Burning Blue

skateboard everywhere. No more shoulder-less north Jersey roads without sidewalks, step-trucks and speeding Range Rovers sucking me into traffic. It would be better for my father too, having me out of the apartment. Couldn’t be easy living with a son of minor ambition.

“You had therapy today, right?” he said. “You didn’t ditch, did you?”

“I went.”

“How was Mrs. Schmidt?”

“It’s Doctor. Terrific.”

“Any of that bullying crap going on again?” he said.

“Nope. Thought you were getting home late.”

“I did. You were later. You have to get right in their faces and give it back to them, Jay. I told you how many times, you can’t just roll over.”

“It’s fine, Dad.”

“Sure it is.”

“Okay, don’t believe me.”

“You’re holding back. Something big too. Your breathing, it’s solemn.”

“How can breathing be solemn? It’s just breathing.”

“I need to be out of town for a week.” He tapped the high end piano key. “This conference wants me to speak. The money is just north of lousy enough to turn down.”

I checked the fridge for milk, nothing in there except duck sauce packets.

“You hear what I said?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then can you acknowledge you heard me?”

“I heard you, man. Have a great trip.”

“Hey, Jay? When do I stop getting blamed?”

“Blamed for what?”

“Everything.” He headed for his room with the wine. He halted at his bedroom door, as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. He went in. The door puffed shut.

I grabbed what was left of the takeout and headed for my room, not much more than a closet with a bed that was too short for me, but it was on the back of the building and it was quiet, except for the old man’s TV, muffled by the wall. I could barely make out he was watching the old movie channel again. I hated feeling sorry for my father. Writing him off as a jerk was a lot easier.

I remembered that I’d forgotten to take my meds. I swigged them down with this sports drink that looked like chalk dust suspended in antifreeze. I’d grabbed it at work, overstock they were looking to dump, and now I knew why: It was disgusting. I shoveled cold burritos into my mouth as I waited for my laptop to boot. Now that I’d spent an afternoon with Nicole, had seen her up close, helped her out of that puddle on the side of the road, touched her, I felt involved. Okay, maybe not involved, not yet, but scared for her. That she was being followed freaked me out. If a photographer could tail her so easily, without being caught, couldn’t the psychopath who got away with throwing acid into Nicole Castro’s face just as easily sneak right up on her again?

Maybe I thought about it for a minute before I did it. Maybe not that long. In less than twenty keystrokes, I hacked a line into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Plate number MBE-7921 ran back to one Shane Puglisi.

At this point I wasn’t doing anything more than poking around. I had no inclination to do more than feel bad for Nicole and wonder whether or not she was going to call me before next Thursday, when I would see her in Schmidt’s office. She wasn’t particularly thrilled I’d followed her into CVS. Stalking her by way of my computer would win me a top spot on her hate list, if she found out about it. She might even be mad enough at that point to sic the cops onto me. I just wanted to be sure that Shane Puglisi wasn’t a psycho. After I cleared him, I was going to delete my suspect list from my phone and mind my own business.

Turning Puglisi inside out was cake. Most of the actionable intelligence the National Security Agency and CIA scoop comes from open source information. Most of that comes from Facebook. Hackers don’t have to hack so much anymore. Why would I take on the risk inherent in stealing information from you when you’re willing to tell me everything about yourself for free? The challenge now is skimming and leaking without letting people know you’re doing it. That’s the real game: remaining anonymous. Not that I was planning on doing any leaking when it came to Nicole’s case. Not yet anyway.

Shane Puglisi’s LinkedIn profile said he was a freelance photojournalist. His Twitter profile picture was a shot of a rat sitting atop a cube of cheese, its legs crossed. I could have stopped there, reasonably sure that Puglisi, while a low-life sleaze, wasn’t after Nicole Castro, not to throw acid at her anyway. But I didn’t stop there. My fingers seemed to hammer the keyboard of their own will. I dipped into Puglisi’s bank account.

He’d wired money to one Brian Meyers, whose Facebook profile picture was a direct match to the guy I’d seen hitting on Nicole in CVS. All of this made me feel, if not better, then somewhat relieved, at least about Puglisi and Meyers. They had run a scam to get a shot of Nicole and auction it off to the highest bidder, splitting the take, end of story. Then again, not quite. One of the wire transfers in Puglisi’s account traced back to The New Jersey Clarion.

I found this more disturbing than surprising. Like every other newspaper desperate to stay in business, the Clarion had a “soft news” section, and Brandywine was almost exclusively the Clarion’s beat. But the paper paid my father’s salary and our rent. We were getting by and in a sense getting over by taking money from a company that chased down people who were dealing with any number of miseries, including losing half your face to an acid attack. I can’t say that it was this sense of guilt, though, that had my fingers itching to hammer my keyboard for some more digging-not exclusively.

How would my mother have reacted to my stepping away from this girl who was clearly in pain when I had a skill set that might be of help in catching the psychopath who had ruined her life? Would she think I was crazy for wanting to help Nicole, or would she be proud of me? What would Mom have done if I had been attacked instead of Nicole? That one was easy: exactly what Mrs. Castro was doing, putting her life on hold to help her child.

I’d lost her almost six years earlier. The loss was at times, particularly in reminiscences that for some reason came strongest at twilight, as stunning as it was the day she died. She was smiling at me by way of the visor shade mirror. She’d flipped it down to block out the high beams of the oncoming truck. The last thing she said to me was, “Jay-Jay, do you know what we’re going to do tomorrow?” And that was it.

At the very least, she would want me to make sure the police were trying to catch Nicole’s attacker. After that, I would stop my prying-I swore this to myself. I tapped into an e-string that linked Brandywine Hollows High School to the police. Sneaking into Mrs. Marks’s computer was a joke. Her password was marksy123. Why bother? I found the two emails the acid thrower sent her, the first coming the night before the attack, the second moments after. Marks had forwarded the emails to the Division of Detectives, nobody specific, just info@. So now I knew where the emails ended up, but where had they come from?

I backtracked them to what we hacktivists call a zero-map, a changing series of relay servers that were part of the Conficker bot net. The emails had ricocheted off of a thousand drives before they landed in Marks’s in-box. They were perfectly untraceable. I studied the first email: “after a little test run, I find that I like the sound.”

Had the acid thrower burned an animal? I’d read that serial killers often started out with rodents, then cats, dogs, moving their way up to humans. Was there such a thing as a serial acid thrower? Schmidt said no, but I wasn’t so sure. The bigger question for me at the moment was: Now that I have these emails, what should I do with them?

FIFTEEN

From Nicole’s journal:

Thurs, 21 Oct-

Emma tried so hard to make me laugh when I visited her today, but underneath the cheerfulness she seemed so weary of it all, the pretending that everything is going to be all right. The bags under her eyes. The bruises on her arms from all the IVs. I don’t know how she knows not to do it, but she never asks me who I think burned me.