“Afternoon, ma’am, sir,” Jepson called to Mr. Contreras and me. “You on your way out? We spent the day on your gal’s computer, and Tim thinks he’s got a lot of it sorted out.”
I explained that I needed to get the dogs home for the dog walker but invited them to follow us north. Mr. Contreras enthusiastically seconded the motion, mentioning my chicken. “Big enough for five, right, doll, when we make some fettuccine.”
At home, Jepson helped me check around the building to make sure Rodney or his minions weren’t lurking.
“So, Vic, Tim totally hacked into this computer. He’s amazing. You should hire him!” Petra yelled as I made my painful way up the three flights of stairs.
“It wasn’t cheap,” Tim warned me. “I had to download some pretty expensive software to come up with her password-none of Chad’s dad’s ideas worked.”
“I told him to go for it,” Petra sang out cheerily.
“Out of curiosity, little chickadee, how much is expensive?”
“Uh, thirty-two hundred dollars,” Tim mumbled.
“Thirty-two hundred, hmm? So-at fifteen dollars an hour-well, rounding up to give you the benefit of the doubt- that would be two hundred free hours of work you can give me, Petra.”
“But, Vic,” her big eyes opening so wide her lashes brushed her brows, “I knew this was important. And I didn’t want to wake you up after you got injured.”
“No, Peetie, that was thoughtful. That’s why I’m rounding your salary up as a thank-you. You see, you’re working for me. I’m paying the bills. And I probably know a vendor who could get me a better deal on software than you can.”
Petra glowered at me. “You’re not serious. I can’t afford-”
“Then you need to learn to think twice, or even three times, before committing me to debt, Petra.”
I looked at her seriously for a beat. “I will let you off the hook this time. But if you do such a thing again, I will hold you responsible for paying for it. Clear?”
“I told you I wasn’t a robot-”
“Clear?”
“Oh, all right!” She stomped back down the stairs.
Tim Radke, who’d been standing by uncomfortably while we argued, said he thought he should pay for the software, since he was the one who talked Petra into buying it.
“No, we’re cool on this. Petra just needs help curbing her magnanimous impulses.” I headed on up the stairs and left Radke to follow Petra back to Mr. Contreras’s place.
Jake Thibaut was on his way out as I reached the third floor. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, and he was surprised by my painful progress upward.
“Your hand bothering you?” For a bass player, an injured hand was worrying enough to cause a limp.
“Not so much. I’m just tired. See you before you fly out?”
“Not if it means looking at something gruesome stuck into your body.”
To my surprise, I found myself fighting back tears. “I’ll wrap myself in gauze, head to foot, so that only my eyes and mouth show.”
“Hey, hey, just teasing, V.I., just teasing.” He brushed my wet eyes with a callused fingertip. “I’m a bass player, nothing grosses me out. Except blood. Can’t explain that one. We have one last rehearsal tonight, and I’m just on my way to buy food for the group. Are you free tomorrow, four-ish? They’re not picking me up until six.”
He pulled me to him and kissed me, and I tried to translate the pain in my abdomen into passion on my lips. As he held me, I heard the dog walker arrive, the dogs’ yelps of pleasure, and then my neighbor start up the stairs with Tim, Staff Sergeant Jepson, and Petra.
Jake murmured that he’d leave me to cope with my circus on my own and went on his way.
Inside my apartment, Tim opened up Karen’s computer. He showed me what happened when he logged on to her site. We got the message that the site was down. Then he typed commands onto the screen itself. Lines of equations began to scroll downward.
“Here’s the command to block content from the site,” he froze the screen and pointed to a line of text. I could see the words “respect,” “for,” “the,” and “dead” separated by strings of code.
“Now, watch this.” He typed another set of commands. Green text scrolled down the screen once more. He typed another command line, and suddenly the Body Artist’s website was on the computer in front of us.
I forgot my sore belly. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s a clone.” Tim tried not to grin, tried to be casual-Aramis Ramirez quickly doffing his hat after back-to-back homers. “That way, whoever is blocking the original site doesn’t know we can access it.”
“But who is blocking it?”
He shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. The server is in Olathe, Kansas. When I talked to one of their techies this afternoon, the best he could tell me is that the commands weren’t coming from
“Your old buddies?” Jepson asked.
“USAC-NOEW?” Radke grimaced. “They could, but why would they? I didn’t see anything pertaining to military ops in here.”
“USAC-NOEW?” I said. “Sounds like a cat in pain.”
Tim laughed.
“U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare,” he translated. “You know the Army. It’s all alphabet soup.”
“Of course, they’re not the only big outfit in Baghdad,” I said. “There’s also Tintrey.”
“Them and a hundred other jackals.” Marty Jepson was suddenly angry. “I’m so sick of those damned contractors, those private armies! I lost two good buddies who had to go out shotgun to protect one of their farking CEOs.”
“Yeah, man, they’re total scum,” Radke agreed. “But why would they care about this stripper’s website?”
“She’s not a stripper.” Petra started to protest, then looked doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t be sticking up for her if she really is, like, a drug dealer or something.”
I scrolled carefully through the images looking for Nadia’s paintings. “We know what the codes that Rodney was using mean, but what was Nadia trying to tell us about Alexandra?”
Petra and the other two men crowded around my shoulders as Tim enlarged various parts of Nadia’s drawings. The last one she’d painted had shown her sister with flames sprouting out of her head.
“She was killed by an IED,” I said. “I suppose the fire symbolizes that.”
“Could well be, ma’am,” Jepson said, his voice very dry. “Where was this incident?”
“On the way to the Baghdad airport, her boss told me. Tim, are there any other files in here that we can look at?”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” I flung my hands open in frustration. “Where the Artist might have gone to earth. What she knew about Olympia and Rodney’s business. What she thought of Alexandra Guaman-the two had a brief affair the summer before Alexandra deployed.”
Tim did some more keyboard work and brought up a list of all Karen’s folders. She had virtually no documents except drafts of scripts for the commentary she made during her shows and outlines for possible future shows. Any financial records, or letters, or even e-mails, didn’t reside on this machine. We should all be so careful about our privacy, I suppose, but it felt eerily like walking through an empty house-like walking through Karen Buckley’s, or Frannie Pindero’s, empty apartment. She might carry a vast burden of emotional baggage, but physically she traveled light across the landscape.
“Her videos, then?” I said. “What’s in those folders that you didn’t see on her DVDs?”
That folder bulged, of course. Movies are very byte hungry, and something only five minutes long might use a megabyte of memory.
Tim got up so that I could sit at the controls. At first, he and the others watched as I browsed through Karen’s junk footage, early shots of herself painting her own body, done with mirrors, in what I assumed was the darkened
