First Class Killing (21 page)

“Maybe the top women have regulars,” I said, trying the best explanation that came to me. That didn’t mean it was a good one. “Maybe they can plan their liaisons further in advance. But they would still have to do some swapping. Where do they fall on your list?”

“Who am I looking for, exactly?”

“Just look for Angel and Sally. Velesco and Prentiss.”

He took his glasses off and held his list of swappers at arm’s length. Every once in a while, he’d put it flat on the table and check something from another pile. Eventually, he had his answer. “In the top one hundred.”

“Out of six hundred fifty total at the base, right?”

“Yes, but only eight-five percent are women.”

“Would it be possible that they could get their dates to come to them? Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

I went back to my chair and settled in with my arms folded on the desk in front of me.

“You seem disappointed,” he said.

“No, not at all. More like devastated. That report only gets the soldiers, not the generals. You have to cut off the head of this snake to kill it. Angel would just hire more women.”

“You do not know that.”

“There are so many things we don’t know. If Angel and the others are hookers, why aren’t they on that report? What’s a pool girl? What was Monica up to, with this blackmail scheme, and is Angel part of that?” I glanced at the file at my elbow. “What happened to Robin Sevitch?”

Harvey leaned in and put both palms on the desktop. He looked as if he were making handprints in cement. “We have accomplished much. You have accomplished a great deal, and if we were to stop now, which I suggest we do, you can be happy with what you have done.”

“I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished anything.” I picked up the file and climbed out of the chair. “I’m going home to bed.”

It was after three when I walked into my apartment. It seemed as if it should be much later, but only because I had been up for almost two days. It was a brisk afternoon. Since my apartment basked in the morning sun, it chilled in the afternoon shadows, so it was cool inside. I dropped today’s slug of mail on the counter, punched up the first of two phone messages, and went to open one of the radiator valves.

Za, got your message. I was thinking…I’ve been going running most mornings I’ve been up here along the river, and I was wondering…if you wanted to come…I mean, I would like for you to come with me if you can make it. If you want to.

There was a pause where he could have been thinking what I was, that it would be like old times for Jamie and me to go running together.

Anyway, if you want to meet me, I’ll be at the Dartmouth footbridge at five-thirty tomorrow morning. If you can’t, that’s cool, too. I’ll catch up with you later.

It was good to hear his voice. There was something about the case and being in Angel’s world that made me feel lonely and hungry for some kind of deeper connection, one that Harvey and I couldn’t give each other. In spite of all our ups and downs, Jamie was still the one person in the world who knew me best. When I called his cell phone, I got his voice mail. I left a message that I would meet him to go running.

I erased Jamie and punched up the next message.

Dear, where
are
you? Have you fallen from the face of the earth? I cannot find you anywhere.

The sound of Tristan’s voice was instantly guilt-inducing. I had not answered his calls to my cell phone, once because I’d been with Angel and twice when I’d been with Harvey. If I’d answered, I would have had to make up some story about where I was. I had already lied to Tristan enough.

I want to know how things went with brother Jamie. You have called him, haven’t you? Also, Barry and I are having a small dinner party tomorrow at eight. A couple of his real estate friends are coming. Irene is bringing Claire. We want you, of course, and anyone you might want to bring. Bring Jamie! It will be very extravagant. So RSVP me, dahling. Talk to you soon.
There was a pause, but he didn’t hang up.
I hope…is everything all right? Call me when you get this. I’m worried about you.

I picked up the phone and dialed, but it wasn’t to call Tristan. I dialed Felix in Miami.

“Hey, Miss Shanahan.”

It never failed to throw me when someone answered the phone with my name instead of hello. As far as I was concerned, caller ID had disrupted the very fabric of the universe. “Um…Felix?”

“Hi. I’m glad you called. I was just working on your stuff.”

“So, you got everything? No problem with the encryption?”

“Huh? Oh, no. Piece of cake. I’ve already figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“The Web site you sent me. I know exactly what he’s doing. It’s pretty cool, too. I haven’t seen this before. Not personally. I’ve read about it.”

