Afraid of the Dark (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-five

D
ouglas Road,” the driver said as the Metro-Dade bus squeaked to a stop.

Vince rose and offered a sincere “Thank you” on his way out; bus drivers were supposed to call out stops for the blind, but not all of them did. The smell of diesel fumes engulfed him as the bus pulled away, and Vince could hear the
click-clack
of Sam’s nails on the sidewalk as his four-legged friend led him to the crosswalk.

“Time for a doggy pedicure, buddy.”

Vince stopped at the crosswalk, checked his GPS navigator, and waited for the familiar female robotic voice:
“Go one hundred yards, and your destination is on the right.”
The traffic light changed with an audible
click
, and Sam led the way across the street.

Vince had visited MLFC headquarters before, but his mental image of it was sketchy. Although he had received a full tour, Chuck Mays’ idea of being descriptive for the benefit of his blind friend was simply to add his all-purpose adverb to everything. The offices weren’t big; they were f-ing big. The computers weren’t superfast; they were super f-ing fast.

“You have arrived
,” announced the navigation system. Sam stopped, and by Vince’s calculation, they were directly in front of Chuck’s building.

“Over here, Paulo,” said Chuck. “What are you, fucking blind?”

The guy had a way with words.

“Too nice of a day to sit in the office,” said Chuck. “Thought we’d walk down to the pond and feed the ducks.”

Vince hesitated. No matter where they were, whenever Chuck said something about a walk down to the pond to feed the ducks, Vince detected the distinct odor of marijuana in the air. Some guys just seemed to get a rush flouting the law under a cop’s nose, even if the cop was blind.

“There’s no pond here,” said Vince, “and probably no ducks, either.”

“Busted. Guess I’ll settle for a cigarette.”

They found a bench in the shade on the other side of the building, away from traffic noises. A light breeze felt good on Vince’s face. He opened his backpack and emptied a water bottle into a travel-size bowl for Sam. Chuck was wired on caffeine overload and dominated the small talk—everything from his new receptionist’s great set of tits to the latest stupid bureaucrat at the Division of Motor Vehicles to hand over twenty thousand driver’s license numbers to hackers in the Ukraine by clicking on a bogus link for free porn. Finally, Chuck took a breath, and Vince got straight to the point of his visit.

“This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” said Vince, “but sometimes I can’t remember what McKenna looked like.”

It was a rare occurrence, but Chuck was actually silenced. Vince heard only the breeze stirring the palm fronds overhead.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Chuck, clearly not knowing how to respond.

Vince sensed his uneasiness—“a guy thing”—but there was something he needed to say. “It’s strange. My grandmother, who has been dead for over two decades, I can picture perfectly in my mind. But with my brother, who I see every week, it’s now almost impossible for me to attach a face to his voice.”

Chuck lit up another cigarette. “What about me? How can you forget my ugly mug?”

Vince stayed on a serious track. “The way I described this to Alicia is to imagine that there is a big photo album in my mind. If people are part of my past, they stay there forever, just as they were. But if I make them a part of my new life, their image fades. The more contact I have with them, the more they are defined by things that don’t depend on sight.”

“Well, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you remember McKenna?”

“She’s the exception. When I think of that night, I don’t see McKenna the young woman anymore. I see McKenna the five-year-old girl who used to jump into my arms when I came to visit. It’s getting so that my memory of that day—that horrible day—is one of a five-year-old girl.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“On the surface, you’re right. But she wasn’t five when she was murdered. And no matter how much evidence we concealed, we weren’t going to make her five.”

“Nobody hid any evidence, Vince.”

“I’m talking about the text message from her cell phone.
FMLTWIA.
”

“I know what you’re talking about. Hacking into her provider’s network and zapping it from her cellular records was my version of child’s play.”

“And I never told anyone a thing about it.”

“There was no reason for anyone to know.”

Vince shifted uneasily. He hated moments like these, when people could see the angst on his face and he could see nothing on theirs.

“Look, at the time, we were of one mind,” said Vince. “The last thing we wanted was a rag-sheet reporter dragging McKenna’s reputation through the mud. But without that text message, the only evidence we had was the recording of her dying declaration—which
I
screwed up. The text would have put Jamal Wakefield at the scene of the crime. What nineteen-year-old guy wouldn’t have come running in response to a message like that?”

“It’s hard to run from a secret detention facility.”

“You don’t really believe that line Swyteck has been selling, do you?”

Chuck took a long drag from his cigarette. “Jamal didn’t kill McKenna.”

“Don’t patronize me. If I had stayed on the line with the nine-one-one operator and let McKenna talk to her, the case against Jamal would have been a lock. There was only a hearsay problem because I recorded it to something as unreliable as my home answering machine.”

