Robby the R-Word

by Leif Wright

  Meanwhile, life trudges on outside the periphery of that cycle. Entropy. That’s what it was. It was the glacial creep of order descending into disorder, organization disintegrating into chaos. Maybe it was because his life was slower, maybe it was just because he had time to watch, but the entropy unfolded like a symphony before Robby’s eyes and ears, the stanzas, pauses, fortes, flares, the rises and falls. He could close his eyes and see a tuxedo-clad conductor raising his hands in the air, directing the brasses to trill, the woodwinds to swell, the strings to vibrato.

  Everyone got so caught up in the details of every small challenge or task of the day. As the trees consumed their attention, the forest grew up around them until they, looking up from their tasks, no longer remembered how they came to be in this place they no longer recognized.

  Even the most attentive and astute couldn’t keep track of everything. Everyone left trails behind them, and right now, Robby was looking for the trails of a murderer who had to have slipped up sometime. He was really only interested in one case, but Robby knew the dangers of letting that tree distract him from the forest. He had to consider the other cases, then compare them all to see the trail through the forest.

  At first, he had almost decided to eliminate Mack Rutherford from his list of suspects. But it was amazing what one could find with enough time—and Internet access.

  Turned out, Mack Rutherford had erased a 1995 arrest from his record through the work of a good lawyer. A girl in Amarillo, Texas, along Mack’s I-40 regular route, had been choked to death in the parking lot of the eighteen-wheel Shangri-La right off the interstate. Then she had been cut from stem to stern, completely bisected, and dumped next to the Cadillac Ranch, where someone had seen a Forest Green Mack truck racing away. A Mack with Arkansas plates. The DA had pored through every weigh-station record and discovered Mack’s Mack was the only forest-green Mack with Arkansas tags in the area at the time. Mack was arrested, but the charges were ultimately dropped because there was literally no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and the eyewitness could not positively say Mack’s Mack was the one he had seen speeding away from the Cadillac Ranch.

  But that DA hadn’t had the luxury of modern databases that placed Mack at or near the scenes of dozens of murdered and mutilated lot lizards over the course of eight years.

  He probably thought he was in the clear. But he probably hadn’t thought he’d attract the attention of a man constantly attached to the Internet, and with functionally limitless time to dig for clues.

  Mack, Robby thought. Mack was the guy. Finally! Everything had been going faster than he had expected, but this changed his plan. Now he could shift gears. If he could have made his body do it, he would have sighed with relief. After all this time, he had done it. Finally.

  After all the painful hours focusing at a computer screen, he had finally completed a task he had been daydreaming about for almost twenty years. Nothing else mattered anymore, because he had—after all this time and effort—proven to himself that sometimes, the bad guys didn’t get away with it. Even when they thought they had.

  Like Mack, who apparently had stopped killing after his wife had laid down the law. Did that make her an accessory—knowing but doing nothing other than making him stop?

  Did his wife know about all the murders he had committed against other lot lizards, or had she convinced herself that this was the only one? It was probably the latter, Robby thought. Unless she was a full partner accomplice—and the aborted divorce seemed to suggest she wasn’t—Mack’s wife had found a way to live with the idea that he had cut a woman in Amarillo in half, continuing to stay married to him after she had somehow straightened him out.

  Or thought she had. Serial killers, Robby knew, never stopped. They just changed the way they killed. Mack Rutherford was probably still killing, he just wasn’t mutilating the girls afterward anymore. That, or he had discovered a better way to hide the bodies.

  Either way, his number was up now.

  Robby would take care of him once and for all. His brain told his mouth to smile. His mouth ignored the instruction. Mack Rutherford’s life was about to discover accelerated entropy in a way he probably never imagined could happen.

  The words just stared out from Robby’s screen. “The only green Mack truck in Amarillo that night.”

  Smile, face.

  No.

  It didn’t matter. Even his useless body couldn’t bring Robby down today. He had the guy, the guy who was finally going to pay, who was finally going to be known.