He sounded enthused, which caused me to feel a flutter of hope as I opened the refrigerator door and stared in. Could this actually be good news? “What’s he doing?”

“Using time-limited reverse proxy servers. I think it started in Russia or Estonia or…I don’t know, one of those Eastern Bloc countries.”

“Time-limited what?”

“Oh, it’s a new trick that hackers use to hide their identity.”

“Hide their identity?” I felt less hopeful. I closed the refrigerator and opened the freezer and discovered that I’d already eaten all my four-minute microwave meals. I would have to settle for a protein shake. I got out the blender, the protein powder, and an ice tray. “How does it work, Felix?”

“What he does is download a rogue program over the Internet to some innocent person’s PC, one with DSL, because with DSL the door is always open. He hijacks that machine and uses its high-speed connection to do his stuff, but he sets it up so that it looks like it’s coming from a big server, a master Web server. Whoever’s PC it is never even knows it’s being used as a proxy. It makes it almost impossible to track.”

“Hold on, Felix.” I hit the puree button and let the blender run until dinner was ready. Then I took my milkshake and retired to the couch. “Can’t you track back through the proxy to the server to the hacker?”

“Nuh-uh. That’s the time-limited part. What makes it work is that he uses these proxy PCs only for a few minutes at a time before rotating. By the time I identify the first proxy, he’s on to the next one. It’s a constantly moving target. It’s pretty smart. It’s what makes him almost completely anonymous, which is why I haven’t found him yet. Oh, I guess that’s, like, bad news, huh?”

“You can’t track him?”

“I can track him, but the quickest anyone has done it is in seven or eight days.” Which was too long. All I had was five days.

“So, this guy is good?”

“This guy is very good, Miss Shanahan. But,” he hastened to add, “not better than me. No. No way he’s better. I’ll find a way to track him. I promise you.”

Dueling hackers. This should be interesting. Showdown at the IT Corral.

“If you can do it in less than seven days, that would be very helpful, Felix. Did you actually get into the site?”

“I did, but there’s not much in there. Just some input screens for name, address, and flight number. Do you want me to send you a password so you can look at it?”

“Please. Send it to my partner, too, if you don’t mind.”

“You have a partner?”

I gave him Harvey’s e-mail address and an explanation. The last time Felix and I had worked together, I had been someone between jobs looking into a friend’s death.

“Wow. So you’ll be a real private investigator with a license and everything?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You are so cool, Miss S. You’ll be so good at this.”

It was unexpectedly and deeply satisfying to feel his enthusiasm. It was exactly what I needed to hear after Harvey’s grim and graphic scolding. “Is there anything I could get you, Felix, that might speed up the process?”

“Just send me anything you can get. You never know which piece is going to be the one, you know?”

I had another thought. I found my backpack, dragged it over, and dug out my notepad.

“Felix, I don’t know what you can do with this, but take it down.” I read him Arthur Margolies’s e-mail address, which I’d pulled out of the OrangeAir reservations system, and spelled out his name.

“Who’s this person?”

“I think he’s the victim of an extortion scheme, probably perpetrated by a hooker named Monica. Monica Russeau. She might have been sending demands through e-mail. Do you think you could get into his computer through his e-mail program?”

“I’ll check it out. If he has DSL, I might be able to get in and scope it out.”

“Look for anything from, to, or related in any way to Monica Russeau.”

“Okay. I might be able to track back to hers, too. Would that help?”

“Anything helps at this point, Felix.”

After we hung up, it was quiet. There wasn’t much going on in my building at three in the afternoon. I reached up and probed the tender areas of my throat. When I touched all the places Mr. Lemon Chiffon had squeezed so effectively, it took me back to the moments before I lost consciousness, the paralyzing fear, and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed and helpless.

Maybe Harvey was right. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Maybe this case was already as good as it needed to get. Maybe my deepest, darkest fear was not a fear at all but a fact: I was already in way over my head.