“You need to stop beating yourself up over that. The text message doesn’t convict Jamal. It actually proves his innocence.”

“How can you say that?”

“For one thing, McKenna would never have sent a text like that. Not that I knew everything about my daughter, but that much I did know. The man who killed her picked up her cell phone and texted Jamal. It was all part of setting up her ex-boyfriend.”

Vince paused, confused. “When did you decide this?”

“After I heard Jamal’s alibi, I did the math.”

“Math?”

“The time of death was a time certain. So was the time of the text message. We also know the severity of McKenna’s wounds. With a little input from medical and forensic experts, I was able to make a fairly reliable calculation of how long a healthy teenage girl of McKenna’s height and weight could survive those injuries. That gave me an approximate time of the attack. The bottom line is that McKenna was probably stabbed
before
the text was sent.”

Vince considered it. Some things weren’t measurable with mathematical certainty, but if anyone could do it, Chuck could. “So Jamal was framed?”

“That’s my calculation.”

Sam rested his head on Vince’s leg. Vince patted his huge head, then scratched him in his favorite spot: on the forehead, right between the eyes. Sam’s eyes.
Vince’s
eyes. “Which means that the son of a bitch who did this is definitely still out there.”

“Three years and running,” said Chuck.

“Which means Swyteck was right.”

“Yeah,” said Chuck. “So right that Jamal’s mother intends to sue me under some bullshit theory.”

“How do you know that?”

“Jamal’s uncle called me. He said he was hiring Jack Swyteck, and that it was going to be the courtroom equivalent of jihad.”

“Well, if it’s war they want . . .”

A puff of smoke hit Vince in the face.

“I got a better idea,” said Chuck.

“Tell me.”

There was another cloud of smoke, then Chuck turned into Marlon Brando. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Chapter Thirty-six

J
ack entered the MLFC Computer Center through a fireproof door and in the company of Chuck Mays, Vince Paulo, and a security guard who made the other men look like Lilliputians.

“Watch your step,” said Mays.

Boxes of records and supplies cluttered the ramp, and it impressed Jack the way Paulo negotiated his way with just a walking stick. The guard left them at another glass door, which Mays opened with a passkey. It led to a large open space that was so well air-conditioned that Jack felt an immediate chill. Inside, rows of supercomputers hummed beneath an expansive drop ceiling with cool fluorescent lighting.

“This single computer center is bigger than my entire first company was,” said Mays.

Jack didn’t fancy himself a computer whiz, so rather than interrupt with a stupid question, he simply let Mays keep talking.

Mays continued. “If you pulled up these floors, you’d see miles and miles of cables. That’s our information pipeline. Every minute of every day we’re sucking in new names, ages, addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses. We get records on your marital status, employment, home values, estimated income. Your children’s ages, your ethnicity, your religion, the books you read, the products you order by phone or online, and where you go on vacation. And that’s just the purchase behavior and lifestyle data.”

“There’s more?” asked Jack.

Mays smiled. “Follow me.”

He led them around a pod of work cubicles to another row of smaller computers.

“Don’t let the size fool you,” said Mays. “These are my fastest ever, and they hold more information than you can fathom. Ever heard of a petabyte, Swyteck?”

“No, but I’m sure a shot of penicillin will clear you right up.”

“Funny. The computer memory here is measured in petabytes.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Imagine a stack of King James Bibles that’s fifty thousand miles high. That’s one petabyte.”

“That’s a lot of ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ verily I say unto you.”

“We call it grid computing, which is basically a network of supercomputers. All day long we’re analyzing and matching the information we gather to create a detailed portrait of hundreds of millions of adults. And it all happens in seconds, because each portrait has its own sixteen-digit code unique to each person.”

Jack’s gaze swept the room. Each computer looked identical to the one beside it, except for a somewhat goofy motif that was unique to each machine. Some were marked with the characters from
The Simpsons
or
SpongeBob SquarePants
. Others were identified by muscle cars, like Maserati or Ferrari.

“What kind of information is collected here?” Jack asked.

“I can’t tell you,” said Mays. “But you might have guessed that the shark fins are for legal actions—divorces, foreclosures, and bankruptcy filings, mostly.”

Jack wondered what nuggets from his own divorce were in there.

“So that’s the end of our tour, ladies and gentlemen,” said Mays. “Now let’s talk settlement.”

“Settlement?” said Jack.

“Jamal’s mother wants to know who killed her son,” said Mays. “I want to know who killed my wife and daughter. My friend Vince wants to know who turned him into the only guy in the room who can’t see what’s going on. So let’s cut through this bullshit about Jamal’s mother suing my ass because it’s somehow my fault that her son is dead.”

