more aquatic boarders riding the winds back and forth across the vast expanse. He shook his head looking back at the stairway, like it was a wormhole into another universe..
The room bustled with activity, officers on phones, paperwork being shuffled from desk to desk, paperwork that wasn’t anchored down blowing off of desks. Colonnello Marino’s room to the right was closed, a booming voice rumbling from within. Detective Rossi stood up from behind a desk off to the left and greeted them with a nod of his head and wave over.
“How are things coming along, David?” Rossi folded his arms and furrowed his brow.
“There have been some developments for sure.” He looked to Lia, who sat comfortably on the edge of Rossi’s desk. “We found that the belt around my brother’s neck was not his own belt.”
“What do you mean?”
Wolf explained the length of the belt and how it couldn’t have been stretched.
“About your brother, I am working on getting all this paperwork done to release him and his belongings as fast as possible. And di
d you find this friend he was out with the night before?”
“No, we just went to his place of work and his apartment, and no luck at either place. It looks like he’s been missing for the same amount of time as my brother. Or, at least he hasn’t shown up for work all week.”
“Interesting again.” Rossi raised an eyebrow. He waved them to the chairs in front of his desk and sat back down. Wolf sat gratefully and stole another glance out to the shimmering water behind Rossi. His desk was amongst many others in a vast main room, a mid 1990s looking computer perched on his desk.
Rossi pushed a manila folder over to Wolf. “Here is a copy of the police report. If you would please not let Marino know that I gave you that, it would be much appreciated.”
“All right.” Wolf took the folder and put it on his lap. He looked around the room, noticing the piles of paper on each desk. It seemed mountainous compared to what he was used to. Every single person at a desk was dealing with paperwork, or holding a piece of paperwork while on the phone, or handing a stack of paperwork to someone else.
Rossi seemed to sense his curiosity. “What?”
“Oh, I was just noting the vast amounts of paperwork on everyone’s desk. I thought we had it bad in Colorado.”
Rossi and Lia laughed. “Really? This is a lot of paperwork?”
Wolf nodded. “Yes. This is a lot of paperwork.”
They laughed like school children at the observation, Rossi slapping his hand on the desk. “Paperwork is in the DNA of all Italians. We are born with paperwork in our hands.”
Rossi leaned forward and furrowed his brow, as if remembering the sober reality of Wolf’s visit, “David, all that paperwork is the reason it can take a lot of time. But I’ve been keeping on top of your brother’s release papers. They are sitting on Marino’s desk now for final approval. In the meantime, I see you have your brother’s computer?”
“Yep.” Wolf nodded. “I can’t get into it. I was hoping to get your guy to help me.”
“Good, give it to Paulo. He will be able to help you. If he can help me with this pig,” he slapped the side of his dirty cream-colored desk top monitor, “then he can help you with a brand new computer like that!”
“I hope,” Wolf said.
Chapter 23
“Porco miseria.” Lia plucked a slip of paper off her desk. “I have to go see Colonnello Marino. Let me get you started with Paulo.”
“Ciao!” Paulo stood peaking over the two giant monitors on his desk.
Wolf estimated his age at about fifteen years old, but then again he wasn’t good at estimating ages past twelve years old, Jack’s current age.
Paulo was dressed in plain clothes, wearing a black t-shirt that had two 1950s style American hot rods smashing into each other. His jeans were faded, baggy in the mid section and skin tight in the legs, a popular look Wolf had noticed propagating with the youth of today’s Italy. He wore thick red plastic framed glasses and had a faux-hawk hair-do. Silver rings on three fingers and a bright red plastic watch adorned his arm extended to shake Wolf’s hand. It was a firm hand shake with solid eye contact.
“Piachere.”
“Hello. Uh, do you speak English?” Wolf asked.
“Yes, yes! I am a, not very good,” he said in an impressive American accent. “But, I learned in University.”
“Great,” Wolf wondered if college for Paulo was done pre or post puberty.
“Well, what’s up?” Paulo pointed at the computer bag slung on his shoulder.
“I would like to get into this computer, but I don’t have my brother’s password.” Wolf wore a pained expression as he pulled out the thin Macintosh laptop.
“Pfffffffft, okay.”
“Do you think you can do it?”
“Yes, no problem.”
Lia looked satisfied. “Paulo can do anything with computers, and programming, and the internet, and, all things that confuse the rest of us.”
Paulo was blushing ferociously but tilting his head back proudly. He opened the computer and pushed a few buttons simultaneously, his attention unwavering from Lia.
“He’ll take care of you,” she said slapping his back. “I have to go talk to Marino, I will be back, hopefully soon.”
Wolf looked around. “Okay, sounds good. I’ll be here.”
