15
We began by trying to get a lead on Beryl Hinckley.
We didn’t have anything to go on at first; her number wasn’t listed in the phone book. Ditto for Richard Payson-Smith, our alleged laser sniper, and although there were four Jeff Morgans listed in the white pages, phone calls placed to three of the numbers quickly established that none of them belonged to our man.
The fourth didn’t pick up, but when the answering machine came on after the second buzz, a still picture appeared on the screen; it was the same person in the photo Barris had showed me.
I then made three successive calls to the Tiptree Corporation, asking the switchboard to connect me with Hinckley, Payson-Smith, or Morgan; I switched off my phone’s camera when I made these calls. On each try, the computer-generated woman on the screen informed me that none of the three were “available at this time.” Remembering that Tiptree employees wore smartbadges that would pinpoint someone’s location in the complex, every time I called I made up a different excuse for being adamant: a relative phoning Hinckley to tell her about a sudden death in the family, an insurance claims adjuster for Payson-Smith, a dental assistant calling to tell Morgan that next week’s appointment had to be changed. On each occasion, the computer put me on hold, only to come back a few moments later to tell me that none of the three were at the company offices today.
This confirmed my suspicion that the three surviving members of the Ruby Fulcrum team had taken a powder. I didn’t accept the virtual receptionist’s invitation to leave voice-mail messages for any of them; I had a hunch that none of them would be coming back to work anytime soon.
Not long ago, this might have signaled a dead end for a reporter on the trail of a missing person, but Pearl had his own resources. While I was taking the slow boat to China, he had already boarded an SST.
Tracker is an on-line computer service, little known by the public at large but used extensively by professionals who make their living by snooping into other people’s lives: PIs, skip tracers for bondsmen, credit bureaus, lawyers, and direct-mail ad agencies, not to mention a few investigative journalists who didn’t mind playing loose and fast with professional ethics. If you’ve ever wondered why all your credit card bills tend to arrive at the same time you missed a payment on one card, or why you suddenly get loads of junk mail advertising dog food or private kennels only a few days after you adopted a stray mutt from the local pound, services like Tracker are the reason.
Tracker is expensive. At five hundred bucks for the first fifteen minutes and escalating from there, it’s not something you logon at whim. It’s difficult to access-the company that runs it likes to keep a low profile-but if you have its on-line number and a gold card, then you too can poke around in someone else’s private affairs. All you need is that person’s name, and you can find out virtually anything available on them through various private-sector databases.
Pearl seldom used Tracker. As a privacy-minded journalist-and, yes, there are still a few of us around-he was loath to invade the personal business of a nonpublic figure, and peeking into someone’s credit card accounts is the type of thing that has given reporters a bad name. Yet this was one time he was willing to play lowball.
“Here she is,” he said after he had entered Hinckley’s name, hometown, and place of work. I bent over his shoulder to look at his computer screen. Next to HINCKLEY, BERYL was a street address in St. Louis and a phone number. “Try that.”
I picked up his desk phone and dialed the number. “No answer,” I said after I let it ring a dozen times. “She didn’t turn on her answering machine.”
He nodded. “Okay. Now look the other way for a minute.” He shot a sharp glance over his shoulder at me. “I’m going to do something you shouldn’t know about,” he said. “Only a jerk like me would stoop to something like this.”
I turned away while Pearl keyed in a new command. Just outside the office door, I spotted Chevy Dick hanging out in the office corridor, jawing with one of the bohos from the production staff. He was probably dropping off this week’s “Kar Klub” column. If things weren’t so intense right now, I would have wandered over to join the bull session.
“Okay,” Bailey said, “you can look now.” I turned back around to see that a new window had opened at the bottom of the Tracker screen; it displayed the account numbers of three major credit cards-Visa, MC, and AmEx- along with their current balances and the dates of their most recent purchases.
“You’re right,” I said. “Only a jerk like you would do something like this.”
“Nothing TRW doesn’t do every day,” he replied. “Now looky here …”
He pointed at the line next to the Visa number. “Three hundred fifty-dollar ATM cash advance, taken out last night at nine forty-six. And see this?” He jabbed his finger at MC and AmEx numbers below it. “Another three-and- a-half c’s from the other cards, taken out just a few minutes later. Probably from the very same machine.”
“Twenty-one fifty-eight,” I murmured, noting the time entered during the AmEx transaction. “Almost ten o’clock. That’s not long after John was shot … probably right after she took off from Clancy’s.”
Pearl nodded his head. “Uh-huh. She headed straight to the nearest ATM and took out as much cash as she could-just over a grand altogether-and there hasn’t been another charge on any of her cards since.” He glanced up at me. “She didn’t want to leave any tracks behind her.”
“Credit card receipts?”
“You got it. Your girlfriend didn’t want to have to pay for anything with a card because that would allow someone to trace her, so she grabbed as much cash as her credit limit would allow. That’s a sign of someone who’s going underground.” He rubbed his jaw pensively as he stared at the screen. “Now I wonder if she …?”
He called up her driver’s license, then cross-referenced it with her credit cards. “She didn’t rent a car,” he said after a few moments. “Car rental agencies always ask for a license and enter it into their records, but this shows she hasn’t used her license for anything.”
“What about Morgan and Payson-Smith?”
Pearl shrugged. “I’ll check, but I bet we won’t find anything for them, either.” He bent over the keyboard again; this time he allowed me to watch over his shoulder as he began to repeat the same process for the other two Ruby Fulcrum scientists.
Modemed phone numbers, passwords, menu screens accessing the files of credit bureaus: Pearl was doing something almost akin to art, albeit strange and terrible to behold. Not to mention scary. If an amateur like Pearl could hack into credit files and use inductive reasoning to second-guess what a fugitive had been thinking the previous evening, what did this portend for the rest of us?
Bailey must have sensed my line of thought. “When I was a kid,” he said as his fingers wandered across the keys, “and my great-grandfather was still alive, he told me that his uncle Samuel had been an escaped slave from Tennessee, way back during the Civil War. He had taken the Underground Railroad up north to Chicago, and it was a hell of a ride. Hiding out in fruit cellars during the day, riding in the back of hay wagons at night, running from one abolitionist house to the next. Once he had to outrun some bloodhounds in some hick town in Kentucky and didn’t shake ’em until he lost the scent by wading several miles down a shallow creek.”
“But he got away, didn’t he?”
He nodded. “Yeah, he got away, but they only had bloodhounds back then. If great-uncle Sam had to do the same thing now, he probably would have stolen a car … and if he wasn’t paying cash all the way, then every time he stopped at a charge station, some database would have recorded a number with his name behind it. How long do you think he might have lasted? Probably not even to the Illinois state line.”
There was a sharp rap on the door; we looked around to see Jah standing in the corridor. He seemed nervous. “Gerry,” he said, “I’ve got something I think you ought to see.”
“Joker?”
He shook his head. “Joker’s clean,” he said, “except that everything you had stored on it has been dumped. It’s the backup disk you took from John’s PT. It …”
Jah took a deep breath, then crooked a finger at me. “Just c’mon down to the lab. You’re not going to believe this.”
