“So the person heading out of the building saw it, the neighbor lady saw it, and anyone else you walked past saw it.”
“No…I don’t think…Shit. I took it out at one point, and I know I put it back in my pocket eventually, but I’m not sure when.”
“So that lady might have seen it,” Julie said. “Or someone else you didn’t even notice.”
“Maybe there was a camera in the lobby,” Thomas said. “Didn’t you think of that?”
I looked angrily at him. “No, I did not think of that. Why the hell would I think of that?” But I supposed it was possible. Calming down, I said, “Okay, let’s say somebody, somehow, saw that sheet of paper I was carrying. How do we make the leap from that to the image disappearing online now?”
Julie said, “For the sake of argument, why don’t we say that what Thomas saw in the window was… something. Something that someone-”
“Like who?” I asked.
“Work with me here. Okay? Let’s say whatever’s shown in the window is something someone wouldn’t be pleased to find out was online. And once they found out it was, they had to have it removed. Think about it. Think of all the candid shots these Whirl360 cars have taken. Husbands cheating on wives, wives cheating on husbands.”
“But they blur the faces,” I said.
“Okay, but let’s say, for example, just for fun, you’re some guy in Hartford and you want to see if your house is on Whirl360, and you find it, there’s a car in the driveway you recognize as your golfing buddy’s Lincoln, except he’s never been to your house. But your wife’s home during the day, when the picture was taken. Or let’s say you’re that guy with the Lincoln, and you find out that picture’s up there before your friend does. What do you do?”
“I get what you’re saying.”
Thomas chimed in, “It’s like that car I saw that hit the other car in Boston.” To Julie, he said, “Ray wouldn’t do anything about that.”
“There’s all kinds of shit online that if you knew about it, you’d freak out,” Julie said. “And maybe when you were waving around that piece of paper, you tipped somebody off about the head in the window.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “So let’s say you’re right, and that my visit and the doctoring of the image are linked. How the hell would you go online and change it?”
“You’d hack in,” Thomas said.
Julie nodded. “Sounds logical. How else would you do it, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“It’d be worth calling Whirl360, asking them if anyone has tried lately to break into their system,” Julie said. “Get through their firewall or whatever they call it.”
“Where would you begin?” I asked. “Who would you call?”
Julie smiled. “You may know how to draw pictures but you’re clearly clueless when it comes to getting answers. I’ll take that on.”
Julie obviously had the smarts to find stuff out. What I was less sure was whether we should be trying. Was this something we needed to get involved in? Could nosing around backfire, get Thomas in trouble? We’d already had the FBI here. Did we want Whirl360’s security people at our door, too?
But I kept those concerns to myself, at least for the moment, because I had more immediate questions. “Thomas, tell me again what the landlord said when you called him. About the women who used to live there?”
“He said the apartment got empty late last summer. I don’t think they were sisters or related. They had different names.”
“What were they again?”
“Courtney and Olsen.”
“Those were their first names?”
“I think so. I had a hard time understanding him because of the accent. I told you that.”
“Olsen doesn’t sound like a woman’s first name,” Julie said. “Did he give you their full names?”
Thomas turned to his desk. “I wrote it down,” he said. “Courtney Walmers and Olsen Fitch.”
“Wait a second,” I said. Something about the name rang a bell. “Olsen Fitch?” Hadn’t I come across a name like that recently? “Thomas, let me sit there.” I got him out of his computer chair, opened up a new browser, and conducted the same search I’d done on Dad’s laptop of any news stories that had mentioned New York’s Orchard Street.
“Hang on…hang on,” I said. “Here we are. I knew that name rang a bell. Thomas, is it possible the landlord was saying ‘Allison Fitch’ instead of ‘Olsen Fitch?’”
Thomas thought. “I guess.”
“Okay, so here’s a story about the police issuing a statement that they were trying to find an Allison Fitch. She lived on Orchard, and worked at some bar and didn’t show up for work. There’s just the one story here, no follow-up.”
“That’s probably the person in the window,” Thomas said, standing close to me, like he wanted his chair back as soon as I was willing to surrender it. “It’s a woman. She got smothered, and then they got rid of her body.”
For a guy who didn’t watch TV crime shows, Thomas was pretty fast with possible scenarios.
“Thomas,” I said, “why don’t you sit back down here while Julie and I talk about how to handle this.”
“Are you going to go finish having sex?” Thomas asked.
I felt my own face flush, but Julie was very cool. “Maybe later,” she said. “We’re going to talk about this first. We can have sex any old time.”
Thomas was already back at it, exploring some city that looked to be European. Sensing my curiosity, he said, “Prague.”
Julie and I retreated into the map-covered upstairs hallway.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She raised her hands hopelessly. “Damned if I know.”
“Same here.”
We went down to the kitchen. Julie went looking for coffee and found a jar of instant. “Tell me this isn’t all you have.”
It was. As she filled a kettle she said, “Call me crazy, but I think there’s something going on here.”
“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.
“Why the hell would someone erase that head from the window if there wasn’t something funny about it?”
“Agreed.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“I know you said you weren’t really going to call the New York police like Thomas asked, but that was then. You gonna call them now?”
“None of the reasons that would have kept me from calling before have changed,” I said.
Julie looked surprised. “Excuse me? That altered picture sort of changes things.”
I reminded her about the FBI. “Thomas is already on their radar for sending e-mails to the CIA and Bill Clinton. Say we call the New York police, or even the Promise Falls cops. That’ll probably trigger some sort of alarm, and the FBI’ll be notified. And when the FBI brings everyone up to speed on my brother’s activities, that he’s been writing the CIA with all his street memorization updates, just how seriously do you think anyone’s going to take him? Especially when what he claims to have seen is no longer on Whirl360?”
Julie’s shoulders slumped. “Shit. But there’s more than just what Thomas saw, and you still have the earlier printout. And there’s that missing woman.”
“Who may or may not still be missing,” I said.
“Yeah, but that can be checked. Ray, I get your hesitation here, and being worried that the cops will think there’s nothing to it, but I gotta tell ya, this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I’m going to call Whirl360 and talk to whoever’s in charge of muddying images on the site and ask if someone hacked into it. Or if they changed it themselves for some reason.”
“And you think I should call the cops,” I said.