“What are you proposing?” asked Jack.

“After you left my house the other night, something stuck in my mind. Basically, we shared information. I gave you a copy of a text-message exchange between my wife and the man who the police think was her killer. You told me something that Jamal said to you in private.”

“That his interrogators in Prague threatened to kill McKenna if he didn’t talk.”

“Exactly,” said Mays. “You said that it was technically still covered by the attorney-client privilege even though Jamal was dead.”

“Fortunately, it was something that Jamal had already authorized me to make public, so I was free to share it.”

“Yeah, brilliant,” said Mays. “Jamal’s dead. Now we want to nail the son of a bitch who killed him and the two most important people in my life. So fuck the attorney-client privilege. You have information straight from Jamal that I can’t get from any other source, am I right?”

“That’s a fair statement,” said Jack.

“Here’s the deal: We pool our knowledge. Everything Vince and I know about McKenna and Shada goes into the pot. Everything you and Jamal’s mother know goes right in with it. And I mean everything. Anything you learned from anyone about Mr. Chang who died at the Lincoln Road Mall. Everything you know about the girl who called you from London. And most important, everything Jamal ever told you.”

“It’s the broadest net possible,” said Vince. “We realize this might include some things that Jamal’s family might not want to tell the police. That’s why we’re doing this privately, through Chuck. Not through the police.”

“We plug all of it into my supercomputers,” Chuck said with a wave of his hand. “We run the same kind of searches I run for Homeland Security when they ask for help finding terrorists. And we find this fucker.”

Mays’ emphasis was on finding the killer, but Jack was hung up on the first point. “Wait a second,” said Jack. “You run searches for the government?”

Mays chuckled. “No offense to my friend Vince here, but do you think the government has this kind of capability? The fires were still burning in the World Trade Center when the FBI came calling on the major players in information technology for clues about the nineteen hijackers and their accomplices. For a stretch, half my company was on it, all on my own dime.”

“Are you still doing national security work?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Is that what Project Round Up is about?”

“I said it’s none of your business.”

Jack glanced at Paulo. With a cop for a best friend, Mays was already connected to law enforcement. Jack probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the ties ran deeper than the Miami Police.

“I believe there’s a proposal on the table,” said Vince.

“Let me say a couple of things,” said Jack. “First, I have tremendous respect for you, Vince, even though it may not have seemed that way in the courtroom.”

“I’m over that,” said Vince. “You did what you had to do. I understand.”

“It’s important to me that things are cool between us.”

“We’re cool,” said Vince.

“Good,” said Jack, and then his gaze swept across the computer center. “But I have to be honest. This business gives me the creeps. Not just your company. I’m talking about the whole information revolution. Call it a Big Brother complex. There’s a bias in me, and that bias makes it hard for me to trust guys like Chuck Mays.”

Mays was completely unfazed, as if he’d heard that speech before. “You probably weren’t whistling that tune on September twelfth. But that’s another debate. Does your client want to find out who killed her son or doesn’t she?”

“I understand what you’re saying. And I will speak to Maryam about your offer.”

“You do that. And here’s something to sweeten the pot. Tell her that if she agrees to my proposal, I’ll pay her five hundred thousand dollars.”

Paulo looked surprised, which Jack noted.

“You’re actually going to write a check to Maryam Wakefield?” said Jack.

“Not exactly,” said Mays. “I would sign over my rights as beneficiary under Jamal’s life insurance policy.”

Jack did another double take—but it was mild compared to Paulo’s visceral expression of disbelief. Like a smart cop, Paulo had the good sense to hold his tongue until he and his friend were alone. Jack felt no such constraint.

“Are you saying that you took out a half-million-dollar life insurance policy on Jamal Wakefield?” said Jack.

“Actually, it was a million. But I’ll give his mother half, and I’ll keep half. That’s fair.”

“Chuck, let’s talk about this later,” said Paulo.

“What?” said Mays. “I have life insurance on everyone who works for me.”

Jack said, “A million dollars on a nineteen-year-old employee who also happens to be dating your daughter? That strikes me as a little . . . awkward, shall we say?”

“A lot of companies have life insurance on their employees. It’s cheap, especially on the young guys, and it pays a nice benefit. What’s the big damn deal?”

“No big deal at all,” said Jack, his stare tightening. “So long as you had absolutely nothing to do with the disappearance and murder of the man who was accused of killing your wife and daughter.”

Mays narrowed his eyes with anger, and Jack got the distinct impression that, had Paulo not been in the room, Mays would have grabbed him by the throat.

“My offer is good for twenty-four hours. Get me an answer from your client—before I change my mind.”