Rough Draft (32 page)

It was nearly four in the morning by the time Hannah sat down in front of Randall's computer and switched it on. Alone in the house, still she was feeling guilty, as though he
would walk in any second and find her snooping on him. She had never done it before, never prowled through his drawers or poked in the back corners of his closet. She trusted her son completely. And even now, with this troubling revelation pulsing in her mind, she felt deeply uneasy about invading his privacy.

All she really wanted to do was get Stevie's address. His E-mail friend. A boy, according to Randall, who was a world-class computer prodigy. Someone she might be able to enlist to trace Fielding's broadcast back to its origin, the exact location of his hospital room.

Of course, this whole thing could wait till daylight. Hannah should go to bed, try to get a little rest, then after Randall got home from school tomorrow she could simply ask him for a way to reach his friend. But as Hannah navigated through the opening screens, then began to prowl the folders Randall had created to store his files, she felt the pang of guilt subside. Apparently her son had misled the police and her about what he'd seen. Something horrifying had sent him into shock back then and now that she had begun a fresh investigation of the events of that morning, Randall was suffering another wave of torment. If that wasn't permission enough to do all the snooping she wanted, she didn't know what was.

She scanned quickly through his school assignments. Essays she'd helped him with, a few he'd tackled on his own. There was another folder of Web pages he'd downloaded from the Internet. Scanned photographs of animals and comic book heroes and a couple of all-girl groups in slinky, revealing costumes. His computer address book was empty and she quickly exhausted his other personal folders. No E-mail addresses anywhere she could see, no old mail stored to his hard drive. She opened some of the general program files and read the file names but nothing struck her as suspicious.

Hannah sat for a while staring at the screen. If Randall wanted to conceal something from her on his hard drive he certainly had the ability to do it. It wouldn't even represent a
challenge for the boy. In only five minutes Hannah was close to exhausting her computer skills.

The only other possibility she could think of was his Internet service provider's storage system where Stevie's old E-mails might be saved. She clicked through the steps and the modem dialed into the system. Fortunately he'd stored his password and in a few seconds the opening page appeared.

Welcome Randall.

As Hannah was locating Randall's E-mail log, an electronic trill sounded from the speakers. She stiffened.

In the corner of the screen a small white box appeared. An instant message from Stevie. Apparently some kind of buddy system alerted him that Randall Keller was on-line.

“Hey Randall. Where you been?”

Hannah sat there for several moments staring at the empty message box below Stevie's welcome. The cursor pulsed inside the box, waiting for a response.

She settled her fingers on the keyboard and typed.

“Hey Stevie.”

She waited but no reply came. Thirty seconds, then a minute.

Finally the trill of another message.

“You're not Randall.”

Hannah didn't hesitate.

“I'm not?”

“No. He doesn't talk that way.”

“Okay,” she typed. “That's true. I'm not.”

“You're Hannah, his mother.”

“Good guess,” she typed.

“I've read your books.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I like Erin Barkley. She's a real tough lady. And sexy.”

“Thanks.”

“I'm ready for the new one. What's taking so long?”

“You sound like my editor.”

“So Where's Randall?”

Hannah considered it for a moment.

Then she typed, “He's sleeping over with a friend tonight.”

“Gisela? The houseboat.”

“That's right.”

“So how come you're on his 'puter?”

“Just playing around. I couldn't sleep.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I was wondering,” Hannah typed. But then she hesitated, not sure where to take this. How much she could trust this kid. If he was indeed a kid.

“Yes?”

What the hell. Frank had failed her, his buddies at the FBI were fumbling or stalling for reasons of their own.

“I was wondering if you could help me with something. A computer problem.”

“I could try.”

Hannah sat there a minute more, debating it. Then finally, she began to type, telling this total stranger what she needed to know.

When she was done she waited for several minutes before his reply came back.

It was a street address on Star Island. And below it he'd typed, “Stop by before noon. I'll show you what I've dug up.”

“You don't go to school?”

“Home schooling,” he replied.

“I'll be there,” Hannah typed back.

“Now you should probably get some sleep,” Stevie said.

“You too,” she responded.

“Fat chance.”

Hannah sat there a moment more after Stevie had signed off. This was her first instant message conversation and she was shivering at the strangeness of it Disembodied words passing back and forth through the black vacuum of cyberspace. It was nuts, laying out this private matter for some complete stranger. It was something only a totally reckless,
totally desperate woman would do. Someone like Erin Barkley. Someone like herself.

Spunky rustled in his shredded newspapers. He poked his nose through the thin bars of the birdcage. Hannah took down the carton of food pellets and dumped a few in his feeding dish. Spunky wriggled his nose at her and went to work, munching ravenously on the brown pellets.

She turned back to the computer and just as she was beginning to run down the list of Randall's recent E-mails, she noticed that in the corner of the screen, the red flag on his mailbox was popped up.

Hannah hesitated a moment, then moved the cursor and clicked on the mailbox.

The message was from someone calling herself Barbie-girl. Another insomniac pal of Randall's orbiting the electronic void.

Hannah clicked open the mail.

Barbie-girl had typed, “Hi, Rando. Here's a recent snap so you have a better idea what I look like. Better shred this when you've finished looking. Wouldn't want Mommy to get the wrong idea. Barbie-girl.”

There was a file attached to the mail. Hannah double-clicked to download the attachment.

Slowly, a photographic file resolved into view, a girl's face filling the seventeen-inch screen.

She had metallic red hair and very pale skin, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two years old. She had dull green eyes and used a garish array of blues and browns in her makeup. She had a longish nose and was squinting back over her shoulder into the camera lens. Her chin rested on her shoulder blade in a Marilyn Monroe cootchie-coo pose. The smile on the girl's narrow lips was probably meant to be coquettish, but it had all the subtlety of a hooker's come-hither leer.

