sister. So if you don’t mind, she’s going to log onto our secure computers, browse through our confidential information, and see if she can find which of you bastards did it. ’”
“I think it would be more clever if you escorted me to your office and stepped outside for a minute.”
“And if you’re caught?”
“I’ll say I need her e-mail addresses so I can invite her friends to the funeral. Okay?”
Definitely not okay. Every piece of evidence screamed that Lisa was the victim of a murderous maniac who chose her because the demons inside his head said she was the right flavor for that day. I looked her dead in the eye and said, “Absolutely not.”
Well, Elizabeth the receptionist looked up when Janet and I entered, and she said, “Major Drummond, you haven’t been around the past few days.”
“I was in lockup.”
“Lockup?”
“Yeah. Seems a guy who looked like me knocked off a bank three blocks from here.”
“A bank?”
“A small local branch. Only ten grand was stolen. My lawyer got me sprung.”
She reeled back into her seat.
I said, “But I was in Cleveland that day. I’ve got witnesses… a dozen of them.”
She chuckled and in her stuffy English voice said, “Oh… you’re making a silly joke.”
Without smiling back, I said, “Elizabeth, this is Janet Morrow. I’m signing her in.”
Elizabeth mumbled something as we headed down the hallway to my office. I walked to my desk, flipped on the computer, and neither of us spoke as it booted up. I wondered how I had allowed myself to be talked into this. What kind of exercise do you do to get a backbone?
The screen appeared and I mentioned, “I don’t know Lisa’s password.”
Pointing at my chair, she said, “May I?” She settled in and studied the screen. She positioned the magic arrow, gave it a little tap, and two boxes appeared, one for the user’s name, one for the user’s password. She typed in Lisa’s name, then tried a password. A bunch of stars appeared in the box, but whatever she tried caused an “Incorrect Password” message to flash onto the screen.
Janet sat back in her chair, thought for a few seconds, tapped a few more times, then six more tries without success.
I said, “Let me try,” and bent over her shoulder. I typed in “J-A-G,” and bingo, we had liftoff.
Janet said, “That’s so obvious.”
“No, it was brilliant. Simply brilliant.”
She laughed. But the screen showed only three e-mails in Lisa’s mailbox. Janet popped them open: administrative messages from the firm. Lisa was the fastidious type and it made sense that she had wiped the slate clean of her personal messages before she returned to the Army. Somewhere inside the belly of the server were probably electronic imprints of everything she ever wrote on the computer, but recovering those files was beyond our competence levels.
Janet maneuvered the mouse around and finally brought up Lisa’s e-mail address book. If I failed to mention it, Lisa Morrow was a very popular girl. Janet scrolled down, and there were, I estimated, easily two hundred e-mail addresses.
Janet informed me, “I’m going to send a mass mailing that includes all these addresses to my personal computer. When we have the funeral figured out, I’ll just mass-mail a blanket announcement to all these addresses.”
It took her a few minutes to accomplish all that, and I then drove her back to the Four Seasons.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Another day in Hell.
Late Sunday afternoon to be precise, a fine day, an Indian summer reprieve, sunbeams cascading through the windows, calculators clacking, and a trio of accountants at the end of the table heatedly debating the details of some obscure Bermuda partnership.
The city and suburbs outside these walls were experiencing a collective epileptic fit. The L. A. Killer, as he’d been anointed, had gone two nights without killing. Theories ran rampant. Maybe he’d had his fill. Maybe a broken- necked corpse was yet to be discovered. Maybe his next victim was among the many women who’d suddenly applied for panicked, unscheduled vacations, forcing him to stalk for a suitable replacement.
The D. C. phone lines were clogged with parents ringing up daughters and friends calling one another to make sure they were still alive. Police stations were inundated with requests to check on the safety of young women who failed to answer calls. A hotline had been opened and hundreds of sightings and scares were phoned in.
Serial killers are generally a phenomenon of the West. Californian and northwestern cities get them like clockwork. One week it’s the ghoul in Seattle who lops off arms, the next it’s the creep in San Bernardino who torches prostitutes. Ever since Charlie Manson struck terror into hearts, the citizenry react with a sort of tame horror and it’s steady as she goes.
The occasional monster turns up in Philadelphia, Chicago, or New York. But Washington, D. C., aside from that freakish sniper case, has been mostly immune. We regard ourselves as the metropolis of crack wars, terrorists airplanes, Watergates and Monica-gates. We have enough problems-serial killers aren’t welcome.
The city was hysterical and the media was driving spikes through its heart. Retired FBI profilers were in huge demand on the news channels. The night before, Nightline had run an hour-long special with one who claimed he had worked on the L. A. Killer’s case three years before, said he had no doubt this was the same guy, said he was the toughest killer he’d ever come up against, said he varied his patterns and approaches to match his target, that he got off on the terror, and was likely single, reclusive, and insecure. He added that two witnesses had gotten a peek at the L. A. Killer’s back during one kidnapping; they described him as short, maybe five foot six, muscular like a former wrestler or gymnast, thick-shouldered and -necked, with dark hair worn in a ponytail.
But all that excitement and buzz was happening outside this room. Inside, flies were dropping out of the air, dead from boredom.
So I was seated in my corner chair, catatonically daydreaming about my options. Seven hundred and thirty grand a year. A hundred and thirty grand signing bonus. Nearly a million dollars my first year, and Tiffany had twice taken me to lunch to extol the company’s “awesome” benefits-health plan, annual stock options, free lunches, all the best the private sector has to offer. By our second lunch she was putting her hand on my arm, batting her doe- like lashes, and slyly intimating there might be other fringe benefits as well.
Now she was talking.
In truth, I had mentally moved past the issue of whether, and was indulging in fantasies about what-what to do with that money, and what to do to Tiffany.
“Excuse me.”
I looked up. A female accountant named Martha, who was the number-crunching ramrod, was holding forth a file and examining my face. She had a sort of mechanical voice, clipped, flat, and metallic, the way you’d imagine a female robot might speak. She asked, “How familiar are you with overseas partnerships?”
Was this a joke? Thus far, the accountants had brought me three issues for legal resolution. My contribution had been to compose short synopses of their queries and fax them to the firm to someone who gave a shit. Neither my alarming ignorance nor my complete apathy had gone undetected. Nobody in the room was taking me seriously, which was okay by me.
“Well, I dated a few German girls.”
A gurgling sound erupted from her throat. “No, silly. That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, Martha, what did you mean?”
She replied, “A lot of firms engage in external partnerships to share access, or marketing efforts, or as joint investment vehicles.”
“Go on.”
