Sam knew he had only temporarily cured Anna of the snooping disease, but told Paul that New York could dismantle the parabolic mike aimed at Joshua’s window and take it back to Anna’s, with the result that they would have two such mikes aimed at Anna’s apartment. They would also need to get the mike out of the sprinkler system.
Next he went to work on the Grady Wade situation. He had run a credit check. Not surprisingly she had a couple of credit cards, but they were billed to a PO box. Sam had a cop friend run a DMV check, and that yielded a driver’s license and street address.
Sam took an outdated e-mail address given him by Anna, called for Grogg, and asked him to do what he could with the old address. Perhaps when she changed e-mail addresses she kept the same service provider. When they breached the security for the service provider’s database, they found her current e-mail address.
A random password generator quickly concluded that her password was Tease.”
They viewed her in-box and copied the contents. They needed to extract her deleted items and sent items. To accomplish their task they put an electronic watch on her line and waited for her to access the Internet. Fortunately it didn’t take long. They sent in a retrieval program based on computer virus technology that went into her desktop to copy and then compress her deleted-items folder, her sent-items folder, and all her personal correspondence under “My Documents.” When her computer was at rest, but on, it went to the “connect” function of her modem, and dialed up her Internet provider and sent an e-mail to Big Brain with a “winzip” file containing copies of all of her deleted and sent items as well as the correspondence from “My Documents.” The virus then removed the sent-item e-mail that was the only trail back to Big Brain. Thereafter the virus self-destructed, leaving no trace and doing no damage to the computer. They called the entire process and the program a “Grogg Job.”
Sam now knew substantially more about her, including her current employer. He called the manager of a cab company with whom he did business, and for a thousand dollars cash asked him to query all his drivers about the Gold Spurs, where she worked. An hour and twenty minutes more and Sam had the private phone of the Gold Spurs management, the names of all three bartenders, the doorman, and the owners, along with names of cabbies who knew Grady or the establishment.
Big Brain broke down the computer e-mails and correspondence documents, isolating all declarative sentences and focusing particularly on any sentence that included a descriptive emotional word or phrase such as glad, mad, pissed off, happy, heartbroken, and the like.
Big Brain then did a loose but revealing personality inventory on Grady, which Sam printed out and placed in an envelope marked “Spring.”
In a few minutes they had a cabby on the line who knew the Gold Spurs manager. The manager was new. Very professional. A straight-up guy. One of the cabby’s wealthy regular fares went to the place twice weekly and usually paid for the cabby to go in. Since the patron was a high roller, the manager came around. Always count on the cabbies.
Sam was on the freeway, headed to the establishment, in minutes; for another two hundred dollars the cabby greased the skids with the manager and the bartender on duty. (Of course both names went immediately into Big Brain for future use.)
Gold Spurs was a big sprawling place with a lot of limos. Money obviously flowed here; bouncers were thick and Sam saw plenty of tuxedo-clad floor managers. The place featured semiprivate rooms, nonalcoholic beer and soft drinks, chocolate-covered strawberries, and a menu of sorts.
Sam wanted Grady Wade, known as Mirage, in a semiprivate room. Normally the rooms would hold a party of eight and went for three hundred dollars per hour. Plus the girl at thirty dollars a dance for steady lap dances or a hundred and fifty dollars per half hour for friendly chats and lap dances, as the customer required. Before Sam went into the room he needed some background. There was a little bristling from a floor manager at the request for information about Grady, but it could be arranged for two hundred dollars-just local color about her work at the club, no address, no phone number.
Upstairs in the VIP lounge he found Nester, the so-called bartender who poured soft drinks. The guy was handsome, not too smart, and obviously spent the better part of his mornings pumping iron. Sam elected to go straight to the manager.
Two twenty-dollar bills got Nester to flick his head with practiced vanity at the office door.
Sam was greeted by a man with a neatly trimmed beard, a slim build, and a seemingly genuine smile. Not the sort he expected to find.
“I’m Will,” Sam said.
“Come in. I’m Guy.”
The office was nice, even plush. Guy had putters and golf balls in the corner and a carpet cup and fake green behind his desk.
“What can you tell me about Grady Wade?”
“You don’t look like the type to get moonfaced over a young dancer.” Guy smiled to take the sting out of the comment. “Or a serial killer.”
“That’s gratifying,” Sam said.
“It would be helpful if I knew your motives.”
“I’m a friend of her aunt’s. I think maybe Grady needs some help, but I’m not sure, and I want to find out.”
“Fair enough.”
“Tell me about her. I mean about her, not how she wiggles her ass.”
“Men admire her in droves. They follow her around like sick puppies. Her hair is golden, her eyes are the deepest blue. None of the customers can usually catch the sadness. They watch the plastered-on smile.
“She loves to please the crowd, she wants them all to fall in love so that she can walk away and leave them hurting, wanting more. She succeeds.
“She can smile and touch a head or pat a shoulder, and some old guy with his tobacco-stained teeth will lay his head over where that hand touched. He’s trying like hell to remember what it was like to be eighteen.
“She likes all the downtrodden. If a rich man catcalls a dancer, she’ll walk up and throw a Coke square in his face. Of course I threaten to fire her; half the men in this strip club are here to watch Grady throw her butt at the door boy. Or they’re sitting around waiting until she pats their shoulder, or if the planets are lined up right and the gods are smiling, kisses their cheek and squeezes their ass.
“More than anything else she wants someone to discover that she’s something special and yet she’s terribly afraid of it.”
Sam nodded his understanding.
“She had a baby when she was seventeen. She loved that kid out of her mind. That baby was the light in her soul. Maybe she loved him too much. He died when he was a year old. Name was Jace. Dad’s nickname as a kid was Jace. Her dad didn’t come to the funeral.
“All the men move across the room to be near her. Her regulars, the guys with the big money that she goes for, have learned to be cool and sit in the shadows. That’s how you get to be a Grady regular.
“Her dad has never come to the place but if he showed an interest, he could maybe motivate her to make something of herself. She’s smart enough to go to college but won’t. She is jealous as hell of her aunt’s success and won’t admit it. Since you’re sort of the Salvation Army, I think she just started coke. Maybe in the last week. Maybe only once, but I think she started.”
“When did you fall in love with her?” Sam asked.
The man laughed and shook his head. “Back when I was just a customer, managing another business.”
“You couldn’t land her. How come?”
“You tell me. Once when she’d had a couple too many Harvey Wall Bangers, I thought I was making headway. We talk but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
“Have you slept with her?”
“Of course. Not that it’s any of your business.”
Sam rose. “You’ve been more than helpful. Thanks.”
Sam held out a fanned handful of cash. Guy shook his head and waved it off.
“Thanks again. I’m going to see if Grady can do something for herself,” Sam said.
“Have at it. Once Grady makes up her mind it’s history. You’ll see. Good luck.”
“I’ll wait for her to come around,” Sam said, shaking his hand. “You think I could buy her shifts for five days,