Lia walked away back across the room and down the hall. Wolf caught himself staring and turned quickly to what was happening with Paulo, who was now standing at his desk staring intently at Lia leaving the room.
“Mmmmmadonna.” Paulo breathed the words, turning to Wolf with a conspiratorial look. “She is beautiful, eh?”
“Yes, she is,” Wolf agreed with a resigned smile. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“Oh, yes, you can pull up that chair there. I am going to create another administrator account on the computer. It takes a few minutes. Then I can go in and access all the files.”
“Okay, sounds good.”
Wolf waited and watched Paulo work his magic with the computer. The computer screen looked to be displaying lines of code — a site Wolf was completely unfamiliar with. He felt proficient enough with a computer, but he was watching a master mechanic rip the hood off of a car and dig into the engine. A tweak here, a command there, and a few minutes later they were inside the computer with a normal view Wolf was more accustomed to.
“Okay, I’ve created a new admin account, and changed the password to your brother’s account, allowing me to log in as him. I’m going to fire up a few of his programs. Otherwise, what would you like to do?”
“I’d like to look at his documents, I guess.”
Paulo worked for a few minutes, opening windows and programs. “Well, wait a minute, this is interesting.” Paulo was looking in the Skype program.
“Why?”
“Well, you haven’t had the computer on at all since you got here? Obviously not…never mind.”
“No, I haven’t. It was closed when I found it in my brother’s room and tried to hack into it last night. Well, I tried a couple passwords and gave up, then just left it to charge.”
“Okay, okay. Well, there are messages on Skype from a person on Tuesday.”
“Okay,” Wolf said expectantly, “and what does that mean? I really have little experience with Skype. My brother was always trying to get me to use it, but I just ended up talking to him on the phone.”
“Well, okay. Look here.” He pointed towards the little logo on the bottom of the screen. “If there was someone who was trying to get hold of your brother with some messaging on Skype, say, on Tuesday…then I would have just logged into his account and a bubble would have shown up on the icon showing how many messages he had missed since he last logged in.”
“Okay.”
“But there was no bubble that popped up on the icon.” Paolo was tilting his head with wide eyes. “But, if I go into his account and look at his recent conversations here on the left, look what someone is saying to him.”
--Hey man, you there? 09/18/12 9:12 PM
--What’s happening? Are we doing this interview or what? Let me know… 09/18/12 9:53 PM
—You okay? You there? 09/18/12 10:09 PM
Wolf felt his face getting red. He couldn’t see the significance of what Paulo was saying to him, and Paulo sensed it.
“So, the most important part is here. Look at the date these messages were sent. This was Tuesday, September, 18, three days after your brother’s death, at 9:12 PM local time…or, how many hours behind is Colorado?”
“Eight.”
“Okay, so that means between 1 and 2 PM in the afternoon your time, someone was trying to get hold of him, looks like for an interview. But he wasn’t answering. However, Skype is telling us these messages have already been looked at, because there was no indication on the icon that there were unread messages!”
“Which means someone was on the computer looking at these messages at some point before we just looked at them, otherwise there would have been unread messages.” Wolf w
as finally getting the significance. He sat back hard in his chair, putting his hands on his head, Paulo following his gesture.
“Exactly,” Paulo said. “Someone has opened this computer and looked at Skype in the last few days, after your brother’s death. So, what do you think they were looking for on this computer?”
“I honestly have no clue,” Wolf said. “Can you somehow tell? Can you see what they did on it?”
“No, not unless I had pre-loaded key-stroke recognition software on his computer. But, we can infer some things, just like we did now.”
“They probably got on the computer to erase something, right?”
Paulo raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Okay, let me check. It’s actually more difficult than people think to erase all evidence of a file off of a computer. We’ll see if this hacker knew more than just the log-on-trick, which is actually very basic.” He rolled his eyes as he dove back onto the keyboard in a flurry.
Paulo’s fingers were a blur entering commands on the screen. Wolf marveled at the strange sequence of letters, numbers and punctuation this wunderkind was commanding at mach speed.
“Ahhhh.” Paulo had a pained expression. “Well, either they cleaned it completely, or they simply didn’t erase anything. There’s no trace of any files that were recently erased to be found. It’s more likely they didn’t erase anything.”
Lia came around the corner and walked to the desk. She looked pained, avoiding eye contact with Wolf. “So, any luck?”
Wolf gestured to the laptop “We’re in, and we’ve seen that someone else has been looking at the computer in the last couple days.”
“Really?” She leaned forward with interest.
“Yeah. According to Paulo, these Skype messages tell us that someone was on the computer sometime Tuesday night or later.”
She came around and looked at the screen from behind. “Ma-donna. What else?”
“Well, we can’t find any indication that anyone erased anything. We have to get online and do some work. Your brother was what, a blogger?”