Matt read through the messages and remembered how he had felt when he read those miraculous words the first time-remembered how they had buoyed him and given him hope. Now, once the words had been committed to memory, he deleted each and every one of them. When the messages were gone, Matt went to his buddy list and deleted Suzie Q’s name. He didn’t doubt that cops, armed with a search warrant, would be able to obtain the deleted messages from the server, but he was hoping they wouldn’t bother.
With a sigh, Matt turned off his computer. He put away the files he’d been working on earlier. He straightened his desk. He returned the stapler he’d borrowed from Bobbie Bacon. Once his cubicle was in order, Matt was ready to head home. He knew it was time, but he also knew there was no hurry.
On his way out of the building, he stopped off in the men’s room. There, standing behind the closed door of a stall, he removed the condoms and the packet of little blue pills from their hiding place in the back of his wallet. He was dismayed that it took a series of several flushes before the plastic-wrapped containers disappeared down the toilet.
He spoke pleasantly to the security guard at the desk in the downstairs lobby. Out in the parking lot, Matt retrieved his ’96 Corolla from the employee lot and then meandered east toward home. Traveling on surface streets rather than hitting the freeways, he stopped at a 7-Eleven on Indian School long enough to fill the gas tank and buy two pint bottles of Baileys.
He opened one of the bottles while he was still parked at the gas pumps. Swallowed straight, the stuff was so cloyingly sweet that he almost gagged, but he managed to keep it down. He hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, so the booze hit him hard. Not wanting to be picked up on a DUI, he waited until he was at Scottsdale Road and North Chaparral before he took his next big swig. It was important that there be enough booze in his system to blur the lines between deliberate and accidental. The trick was being able to show an intent to get drunk without an intent to do anything else.
When Matt pulled up in front of his house, he was relieved to see that all the interior lights had been turned off. Jenny wasn’t the kind of person who would leave a porch light burning on those rare occasions when he came home later than she did. The darkness inside meant she was fast asleep. Considering her snoring problem, he doubted that his opening and closing the garage door would disturb her in the slightest.
He drove into the painstakingly neat two-car garage and parked the faded blue Corolla next to Jenny’s much shinier ’05 Acura. Once the garage door had closed behind him, he put the car in park and engaged the emergency brake. Leaving the engine running, he reached for the bottle again and took several more quick swallows, one after the other. As the stuff slid down his throat, he started to feel the buzz. That was good. So was having a full tank of gas.
Leaning against the headrest, Matt wondered how long it would take. It would be better for all concerned if it was over long before Jenny woke up. She usually staggered out of bed around seven or so and came scrounging out to the kitchen in search of her first cup of coffee. Matt knew there would be far less fuss and bother if there was no chance of reviving him when she opened the door and found him. Things were going to be bad enough for her that Thursday morning. He didn’t want to make the situation any worse.
The first bottle of Baileys was entirely empty, and the second was mostly so by the time he started feeling more drowsy than drunk. It took several tries before he was able to twist the cap back on the bottle, but he managed it.
Ali’s phone rang at five to six, dragging both her and the cat out of a sound sleep. Samantha left the foot of the bed in a huff while Ali groped for her phone.
“We have a bingo,” B. announced triumphantly. He sounded wide awake and amazingly chipper.
Ali was not. “A what?” she grumbled.
“A bingo,” he repeated. “Our bad guy tried logging on to your e-mail account a little while ago. I’m pretty sure we nailed him.”
“And you collected all his files in the process?”
“I think so,” B. said. “And if he had to sit there and watch his computer die, he’s probably not a happy camper at the moment.”
Ali made the effort to sound a little less grumpy. “That’s great,” she said. “So does that mean I can use my own computer again?”
“Probably,” B. said. “If I were him, I’d have learned from my mistake. I doubt very much that he’ll be trying to invade your computer files again anytime soon. He won’t want to risk damaging a second computer.”
“So we’re done, then?” Ali asked.
“Not by a long shot,” B. said. He sounded focused and energized. “I’m a little surprised it was that easy. I would have thought he’d do more about securing his own equipment. He does have a fairly sophisticated encryption code. I’m working on breaking that in hopes of getting a look at his files.”
“What are you hoping to find?” Ali asked.
“We managed to stop him before he could do any real damage to you, but there may be others who weren’t as lucky-people who maybe don’t yet know they’ve been victimized. If we can find them and let them know what’s going on, we may be able to bring law enforcement in on this after all.”
Now that the crisis with her own computer had been averted, Ali found that idea appealing. “In other words, now that we’ve had our immediate gratification, we’ll let someone else take a crack at him.”
“Exactly,” B. agreed. “In the meantime, I’m hoping that having access to his files will give us some clues about who this guy is and where he lives.”
“Any ideas on that?” Ali asked.
“My first guess would be that he’s one of the employees on the Singleatheart server farm in South Dakota- some low-level minimum-wage guy who figured out how to circumvent the system. I’ll start by doing some unofficial background checks on a few of those folks and see if anything jumps out at me.”
“How?” Ali asked. “Will you ask the cops for help?”
B. chuckled. “Are you kidding? There are background checks, and then there are underground background checks. For what I do, the second one is far more useful, and those will have to wait until later. Right now I have all my computer power working on breaking that encryption code. And since my computers can churn out logarithms without any help from me, I’m on my way to bed.”
Having just abandoned her own, Ali was a little surprised. “You’re going to bed at six o’clock in the morning?”
“What I do crosses international datelines, so local time zones tend to fade into the background,” he replied. “I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, and don’t punch a time clock.”
“Luckily for me,” Ali said. “And thank you for this good news, but are you sure it’s safe to use my computer?”
“Relatively safe,” B. told her with a laugh. “From that one source, at least. It doesn’t mean someone else won’t try to pull the same stunt, but you can rest assured that if there’s another problem, it’ll show up on my system as well.”
“Good night, then,” Ali said. “Or should I say good morning? Sleep well.”
Fully awake, she scrambled out of bed and reached for her robe. Out in the kitchen, the coffee grinder howled into action as Chris started brewing fresh coffee. She followed the heady aroma into the kitchen, where she found her son looking questioningly at the two computers and the two thumb drives that still littered the dining room table.
“What happened with all the computer drama?” Chris asked.
“Thanks to B. Simpson, good has prevailed,” Ali replied. “When whoever it was tried to access my e-mail account early this morning, our worm knocked him out and collected all his files in the process.”
“Way to go,” Chris said admiringly.
While Ali waited for the coffeepot to finish, she sat down at the table. Her old computer, left on as bait, clicked with a new mail announcement. Reassured that whoever had been spying on her had been taken offline, Ali was relieved to see a familiar name in the address line-Velma T, her longtime correspondent from Laguna Niguel.