Hannah sat still. It was half a minute before she managed to draw a breath. She got up from the desk and paced back through the house to the kitchen. From an open bottle in the refrigerator she poured herself a glass of Chardonnay, gulped it down, and poured another. She carried it back
through the silent house and took her place again at Randall's desk.

She had another sip of wine, then set it aside and went back to the E-mail log and clicked on the icon to open the folder. Three other folders were stashed inside. Once was titled
Stevie,
one called
Barbie-girl,
and the last one
Dad
.

Hannah fumbled with the mouse, nearly knocked it off the desk.

“That fucking bastard.”

When she regained control of her faltering hand, she guided the cursor to the
Dad
folder and clicked. There were a couple of dozen files inside, each one dated, starting back in January, ten months ago. About the same time Randall had created his Web page and hung it out on the Internet, a virtual post office box. Making himself available to anyone searching for the name Randall Keller. Which is how his father, Pieter Thomasson, that goddamn son of a bitch, must have located him. And for the last ten months the bastard had been courting her son, engaging him in some kind of E-mail relationship, no doubt trying to plant seeds of discontent or betrayal.

Hannah chose the first file, a message dated the seventeenth of January.

But when she clicked it twice, the file wouldn't open. A small gray box appeared instead, asking for her password. She tried typing
Randall,
but that wasn't it. She tried
Keller,
then
Spunky,
but was refused.
Pieter
was rejected and
Thomasson
was as well.

She sat back in the chair. A screech owl was hooting in the neighbor's yard. The sea breeze had stiffened and she could hear the rattle of the palm fronds outside Randall's window, and the quiet tick of the wood house resisting the steady pressure of the wind.

In the middle drawer of his desk she found a box of floppy disks. She punched one of them into his disk drive and in a few seconds she'd copied all the
Dad
E-mail files to the floppy. She backed out of the
Dad
folder and then opened the one named
Barbie-girl.
Twenty-odd files starting
back in July. The Barbie files were password-protected as well, so she exited the folder and copied it to the same floppy disk.

The
Stevie
files did not require a password. But it only took her a couple of minutes, scanning through the first four or five, to see that the conversation that passed between these two was innocuous, the talk of boys who shared an obsession for computers and the arcane intricacies of software programming.

She got up slowly from the desk and carried her wine through the dark house. In her bedroom she switched on the small reading lamp perched on her bedside table. She opened the top drawer. Beside the .357 Smith & Wesson lay the copy of
First Light.
She plumped the pillows and propped herself against them and opened the book to page 276.

There was only a single phrase underlined.

She closed the book, lay it on the bed beside her and reached over for the phone.

Frank Sheffield answered on the first ring.

His voice was husky, as if he'd been screaming at the bare walls ever since she'd left him.

“Are you all right, Hannah?”

“I'm fine.”

“You don't sound fine. What's wrong? What happened?”

“I'm fine.”

The line was empty for several moments.

“Hooked up page 276.”

“And?”

“Fifty-yard line at the Orange Bowl.”

“That's all it says?”

“That's all.”

He was quiet for a second or two, then said, “So does this mean you're back on the case?”

“I'm back.”

“Good. I'm glad to hear it.”

“How about noon, Frank?”

“The Orange Bowl at noon. Okay, sure. I can be there.”

“You starting to see the pattern?”

“Pattern?”

“The Bayshore house. Stiltsville. The Orange Bowl. A place in plain view. Exposed. Easily monitored.”

“Yeah, that's true.”

“Frank?”

“Yeah.”

“Does the name Helen Shane mean anything to you?”

She thought she heard him swallow.

“Helen Shane?”

“Never mind, Frank. I'll see you at noon. North entrance. We can go in together.”

“Fine,” he said. “Noon, north entrance. And listen, Hannah.”

“Yeah?”

“I'll get on those computer guys. Crack the whip. I agree, it shouldn't take this long to locate the source of a Web address. They may even have something by now.”

“Good, Frank. You do that Crack the whip.”

She hung up and sat there for a while staring at the phone, listening to the push of the steady breeze against that old wood house.

Hal Bonner was changing planes in Atlanta. It was six in the morning and the plane that was to take him to Nashville was parked at the gate just about to start boarding. Hal was talking to a man in a brown corduroy suit. The man was red-haired and gangly and he had huge feet inside his huge wingtip shoes. His portable computer was perched on his lap and his fingers were still resting on the keyboard, but a few minutes earlier he'd stopped working on the memo he was typing. The man wasn't looking at Hal. He wasn't looking at his computer screen. He wasn't looking at anything at all. The gangly man hadn't so much as twitched since Hal started letting him know about the feeding practices of the bearded vulture of Eurasia.

How it lives on a diet of bone and marrow. How it spots a carcass from above, and circles in and lands, then waits patiently near the carrion while all the other jungle scavengers strip away the meat and gristle and lick up all the blood. When they're finished with their meal the bearded vulture hops forward to take his turn, and consume the skeletal remains.

But the femurs of antelope or gazelle are not easy for a bird to crack open. So the bearded vulture had to discover a way to take advantage of the one skill that is his greatest strength—flying.

With a bone grasped in its talons, the bearded vulture flies around till it locates a slab of rock. Then after it gains a little altitude, it dives at the rock at speeds of more than fifty
miles an hour, turning away at the last second and letting the bone go so it smashes against the boulder. The vulture might have to repeat the trick two dozen times to pulverize a single bone. Though the splintered parts don't have to be all that small because the bearded vulture can swallow a ten-inch piece of bone without any trouble.