  It was good. It was as it should be. Entropy was once again in motion.

  Smile, face.

  Don’t think so.

  No matter.

  29

  THE ONLY THING BAIN HATED WORSE THAN FLYING WAS TALKING WHILE flying. Talking about sex while flying was even worse. It was enough to put her into one of her patented Bain Foul Moods, which had quickly become legendary at the precinct.

  The thing was, Russell looked so cute with his little baby bird “feed me” face, sitting by the window, leaning his head on Bain’s shoulder, hands curled up under his chin in a half-prayer gesture. He had said only two words: “Okay, spill.” If he hadn’t been such a great partner for so long, she would have elbowed his head right off her shoulder. Instead, she couldn’t help a small smile—and that was enough to fire him up.

  He started clapping his stupid hands like a seal’s flippers. The fact that his little show of anticipation made her laugh pissed her off more. The flight attendant, making a pass to make sure everyone was obeying the rules, cast them an odd glance, rolled her eyes, and moved on.

  “It was good,” she said after a sigh. “Great, even.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” he said. “Details! What were her nipples like? Was her body nice? Was she the dude or were you? Who came first? Who came most? I need details of the cunnilingus. Was there screaming? C’mon! I’m a single, involuntarily celibate pervert. I need graphic, slutty, sloppy details!”

  “Jesus. You need to get laid.”

  “I’d settle for you letting me watch,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “I’ll be quiet. You won’t even know I’m there, except for the shameful masturbation sounds coming from the corner.”

  “You wish,” she said, smiling.

  “I do,” he said. “Now feed my spank bank!”

  The woman in front of Russell shifted in her chair and made an uncomfortable sound, making Bain laugh.

  “Well, when I got to her house, she was naked when she opened the door,” she said.

  “Holy fuck,” Russell said. “Okay. I’m done. Nap time.”

  Bain punched him in the arm. “She took over,” she said, “which was a good thing, because this case has me shot. Hands down, best sex I’ve ever had, with a man or a woman. All I know is when I woke up this morning, I could barely move, and I felt like I had been crawling across a desert all night. We were breaking out the Gatorade for round two when you called.”

  “Gatorade, damn,” he said. “I gotta get laid.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t feel sorry for you. You could fuck any woman you want, if you weren’t such a bitch about it. I swear, you’re more of a woman than I am.”

  “That much is obvious,” he said. “But I still think my balls are bigger.”

  “Whip ’em out,” she said. “I’ll compare.”

  “You know the rules,” he said. “I’ll show you mine when you show me yours.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass you,” she said. “Hit me up when I’m back on men.”

  “Tease,” he said. “I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Especially after last night and this morning,” she said, smiling. “I may never need another dick.”

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “Now I really do need details!”

  “Sorry, a gentleman never tells,” she said, still smiling. Then, after a pause, “But you could bounce a quarter off that ass!”

  “Fuck you,” Russell said, flicking h
er wrist with his finger. “I’m going to rent some straight porn at the hotel and make you watch.”

  Bain laughed as the seatbelt sign came on in response to turbulence. “They’re going to promote you after this case, you know,” she said. “You’re all over my reports, and I’m going to put in to assign you as my partner.”

  “Fag,” he said, smiling.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  After another bump of turbulence, she grabbed his hand and squeezed. If she could ever again envision herself being with a man, this was the one. But she also knew it could never happen. If it did and then it got weird, she would lose her best friend and biggest ally. It wasn’t worth the risk. From the few times they had discussed it seriously after his divorce, she knew he understood that, too. He squeezed back.

  Truth be told, the thought of him having sex with some random woman sent spikes of jealousy through her. But it wasn’t fair for her to be having sex and getting jealous if he did too. So she clenched her teeth and thought of other things, closing her eyes, leaning her head back and falling asleep to visions of Jessica’s head between her legs.

