19

She gave Melanie a couple of tasks. The first was to connect her with the Westmuir Record. A panicked Rebecca Portman came on the line. “Mr. Sunderland is on the warpath,” she said. “He just called from Atlanta and I had to tell him about our Thursday edition. I, um, have a message he made me write down. He told me to read it to you.”

“I didn’t call you, Miss Portman, to pick up messages from your boss.”

“I’m sorry, but, just the way he sounded…”

“I have a couple of needs you can take care of for me. Do I still have your attention?” Portman murmured that she did. “The first thing is, I’ve decided you can run Colin Eldwin’s story again. In fact, I want you to run both chapters four and five in Monday’s edition.”

“Both?”

“Yes. Is that going to get you in trouble again?”

“I’m afraid it will. Maybe I should read you Mr. Sunderland’s message, Ma’am? He asked me to read it to you.”

“Does it have the word feckless in it?”

“Um…” She was scanning the note. “Not exactly.”

“Is your boyfriend in today?”

“Who?”

“Beaker, Miss Portman, your nervous little friend in IT. I want him in my station house in fifteen minutes. Tell him to put all the emails Colin Eldwin has sent you – all of them – on a CD and have them bring it over to me. I have some questions for him.”

She thought she could hear Portman’s heart pounding over the phone. “He’s uh, not in today, Detective. Friday is usually pretty quiet.”

Hazel wanted to reach through the phone and wring the little dope’s neck. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Um -”

“Tell him I won’t keep him long. And I’m ‘Detective Inspector’ to you.”

“Sorry, Ma’am.” Hazel closed her eyes and held her tongue. “He really wants me to read this note to you.”

Cartwright appeared in the doorway. Hazel covered the mouthpiece. “What?”

“Mr. Pedersen says he’s having brunch with his wife. Is it urgent?”

“Tell him to come in when he’s done. And if he’s at Ladyman’s have him bring me a peameal bacon sandwich.”

She put the phone back to her ear. Portman was evidently reciting Sunderland ’s message. “‘… and don’t think I won’t.’ I’m sorry for the strong language, Ma’am. But he insisted.”

“My ears are burning. Tell him you could hear me swallowing nervously. Hey, do you want to know what we called your boss in high school?”

“No.”

“We called him ‘Pokey’ because he was always in other people’s business. Probably the boys called him that too because he had a small penis. He might still answer to it.” There was silence on the other end. “Send me your little friend, Miss Portman. Burn him his CD if you know how, and get him over here. He has thirteen minutes now.”

Hubert Mackie – that was the kid’s name – showed up fourteen minutes later, out of breath and looking panicked. Cartwright offered him a cup of coffee, but he told her coffee made him sweat and she gave him a glass of water instead. He was wearing a black cloth jacket with a broken zipper and his wispy hair kept falling over his forehead. “I guess we’re going to need a computer,” he said, and Hazel led him out to Wingate’s work station. The kid walked through the pen with his head down, muttering “hello” left and right and pushing his hair away from his eyes.

Hazel pulled the chair out for him, and Mackie sat, apologizing as he did, and Hazel asked him if he wanted a sedative.

“Oh no, Ma’am, that’d just make me sleepy.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

“What is it you were wanting to know, Ma’am?”

“That story the paper is running – did the chapters all come from the same email address?”

He’d popped the CD into Wingate’s drive and was waiting for it to show up on his desktop. “I had Rebecca turn the emails you wanted to see into rtfs to make things easier.”

“Meaning?”

“Just text files, Ma’am. They’ll open in any word processor.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. He used the first two fingers of each hand to type and he seemed to be faster than Cartwright with all ten. The windows started opening on the screen, blooming and expanding until there were more than a dozen. “Thirteen in total, Ma’am.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“There’s his email address right there,” the kid said, putting his finger against the screen. The address read [email protected].

“Is it always the same? Like, is it coming from the same email address every time?”

“Yeah,” said Mackie.

“So that means it’s him writing to you guys.”

“Well, it’s his email address.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?” she said, getting impatient.

“It’s just that, you know, when you write an email, there’s an IP address attached to the ISP both sending and receiving the email -”

“English, Beaker!”

“I’m trying!” He hunched over the keyboard for a second, making an effort to become invisible. He spoke faster now. “IP: Internet Protocol. Every machine, you know, a computer or a device of any kind, that’s connected to a network – like the internet – has an IP address. It’s a unique identifier, it tells you where the device is located. Most of the time. ISP: Internet Service Provider. Simply said, your email originates at one IP address, that of your ISP, and arrives at another, the IP of your recipient’s ISP.”

