Jack wasn't so sure. He had a feeling this kind of second-guessing could lead them in circles.
'First thing for me to do,' he said, 'is find out how many newborns died yesterday morning.'
'And I'll start combing Craigslist for a sublet for Eddie.'
'Good.' That was how they'd found this sublet for Weezy. 'If one of the dead newborns was Dawn's, we're back to square one. But if not…'
'Then we start looking for the baby.'
Jack had a thought. 'What if they want us to find the baby?'
'Well, then I think they'd have let Dawn keep it when they moved her in across the hall.'
'Maybe they want us to work for it.'
She gave him a sidelong look. 'Are we overthinking here?'
'Could be. We could end up in a poisoned-cup debate.'
She rolled her eyes. 'The Princess Bride?'
'Sorry.'
He couldn't escape the way his mind worked. And he couldn't escape the uneasy feeling that they were missing something.
15
Munir ignored the incessant rings from his in-box. A blizzard of emails was filling it. They seemed to be coming from everyone he knew and even some he didn't-or didn't recognize. And not just one from each, but multiples, all without a subject line, all blank. He had stopped opening them.
Somebody somewhere had a virus.
When the storm abated he'd delete them en masse. Right now he was more interested in the rootkit virus that Valez had forced him to allow into his computer. It had hijacked his system and refused to be removed.
It gave him something to do. Barbara was at the hospital at Robby's side-they were taking shifts-and Munir was supposed to be here at home resting. But he couldn't rest. Robby would be back in a day or two and they'd have to start dealing with the aftermath of all this horrendous trauma. This was a way of keeping his mind occupied.
He'd located the virus but it had integrated itself so deeply into his system that he could not pry it loose. Three times now he thought he had eradicated it, but it reappeared each time he rebooted his system.
And then he realized this wasn't the original rootkit. A second virus, introduced sometime since Tuesday, had overlaid the first.
He could see it now: This had to be related to the email assault. But what was the purpose? It wasn't even slowing down his machine. It was merely annoying.
He wished he could contact Russ. He'd been calling him all day, ever since Valez had said he'd heard of the game code from Russ. Munir couldn't believe he'd been involved in any way with what had befallen him and his family, but he needed to know the connection between the two. He also needed Russ's hacker expertise to help eradicate this virus.
Of course, Munir could simply wipe his hard drive clean and reinstall everything. A simple, effective solution, but he was loath to admit defeat.
After another half hour of tinkering, he finally managed to break into the rootkit's code.
What he found there sent him running to the phone to call Russ.
But once again Russ wasn't answering. So Munir called Jack.
16
First thing Jack did when he got home was check his various email accounts. All had multiple blank letters with no subject line from seemingly everyone he'd ever emailed. Not a large number, since he preferred the ephemeral nature of a phone call to committing words to electronic blips that could conceivably exist forever in cyberspace.
Conspicuously absent from the in-box were Gia and Vicky. Gia liked to send him a link now and again, and he'd occasionally shoot Vicky a cartoon or joke he thought she'd like. But Gia was about twelve hundred miles away from her computer.
Weezy said he'd caught a virus. Where from? Abe's email? Did these other folks have it too? Whatever, he'd leave finding a solution to Weezy. The intricacies of the Net were a mystery to him and he was content to let them remain so.
He checked his voice mail and found a message from Munir saying he had to talk to him, immediately.
Yeah, in a minute. Someone else he had to talk to first.
He called Ron Clarkson for the second time in two days. Ron worked at the city morgue in Bellevue. He'd probably think Jack was calling with a complaint about the color-matched finger he'd supplied for Munir, but Jack only needed him to answer a question this time.
'Hey,' he said when he recognized Jack's voice. 'Figured you might be calling.'
'It's not about the merchandise,' Jack said. 'That was fine.'
It had all been for nothing, but none of that was Ron's fault.
'Well, I'm glad to hear that, but I was talking about Russ.'
'Russ who?'
'Tuit. Who else? I thought you was calling 'cause you'd heard the news.'
Not something Jack wanted to hear from a morgue attendant.
'Aw jeez, you're not telling me-'
'Yeah. Fished him out of the Hudson this morning, poor guy. Looks like he drowned.'
Jack couldn't speak for a moment. Russ… geeky, good-natured, harmless Russ. The feds listed him as a felon, but he was one of the least violent people Jack knew. His crime had been hacking a few banks and skimming a fraction of a cent off their transactions. For years he'd been Jack's go-to guy for all things cyber-to solve a problem or sometimes create one. When Jack had been looking for a contact in the morgue, Russ had put him in touch with Ron.
'Any signs of foul play?'
'I ain't the ME, but preliminary word is no.'
Jack wasn't buying that for a second.
'Shit.'
'Yeah. Good guy. Coulda knocked me over with a feather when I heard. But if you didn't call about Russ-?'
Jack told him about looking for a newborn who died Wednesday morning.
'Piece o' cake,' Ron said. 'Lemme run a check on the computer and call you right back.'
Jack hung up and stared at his computer screen. Valez said they'd heard about Munir's game code from Russ. How? Bigger question: Why kill him?
Because Jack had no doubt Russ had been murdered. Drowned in the Hudson? No doubt true. No sign of foul play? Easy enough to do. Take a guy out on the river for a party or a girl or some weed, whatever, and push him over. The water out there in February is not much above freezing. No matter how good a swimmer he is, he can't last fifteen minutes, if that, before his muscles seize up and he sinks.
No sign of foul play… not one bit. And if you liquor him up a little beforehand, the ME's got all he needs to construct a neat little scenario: He got drunk and fell into the river.
Bastards.
Or maybe… maybe he had jumped or fallen. Maybe he'd been involved in what had happened to Munir and felt so guilty Not Russ. If he'd wanted the game code, he could have gotten it without all the drama that had gone down. All he'd have had to do was ask Munir for a copy.