  She woke up when the jet’s wheels hit the runway, her hand still clasping Russell’s. His head was bouncing against the window, the landing apparently not enough to wake him up.

  “You can let go now,” she said, startling him. “We’re on the ground, little girl.”

  Russell smiled and pulled his hand away. “Thank you, mister,” he said groggily. “Do I get my candy now?”

  Twenty minutes later, the GPS in their rental car was guiding them to the Boca Raton offices of YourEmailProvider, a dot-com startup that had somehow avoided the Armageddon of the bubble burst in the early 2000s. The company was a legitimate—if somewhat boring and uninnovative—email provider to millions of individuals and businesses. The shtick was that a business could use its own domain name and YourEmailProvider would handle the email, including archiving and deep search of emails for businesses that required it.

  Few of its customers knew that the company used some of its profits to support an end-to-end encrypted email service called anonymousmail. The company’s founder, apparently, was an old-school Fourth Amendment crazy who believed the right to privacy meant everyone was entitled to email that was closed to the government.

  Bain couldn’t have cared less about the founder’s politics. She had a federal warrant that commanded the company to cough up the information about the guy who had hired Chris Jackson to kill an old lady.

  The receptionist, a pretty girl who looked like she fake tanned, seemed friendly enough, even batting her eyes at Russell, until Bain produced the warrant.

  “I’m going to have to ask management about that,” she said curtly. “I’ll be right back.”

  She popped up from her desk and disappeared through two swinging doors, but not before Bain noticed Russell noticing the way her tight skirt hugged the curves of her ass.

  “You should totally hit that,” she said. “She was flirting with you.”

  “You’re such a dude,” he said. “Plus, she turned on the cold as soon as you showed her the warrant. Cock blocker.”

  “Don’t blame me for your shortcomings,” she said, looking at his crotch. “You should figure out how to close the deal anyway.”

  “Shortcomings,” he laughed. “Reach on in and see how short you think my comings are.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I like girls.”

  A quick look let her know he saw the receptionist coming back.

  “Mr. Bastion is in a meeting, but he can see you in an hour,” she said.

  “I hate to be a pain, but the warrant gives us immediate access. Stopping here at your desk was a courtesy. I suggest Mr. Bastion interrupt his meeting.”

  Bain can be downright intimidating when she wants, Russell thought, admiringly.

  The receptionist, who couldn’t have been in her twenties yet, blinked a few times, then turned around and went through the doors, Russell’s eyes glued to her ass again.

  “I seriously would wreck that,” he said when the doors swung shut. “I’m talking like putting her into a wheelchair. I would Tear. That. Ass. Up.”

  “Big talk,” Bain said, rolling her eyes. “You’d probably break a hip, grandpa. She’d get one look at your droopy old man sack and laugh her ass off.”

  “I’m only twenty-nine,” he said, defensively. “My sack is young and beautiful.”

  Bain laughed. “All sacks are wrinkly and gross.”

  “Fag.”

  The receptionist came back with a heavy, balding man wearing a turtleneck under a sweater vest, all tucked into a faded pair of 1990s jeans, complete with a braided leather belt. He looked annoyed.

  “What can I do for you folks?” he asked in a nasal voice that somehow perfectly fit his pinched nose. “Amanda tells me you have some kind of warrant.”

  “We’re detectives in a murder-for-hire case out of Oklahoma,” Bain said, noticing with satisfaction that Russell stood a bit taller when she called him a detective. “Our hit man received his instructions from an email account with your company, and we have a federal warrant for all the details relating to that account, including any emails.”

  “Oh, shit,” Sweater Vest said. “I could have saved you a lot of time and money. We don’t keep any information about our anonymous accounts. That’s the attraction of it.”

  Russell smiled. This guy obviously believed he was dealing with newbies. “All email traffic generates trails,” he said. “Even if you don’t save the account details, your servers log that traffic. And you have to save login details or your users can’t log in.”