I sat back, drank my shake, and felt at least a partial rejuvenation from the infusion of protein. I thought about what Felix had said, and another interpretation occurred to me. If, indeed, I was already in over my head, perhaps the key phrase was that I was
already in,
and the only way to get to the other side was to keep swimming.

I went to my desk, dug out my base roster, and looked up Monica Russeau’s home phone number. I didn’t expect to get an answer, and I didn’t. I hung up without leaving a message. I wasn’t about to give her fair warning. She hadn’t given any to me.

Chapter

24

T
HE STONE STEPS ON THE BANK OF THE
Charles River were dark and deserted. Jamie wasn’t there yet. I had gotten a good night’s sleep and rolled out of bed with a lot of energy. The fresh air felt good.

In the early-morning darkness, all the sounds were magnified. Early-fall leaves drifted across the stone steps, dead and dried, pointed tips brushing the ground like fingernails. Across the river down at the salt-and-pepper bridge, the sound of the red line blasted through deep quiet that seemed to rise up from the river like fog.

Stretching would have been a good idea. On a cool morning like this, my perennially tight hamstring had the feel of hardened chewing gum. But I hated stretching, so instead I watched the rowers out on the water. I loved to watch them on the river early in the morning, knifing through the black water in their thin slices of boat. The solo rowers seemed especially peaceful.

I glanced up and saw Jamie coming over the footbridge. It wasn’t light enough to see his face, but I recognized the way he walked. When he got closer, I saw that he was elegantly disheveled, as if he’d reached into a dark closet and pulled out whatever was on top of a pile of really nice running gear.

“It’s cold,” he said. He bounced on the balls of his feet, hands squeezed into fists at his side, shoulders pulled forward. “Which way do you usually go?”

“West. This way.” I pointed us in the right direction, and we were off. He ran faster than my normal pace; his legs were longer. I was huffing and puffing before we even got to the Mass Avenue Bridge, and even though I didn’t want to, I had to give in.

“Jamie, we have three and a half miles to go. Can we ease off the pace?”

“Oh, sorry.” He slowed, and I felt better as we crossed the river, running through the pools of light draped around the bottom of the streetlights. The wind, as usual, pushed hard against us on that stretch.

It felt strange being with Jamie. Or maybe it was the strangeness that felt strange. I wanted to try to make it go away, maybe by telling him what I was really doing, that I was starting a new career. I wanted to share my excitement with him. But I had to find just the right approach, just the right—

“Za, what’s going on with you?”

I reached up and wiped the moisture from my cheek with the back of a dry hand. The cool air in the morning always made my right eye tear up. Never my left, only my right.

“What do you mean?”

“How’s this flight attendant thing working out for you? Do you like it?”

“Yeah. Sure. It’s okay.”

“How long do you think you’ll do it?”

“I don’t know.” We hit the other bank of the river. The second we made the turn east, the wind disappeared.

Jamie cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to be patronizing. I really don’t, but are you doing it because you couldn’t find anything else?”

“No, I found a job. A management job earlier this year, but—”

“You did? That’s great. What was it?” Something snapped into place for him as he went from uncomfortable uncertainty to relief. It was in his voice, as though we could now be friends again. We were back on the same page. My eye would not stop tearing.

“VP of operations with a start-up carrier.”

“Impressive. I guess it depends on how big, though. Could be a big title with no responsibility. Stock options?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Salary increase?”

“It was, but—”

“Bonus?”

“Yes, but obviously I didn’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, it was in Detroit, but that wasn’t—”

“I can remember when you’d move anywhere for the right opportunity.” We were passing the Harvard boathouse and the boats that were docked there. In another month or two, the plastic coverings would come out, and they would spend the coldest months of the winter shrink-wrapped. “But,” he said, “I’m sure that gets old. I can see why you wouldn’t want to live in Detroit, anyway.”

He was quiet after that. All I heard was his steady breathing and his feet hitting the pavement.

“Look,” I said, “I know it seems strange to be doing something so different, but isn’t that okay? We don’t have to keep doing the same thing just because we’ve always done it, right? That’s what we said the other night about respecting each other’s choices?”