Killer Move

“Steph, listen. Something else happened today. An e-mail.”

“You e-mailed her?”

“Just listen. When I got back from returning that book to Amazon, Janine was sitting in the office laughing at some joke she thought I’d sent.”

“Yeah, you sent it to me, too. It wasn’t funny.”

“That’s just it—I didn’t send it.”

“What?” Steph looked angry at being derailed.

“I didn’t send it. To you or Janine or anyone. Somebody else did, using my e-mail account. The reason I was late home this evening—before you even start speculating about that—is because I was talking to the IT guy from Shore, trying to work out what happened, how the e-mail got sent.”

She snorted. “Why would I believe that?”

I yanked out my phone. “His number’s top of the outgoing call list. Call him right now, Steph. Ask him if we just sat and had ice cream outside the parlor on the Circle. Ask him if he had a chocolate sugar cone. Or do you think I’ve gone so far into the heart of darkness that I’d recruit some random patsy to lie about my whereabouts?”

She didn’t say anything. The expression on her face remained lodged in a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.

“Wait one second,” I said, and sent up a prayer to whatever tiny god looks after Realtors who are in serious trouble not of their own making. I leaned over the laptop and fired up my e-mail app. Five e-mails came straight in. A couple of positivity newsletters, two from clients . . . and one from Kevin the Geek. Thank god.

I opened the e-mail. “Look.”

Reluctantly, Steph bent forward and read what was on the screen. A reference to the meeting I’d just described, a page of complex instructions on how to check for a keystroke checker, and an introduction to Wifi Spying 101.

She wouldn’t look at me. “So what does that prove?”

“Someone’s messing with my e-mail,” I said. “They ordered a book from Amazon in my name and this morning sent out a dumb, racist joke.”

“Even if this is true, how does it have any bearing on you taking pictures of Karren?”

I took a deep breath, then let it out. She was right, in fact. It didn’t. With the photographs, we were into new and uncharted territory.

Which we then set about exploring, at length.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nothing had become clearer or more positive by the time Steph went up to bed. We’d gone round in circles until the momentum of tiredness pulled her out of my orbit. I didn’t follow straightaway. Steph and I have had very few full-blown rows in our years together, but I knew time was needed to deflate this, time and the space it would give for common sense to prevail. You don’t tell an angry person they’re wrong to be angry. You have to wait for the emotion to diffuse.

Before that, following the instructions in Kevin’s e-mail, I’d checked my laptop. There were no strange apps hidden among my login items, no windowless background processes chugging away—at least as far as I could see. Kevin had reiterated in his e-mail that there were more hard-core possibilities, but that any attempt by me to establish their presence would almost certainly result in my computer being “borked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good and I didn’t want it. My life felt “borked” enough already.

“Right,” Steph said, when I told her I’d drawn a blank. “So no supersecret spy software. How weird.”

She was sitting stiffly at the extreme far end of the sofa. She’d worn through some of the initial fury, but retained the air of a volcano that could wipe the hell out of town if it so chose. I guess she’d assumed that, presented with what she’d thought was incontrovertible evidence, I would cave immediately, throwing myself on her mercy. I hadn’t. In fact, while I’d been running the tests on my laptop, I’d been simultaneously delivering a point-by-point recap of the true events of the previous evening (which did not include amateur night soft-core pornography) and offering her my cell phone (again) to call Melania, Warner’s assistant, for confirmation.

Her refusal to consider doing this weakened her position—even though, yes, I could still technically have driven up to Karren’s apartment regardless of whether a real meeting had been scheduled—but I took care not to belabor the point. Steph was genuinely upset, and with good reason. It didn’t matter how firm my defense—or whether she eventually came round to believing it—she’d still spent time believing something different. You can’t unthink a thought. Your mental patterns, your perception of someone, has been changed. That can’t be undone, only superseded by fresh and concrete evidence—which so far, I didn’t have.

“So it must be someone scanning our wifi,” I said, looking across the room to where the unit sat, close to where the cable feed entered the house.

“Oh, definitely,” Steph said acidly. “I wonder: will it be the Jorgenssons or the Mortons?”

She had a point. Quite apart from the basic absurdity of our neighbors wanting to screw with my e-mail, there were practical issues. The Jorgenssons were Longacres’ token oldsters, in their midseventies: healthy, golf- obsessed, surrogate grandparents to half the kids in the community—and no one’s idea of cybervillains escaped out of The Matrix. On the other side we had the Mortons. Again, nice people, and moreover a family who cleaved to a genteel subdivision of some Christian faith that had a downer on the Internet as a whole—source, as it is, of unwholesome images and concepts and ways of being. I remembered being apprised of this a while back, during an affable but interminable dinner party. They didn’t even have cable.

I sat back from the screen, baffled. “It’s not going to be the Smiths opposite, either. I had to install Microsoft Office on their computer for them.”

Steph chose not to reply. She just sat there looking at me, her right foot twitching up and down.

“It could be war-driving,” I offered weakly.

I was surprised to discover she knew what that meant. She poured scorn on the idea, but eventually conceded that someone’s kid in the community might possibly have the hardware, know- how, and adolescent assholeness to have cruised by the house, taken a snapshot of what was traveling through the ether, and snatched my e-mail and Amazon passwords from it.

The pictures remained harder to explain. I tried to tidy this away by harping on about the wifi conundrum, but Steph wasn’t buying. She asked how some kid could even know about Karren in order to take the pictures. I didn’t know the answer. All I could do was say what hadn’t happened. I denied taking the pictures, denied all knowledge of how they’d ended up on my machine. Denied it loud, denied it long. There was nowhere else that the conversation could go—nowhere, at least, without the fade down and back up of sleep.

Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.

Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.

There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that I didn’t own. I’d argued that I needed them to try to get to the bottom of where they’d come from. It was just after preventing her attempt to throw them away that I’d noticed this final thing—the fact that finally got me to climb out of the pool, cold and tired and