want the man arrested, I just want you to find him and get back whatever he took from Anita’s house. Besides, police probably wouldn’t even believe a crime had been committed, right? I mean, no valuables gone, at least nothing the victim can describe, and no forced entry. No crime from their point of view. This is a case for you, my friend. You know, we’re in the same line of work you and I. What do you know about data mining?”
“Not much,” Hannibal said. “I guess it’s all about extracting the information somebody needs from large databases.”
Blair lit up like a school kid. “That’s it exactly. That’s how I made my fortune, you know, and I think it’s what you do too. We‘re both in the information business, Mr. Jones. The only real difference is that my databases are in computers, and yours are usually in people’s heads. That’s the only way to find a person who doesn’t want to be found in this world. We all leave a trail, after all, it’s just lost among all the other material. It’s all out there, you just have to dig up the right bits of data.”
“Yes, well, buried treasure that might be missing isn’t usually the kind of thing I do,” Hannibal said. “Ms. Cooper doesn’t appear to really be in any kind of trouble. And I did have a little vacation planned. Not to mention, there doesn’t seem to be much to go on.”
“Please, just do me one favor,” Blair said. He picked up a thin envelope from his glass topped end table and handed it to Hannibal. “This is a check for one day’s work and a retainer for a week of your time. Please just go to Anita’s place and look around a bit. Get your feet wet with the case. If you decide it’s not for you, just tear up the second check and move on. I promise I won’t bug you again. Okay?”
Hannibal thought that little kid grin must work for Blair nine times out of ten, and he couldn’t resist returning it. “Okay, you’ve got a deal. Let me mull this one over, and I’ll let you know in the morning if I’ll take the case or not.”
Blair stood and extended his hand. “I had you checked out pretty thoroughly, Mr. Jones. If Anita told you her whole story I know you’ll pursue this.”
Anita Cooper insisted on making lunch for them after Hannibal drove her the five blocks to her home. Her townhouse was a bit more modest than Blair’s but the much greater difference showed in the contents. Expensive furniture doesn’t really look so special until you have something to compare it with. Hannibal thought her father had bought a home just a little beyond his reach. To compensate, he had ordered the cheapest carpet, the least expensive blinds and the most basic kitchen appliances. They had furnished it along the same lines.
Hannibal toured the house while Anita did kitchen things. Being a bachelor, he was amused at how neat she kept the place relative to his own apartment. Beyond that, nothing upstairs seemed remarkable to him except perhaps the after-shave lotion in Anita’s medicine cabinet. The second bedroom was preserved as if someone lived there, but dust motes floated in the strong shaft of sunlight beaming in through the window. He suspected the room was merely a shrine to her lost father.
On the main level he walked into the odor of tuna fish oil and mayonnaise as he passed Anita. She seemed focused very hard on making the world’s best tuna salad sandwiches and soup from a can. The living room held the usual items, although her nineteen-inch television looked puny after standing in front of Blair’s home theater screen.
Another flight of stairs led Hannibal to a family room, and finally, a small office. This room showed signs of recent use. Papers were neatly arrayed on the desk. Perhaps Anita used the computer every day to send e-mails and such. Bookshelves lined the room, and one set of them held a row of numbered green notebooks. That didn’t mean much to Hannibal until he noticed the floppy discs.
A transparent case on Hannibal’s desk holds two rows of poorly labeled discs. Three similar cases stood on Anita’s desk. Perhaps a total of one hundred eighty discs, all grouped by color and separated by dividers. The woman was absolutely anal-retentive. Or maybe her father had been. Looking more closely, he could see that the discs were labeled and numbered with great care. Well, she did say her father was a researcher. Maybe he worked at home.
Again, Hannibal’s attention returned to the green hardcover notebooks. Each was numbered in sequence with a label pasted to the spine. He pulled down the first one and opened it. The pages were lined but much of the content was drawings and diagrams and writings that he recognized as chemical symbols. Each triangle or pentagram with letters at the corners represented a chemical compound but like the accompanying paragraphs it was all gibberish to him. Curious, Hannibal reached for the last volume, number thirty-eight. It was blank. As were thirty-seven and thirty-six. She must have prepared them in advance. But number thirty-four was full to the last page. The book in-between was absent.
“It’s ready,” Anita called.
Hannibal bounded up the stairs to find Anita facing him with her back to the stove, pointing toward the table at the front of the house where a glass of lemonade already stood. He smiled a thank-you and moved to a chair while stuffing his glasses and gloves into inside jacket pockets. Green plants lining the windowsill beside him were a silent testament to one more thing he could not do, keep plants alive in his home.
Anita served lunch, in a truer sense than Hannibal was accustomed to. She carried his soup bowl on its plate to the table, and then brought another plate with two sandwiches. The sandwiches were cut in half diagonally and turned so the crusts touched and the filling side faced out. She carried the plates with both hands, and placed them on the table with her face down, almost as if she were bowing to him. Then she returned to the stove, and lifted her own sandwich from its plate, as if she intended to eat standing at the counter by the sink. For Hannibal, that was too much.
“Please, come join me,” he said, keeping his tone light. “We need to talk a bit while we eat, so I can get some facts straight.”
Anita quickly carried her plate to the table and sat at the other end. In the eerie quiet she chewed slowly, her eyes mostly focused down on her food. Hannibal tasted his own sandwich, leaned back and smiled. It was on rye bread with onions and celery and maybe a hint of mustard as well.
“Hey, that’s really good,” he said.
When she smiled back at him her nose wrinkled adorably and her shoulders rose a bit. “Thank you,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard.
“I’m impressed at how well you keep the house,” Hannibal said, sipping his lemonade. “And I noticed everything is very organized. Did your father keep it this way?”
“Daddy was never as organized as he could have been. I actually kept his things straight for him. It was good to have someone to take care of. We took care of each other.”
Hannibal nodded, and sipped his chicken soup. “So, you organized all his work notes and such?”
“Oh yes. It was one way I helped Daddy out.”
“So, you couldn’t have missed the fact that his most recent notebook is gone,” Hannibal said. “Didn’t it occur to you that whatever your father meant for you to have might be hidden in them?”
Anita looked down again. “It was just his notes. What could be so valuable in one of those books?”
What indeed? Hannibal could think of a dozen possibilities. Incriminating photographs could lie between the pages. Dirt on a company executive could be written between the formulas, or even trade secrets Anita’s father could have sold to another firm. These were the kinds of intangible items that people often paid a great deal of money for. They were also the kinds that lose value quickly once too many people are aware of them. The kind of treasure that is all too often unrecoverable. You can’t repossess a person’s knowledge.
“Well, one way or another, it sounds as if you won’t get whatever it is back unless I can make some sort of settlement with Rod. That means I won’t be able to help you unless I can find him, and it sounds as if this guy knows how to keep a low profile. He could be several states away by now.”
Anita was looking at the floor again, her fingers laced together in front of her, biting her lower lip. Sitting behind her half eaten sandwich, she looked even smaller than she really was. “Please Mr. Jones. Please try. Whatever my father left me, it’s my only legacy from him.”
Hannibal pushed his food aside. “I don’t even know if I can help you. I need more to go on. So tell me a little about this Rod fellow. Where did he work? What did he do?”
“Rod was very handy,” Anita said. “He helped a lot around the house, and sometimes he did odd jobs for neighbors and such.”
“I see.” Hannibal was starting to form a picture of their relationship, and it was not a pretty one. “He stayed here?”
