nature preserve that bordered Nicole’s house. The path was a shortcut to the road, where I could catch the bus.
I made my way through the preserve and walked along the side of the highway. I stopped to catch my breath. The day was gray, but there was a glare to the sky, bright enough that I could see the stain in my pants wasn’t really in my crotch but on my thigh, and it was too dark to be urine, more the color of blood. I couldn’t figure out how I’d cut myself or where. A car revved up to me. As I looked over my shoulder, the car blinded me, flashing its brights. It swung in front of me, cutting me off. It was the black Civic. No, the Saab, Nicole’s. She leaned over the shotgun seat and pushed open the door, and that’s when I realized the stain in my pants wasn’t blood. “It was the tea,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“I must have spilled the tea on myself when I faded out.”
“Jay, get into the car.”
The road was one muddy puddle after another. Trucks whipped up gray spray. I was cold and beat. I sank into the shotgun seat. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I. I’m not supposed to be driving. My mother made me take a Xanax just before you showed up.”
She drove fast into the empty rest area, the rain darkening the sky. The brakes whimpered as she stopped short to park. She turned to face me.
“No more chocolate stain,” I said. “Wait, you changed your hoodie.” This one was pink too, but baggier. I touched her sleeve where the stain had been. She winced and drew back her arm. “Was that blood before, on your sleeve?” I said.
“Cat scratched up my arm.”
“You have a cat?”
“The neighbor’s. She’s always in the yard. I was cuddling her, and all of a sudden she flipped out.”
A person who has serious allergies cuddles a cat? Nicole Castro was lying to me. She leaned across the seat and rested her head on my chest. I put my arms around her. The rain fell hard on the roof. “Tell me what happened to her,” she said. “Your mom.”
“Some time,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
I don’t know how long we were like that, just holding each other. Not long enough. Somebody tapped on the side window. The security guard. He drove Nicole home in the security company SUV. A second guard drove me home in Nicole’s Saab.
FORTY-ONE
From Nicole’s journal:
Monday, 1 November-
I think he might know.
FORTY-TWO
At four that afternoon, Cherry called with a promise of hot news. “Tell me in person,” I said. I had re-upped my anonymity settings, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain the Recluse wasn’t watching me. Cherry showed up at my apartment with Starbucks scones. “So my father’s cop friend didn’t get an ID on the woman.”
“And this is hot information because?”
“He got a lead on the car owner.” She clicked a picture onto her Droid screen: a shot of the Civic’s rear bumper. “A traffic camera picked up the car.”
“Okay?” I said. “We already had the plate number.”
“Right,” she said, “but we didn’t have this.” She zoomed in on the plate. “The plate itself is bad, yes, but not the plate rack, the kind the dealer gives you to advertise the dealership.” Cherry tweaked the picture, magnifying the plate rack: Vardy Dealership.
I nodded. She left the scones on the counter and hurried for the door.
“What’s the rush?” I said.
“Work.” Cherry DiBenneditto was a very cool girl.
A little after 4:00 Tuesday morning, I cracked the Vardy database. The company had resold four hundred and sixteen 1990s model Civics in the last fifteen years, and none of those went to anybody named Vratos or Wood. By now I’d hacked the class list for Sabbatini’s chem lab. None of the last names matched.
I created a map that covered Brandywine and the Hollows outskirts, and I checked the addresses of the Civic owners with Google Earth Street View, one by one. It took hours. Around 11:45 Tuesday night, about three-quarters of the way down the Vardy list, I found what I was looking for, a dumpy little house not far from my apartment building, in lower Valedale, still in the Brandywine school district but definitely low rent. The black Civic was in the driveway. The stolen plates had been swapped out for the ones registered to the address, but I recognized the car by the gash that ran across the driver’s-side doors. The Civic owner’s name was Roberta Lyles. I tapped up her Facebook page.
Bobbie Lyles listed herself as divorced. She was probably in her early thirties but the lines around her eyes made her look a lot older. She had long blond hair, but she couldn’t have been the woman I saw in the Civic hauling out of my parking lot. That woman was thin, and Bobbie was not. Still, she looked familiar. Those eyes. . I tapped up Chrissie Vratos’s page. At a stretch, she and Bobbie could have been distant cousins. Maybe they were friends, and Chrissie had simply borrowed the car? Took me about half an hour to go through Chrissie’s posts and albums, and I didn’t find anything that connected her to Lyles. Bobbie’s page took half a minute to scan. She had nothing up there except a handful of pictures, all of crocheted objects. She was using Facebook primarily to promote her home business, handcrafted scarves, sweaters, blankets made to order. She had six friends, and none of them linked her to Chrissie. I tried to connect Bobbie and Marisol Wood and came up empty there too. I tried to link her to the suspects I had already eliminated from my list, Mr. Sager, Kerns, Dave, Schmidt, Sabbatini. I crossed my fingers when I tried to link her to my father and sighed relief when I couldn’t. I couldn’t link her to Marathon, New Jersey, either. I had to dig deeper into that and find out what my father was hiding down there, but not yet. I had one more name I needed to cross-reference with Bobbie Lyles. I hesitated. I forced myself to do it.
She didn’t connect to Nicole either.
I checked to see if the black Civic had been stolen recently. It hadn’t, or Bobbie Lyles hadn’t reported it as such. I ran her address into the cable service provider database. The house was wired for basic television, Vonage, and Internet service. The only machine IDs that came up were for a fax machine, an older model TV and a very old desktop PC, the kind Bobbie Lyles might use for her little startup business, to post her wares on eBay. She listed her employer as Dunkin’ Donuts.
The low-tech computer, low-rent cable, low-wage job: perfect cover-too perfect. That black Civic was in her driveway. She was involved in this thing somehow.
I pulled a long-standing string I had into BinarTREE, one of the major manufacturers of cell phone towers. They owned the northeast with nine of every ten towers flaunting their brand. The towers were equipped with sensors that pinpointed wireless data flow. Obviously media companies would pay dearly to know which homes were gobbling up lots of gigabytes, and then push their products there.
Why was Bobbie Lyles importing ridiculous amounts of data into her home, into her back bedroom, specifically; way more data than that crappy desktop dinosaur PC with its half a gigabyte of RAM could handle? I’d found her. I’d found the Recluse. She had a very powerful computer in that back room, the kind I had, homemade, no machine ID, untraceable, the kind you never dock to an Ethernet cable, to keep yourself invisible. The only way I was going to be able to suck the information from Bobbie Lyles’s hard drive was to dock to it with an external drive.