  “We have salt-encrypted logins in a blind database,” he answered, his flaring nostrils turning his pinched nose white. “And server logs are automatically purged after thirty days. I’m afraid we just don’t have any information for you.”

  “Thankfully, the traffic we’re interested in happened two weeks ago,” Russell shot back. He didn’t notice—but Bain did, with a twinge of jealousy—the receptionist admiring him as he put her boss on his heels—something that clearly didn’t happen often around here. “And we will be requiring all the login information you have—including encrypted information.”

  Sweater Vest cleared his throat. “Did you say you’re from Oklahoma?”

  “Born and bred,” Russell said proudly. He loved confounding people’s perceptions of Okies as backwoods hillbillies. “Now, please give us the information, and I will remind you this is a warrant signed by a federal judge. You don’t want the shit storm that will come if you withhold anything.”

  The receptionist hid a smile behind a finger ostensibly scratching her nose.

  Sweater Vest stood silently for a moment, appearing to consider his options. “Okay, fuck it,” he said finally after a sharp inhale. “Let’s get what you want and then you can get the hell out of my building.”

  Bain smiled. If Russell didn’t get a promotion out of this, she might quit in protest.

  He led them through the swinging doors, past a few offices, and into a concrete-walled room with dozens of servers whirring away. The room was easily ten degrees colder than the rest of the building. At a small desk on the far wall was a long-haired guy sitting behind a bunch of computer screens. He was clicking away at the keys on his keyboard.

  “Aaron, these people are police,” Sweater Vest said as they approached. “They have a warrant for very specific information. Please get the information for them on a memory stick and make sure they only get what’s in the warrant.”

  Aaron looked up from whatever task he was doing, briefly startled. When comprehension crossed his face, he swallowed the gum in his mouth and said, “Okay.”

  “We’d like hard copies, too,” Russell chimed in. Sweater Vest made a grand gesture of rolling his eyes.

  “Whatever,” he said exasperatedly. “Give them hard copies too.” He stormed importantly out of the room.

  Aaron held his hand out for the warrant. Rus
sell had only given it a cursory read, but he knew it called for any information that might be related to Random1289’s email activity, inclusive of everything from the time he or she opened the account until the time the warrant was served.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Aaron said. “Why were Bastion’s panties all in a wad?”

  “It seems cooperating with the police pisses him off,” Bain said. “Who knows.”

  Aaron laughed. “You want the stuff that’s currently in his email account as well as the stuff he’s sent?”

  “Hell yes,” Bain said. “We’d like his login as well. We might want to do a bit of a sting.”

  “That’s harder,” Aaron said. “It’s all encrypted.”

  “Damn,” Bain said.

  “But I could reset his password. He would know, but we could explain it by saying it’s a system upgrade or something.”

  “Do you need his password to see the contents of his account right now?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s not raise any red flags. Let’s just get what’s there, what’s been sent and received and deleted, and any information that might lead us to identifying the account holder.”

  “Oh, that’s easy, too,” Aaron said. “We keep all IP addresses to comply with Homeland Security. If he logged in from a home computer, you can usually drive right up to his door.”

  “That will all be great,” Bain said. “I could kiss you!”

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Wow.”

  Russell stifled a laugh. Bain was gorgeous, and when she was outside her territory, her cop act was a little softer, so poor Aaron, who looked like the only girl he’d ever been with was virtual, clearly didn’t know how to handle such a statement. His fingers started flying over the keys on his keyboard.

  “Got something,” he said triumphantly, as if the kiss Bain had offered was real and contingent on how quickly he could produce results. “Man, whoever this is keeps a clean inbox.”

  He turned one of his screens around. On it, there was an email inbox with one message, subject “Fr. Christmas,” from Chris Jackson. It was unread.

  “Can we open that without marking it as read?” Russell knew in a traditional email program, that was trivial, but this was server-level stuff, so he was a little less confident.