“Fine. Where were these emails sent from?”

The kid started cycling through the text files. He ran his finger down a long string of gobbledegook that preceded the first bunch of the email messages. “Well, these all both originate and terminate at a Mayfair hub.” He quickly put his hands in the air to keep Hazel from yelling at him again. “A hub is the physical location where the ISP has its computers, and where all information is received, processed, and/or sent along. Eldwin’s provider is Ontcom, which has a hub in Mayfair, and ours is Caneast, which does too. So he sent these from his computer to the Ontcom servers, they sent them along to the Caneast servers, and we uploaded them to our hard drives from the Caneast servers.”

“So, broken telephone.”

“Sort of,” he said. “Except in the internet version, you can trace every step of the journey.”

“What about the rest of the emails? I want to know where chapters three, four, and five came from.”

He brought those up. She could see for herself that they still came from [email protected]. “These were sent from the internet, but still from his account.”

“Meaning.”

His shoulders slumped a little. “How come you don’t know this stuff? Ma’am.”

“You want me to slap your cranium?”

“You can send email from your desktop, you know, at home, off a program, or you can send it from the internet itself, from your ISP’s webmail program – it’s called a ‘shell’ and they all have one – which means you’re logging on to your account from some homepage – and this could be anywhere in the world – and you can send and receive mail from there.”

“Does the IP address change?”

“Yes,” he said. “Different servers.” He quickly added: “Servers are machines connected to the internet.”

“Can you find the location of these servers?”

“Yes,” he said, and he opened the browser on Wingate’s computer. He was copying and pasting strings of numbers onto a webpage. He clicked something and waited. Then he said, “Or no.”

“What do you mean no?”

“I mean these later chapters were sent from Colin Eldwin’s email address through the shell, but he was anonymized.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

Mackie turned in the chair, panicked anew. “Please, Ma’am, don’t slap my cranium. There’s all kinds of ways to be anonymous on the internet these days. You can send email, surf, chat, all anonymously. You can be untraceable. Anyone can do it.”

“So we can’t know it’s Eldwin physically sending the emails?”

“That’s right,” he said, and he sounded proud of her. “Someone could have his password and is using his account. That’s all they’d need. Then they could cloak, log on, and send email and no one would be the wiser unless they ran the IPs, like we just did.”

Hazel stared at the screen. The string of numbers Mackie had input was now superimposed over an image of planet Earth with a big yellow question mark beside them. “So what you’re saying is these last three chapters could have come from anywhere.”

“Well, they came from Ontcom’s shell, but the person who logged on to the shell could have been in Mozambique for all we know. This person used a site called Anonymice to cloak themselves. It says it here in the expanded headers.”

“What if we serve Anonymice with a warrant?”

“Good luck,” said Mackie. “These sites don’t keep any records at all. They don’t know who’s accessing their service. Theoretically, you could identify a user if you somehow got legal control of the site and you found him while he was online, because the Anonymice servers know, at some level, who’s logging on and generally where they are before they cloak them and send them forward into the internet. But once your guy’s logged out of the site, he’s a ghost.” She leaned over him and brought up the window with the video in it. She let him watch it. “Omigod. Is that blood, Ma’am?”

“What can you tell me about that url?”

He copied it from the address window and pasted it into trace search. “It’s the same thing. The path begins and ends on the internet.”

“Is there any way to link the url with the company that anonymized the emails? Is it the same company?”

He did some typing. “Yes. This is being processed through Anonymice as well.” He pointed to a string of numbers. “That’s their IP address.”

“Right now?” she asked. “The connection is live right now?”

“Yes.”

She patted him on the head, and he shrunk a little under her touch. “You can go.”

She went out the back of the pen toward her office. “Cartwright?” Melanie Cartwright appeared in the hallway. “Where’s my bacon sandwich?”

“Do you mean Mr. Pedersen?”

“Him, too.”

“I’m expecting him any minute,” she said.

Hazel went into her office. The missing link to Eldwin was some internet service that existed solely to allow people to work untraceably on the internet. But she knew what the average person didn’t: even a buried footprint still exists.

Something landed on her desk. The homey scent of peameal bacon wafted up from it. “I serve two masters,” said Andrew Pedersen.

“Thanks for coming in,” she said. “Have a seat. There’s something I want to show you.”

He sat in the chair opposite her, looking around the office. Another phantasm of the past settled on them both, him in that chair, having brought her lunch. The comfortable silence of ritual. Would there come a time when she wouldn’t be stumbling into these hollows, shaped like her, that belonged to another time?

She opened the wax paper that wrapped the sandwich and passed him a small sheaf of papers. “I’m wondering if you can look at this for me. We think it’s written in a kind of code you might be familiar with.”

“Really.”

“It’s the fourth and fifth chapters of the short story in the Record. We’re not sure it’s still the same writer, and we think he might be leading us to something. Only we’re not sure what and we’re not sure where he’s telling us to look.”

His eyebrows went up. “Interesting.” He accepted the papers as she took her first bite of the thick, fatty sandwich. It was gorgeous. She let him read the papers in silence. When he’d finished them, he went back to the first page and read them through again. By the time she was done her sandwich, he’d finished as well. “Pretty sick stuff.”

“It’s not the plot that’s got us confused. It’s the sense that there’s something buried in it. Did you notice how many times he used the word damage?”

“I did.”

“So?”

“Well, he is better than the first writer -”

“So you agree it’s not the same person.”

“Absolutely.”

For some reason, his confirmation of what they believed weighed on her. “That’s what we thought, too.”

“The guy who wrote the first two chapters is incapable of something like…” He shuffled the pages. “‘Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel.’ That’s almost good.”

“Fine. So someone’s taken over the story.”

“That doesn’t bode too well for the first writer.”

“No. It doesn’t,” she said, and she decided not to say anything else. “Go back to ‘damage.’ Does it point to anything for you?”

Andrew looked down at the pages in his lap. “Well, there’s some pretty graphic ‘damage’ in the story, don’t you think? Maybe the writer’s just pointing you to its importance. Telling you it’s meaningful.”

“And nothing else? I’m of the mind that these two chapters are telling us what to do. The Wise character talks to this dead woman. Tries to destroy her again by burning something he’s written. This story. Then he finds himself trapped. I shouldn’t tell you this, but the man who wrote the first two chapters of this story seems to be missing. This isn’t a yarn anymore.”

He flipped through the story again. On the last page, he began to nod.

“What is it?”

“You might be on to something.” He got up and came behind the desk. “Look at these three lines at the end.” “Someone’s speaking to him.”

“No. Someone’s speaking to you.” He reached for a pen. “A good cryptic clue gives you a definition, an action, and something to perform the action on. Listen again…” He read the lines:

A voice said, “You’re inside it now, aren’t you, Wise?”

Nick looked around. “Who… me?”

“Draw closer.”

“Repunctuate that first line – You’re inside it now. Aren’t you wise? Maybe that’s a challenge. ‘Aren’t you wise?’”

“Wise to what?”

“The first part is the action.” He nodded at the paper. “This is actually kind of smart. You’re inside it – that’s a container clue. It means that what you’re looking for here is hidden inside other words. The next two lines are ‘Who… me?’ and ‘Draw closer.’ Do you see it now?”

“Andrew, I don’t! That’s why you’re here.”

“What does ‘draw closer’ mean?”

“Um, to approach… to look into…”

“To home in on?”

“Okay.”

“The container is ‘Who… me?’ The word is home. It’s inside in the line. Wise ends up in a box, something he’s inside, but the writer wants you to draw closer. To what?”

She became very still and touched the lines on the page as if they were embossed there and she could feel their contours. “Home. He wants us to go to the house.”

“ Cherry Tree Lane.”

She pressed the intercom. “Melanie, get me Wingate.”

Her Detective Constable was in the office within seconds. Andrew showed him what he’d found. “Are you sure that’s what it means?”

“Once it’s unravelled, it doesn’t seem at all accidental,” said Andrew.

Hazel pointed to the words Cherry Tree Lane in the story. “Where is this?” she asked.

“Umm… There’s a Cherry Street, but I’ve never heard of a Cherry Tree Lane. At least not downtown.” He thought for a second. “Yeah, I don’t know what street he’s referring to. Maybe something out of downtown.”

“But he describes a drive to the city centre, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

She looked at her watch. “It’s too late to go now.” She looked up at him. “I need you to start on something else, James.” “You don’t want me downtown?”

“No. I want you to get some legal advice for me concerning a company that operates on the internet.”

He squinted at her, a bit confused, but he could wait for the details.

She continued, now talking to Andrew. “Anyway, I think I need someone who knows downtown and cryptic crosswords about equally.” He was looking at her suspiciously. “What? Were you planning on having a quiet Saturday?”

“No. But I wasn’t planning on being seconded by my ex either.”

“Would a decent sushi lunch make it worth your while?”

“Define ‘decent,’” he said.

“Set your alarm for eight.”