? ? ?
Ruth doesn’t think there’s much value in viewing Mona’s apartment, but she’s learned over the years not to leave any stone unturned. She gets the key from Sarah Ding and makes her way to the apartment around six in the evening. Viewing the site at approximately the time of day when the murder occurred can sometimes be helpful.
She passes through the living room. There’s a small TV facing a futon, the kind of furniture that a young woman keeps from her college days when she doesn’t have a reason to upgrade. It’s a living room that was never meant for visitors.
She moves into the room in which the murder happened. The forensics team has cleaned it out. The room—it wasn’t Mona’s real bedroom, which was a tiny cubby down the hall, with just a twin bed and plain walls—is stripped bare, most of the loose items having been collected as evidence. The mattress is naked, as are the nightstands. The carpet has been vacuumed. The place smells like a hotel room: stale air and faint perfume.
Ruth notices the line of mirrors along the side of the bed, hanging over the closet doors. Watching arouses people.
She imagines how lonely Mona must have felt living here, touched and kissed and fucked by a stream of men who kept as much of themselves hidden from her as possible. She imagines her sitting in front of the small TV to relax and dressing up to meet her parents so that she could lie some more.
Ruth imagines the way the murderer had shot Mona and then cut her after. Was there more than one of them so that Mona thought a struggle was useless? Did they shoot her right away, or did they ask her to tell them where she had hidden her money first? She can feel the Regulator starting up again, keeping her emotions in check. Evil has to be confronted dispassionately.
She decides she’s seen all she needs to see. She leaves the apartment and pulls the door closed. As she heads for the stairs, she sees a man coming up, keys in hand. Their eyes briefly meet, and he turns to the door of the apartment across the hall.
Ruth is sure the police have interviewed the neighbor. But sometimes people will tell things to a nonthreatening woman that they are reluctant to tell the cops.
She walks over and introduces herself, explaining that she’s a friend of Mona’s family, here to tie up some loose ends. The man, whose name is Peter, is wary but shakes her hand.
“I didn’t hear or see anything. We pretty much keep to ourselves in this building.”
“I believe you. But it would be helpful if we can chat a bit, anyway. The family didn’t know much about her life here.”
He nods reluctantly and opens the door. He steps in and waves his arms up and around in a complex sequence as though he’s conducting an orchestra. The lights come on.
“That’s pretty fancy,” Ruth says. “You have the whole place wired up like that?”
His voice, cautious and guarded until now, grows animated. Talking about something other than the murder seems to relax him. “Yes. It’s called EchoSense. They add an adapter to your wireless router, and a few antennas around the room, and then it uses the Doppler shifts generated by your body’s movements in the radio waves to detect gestures.”
“You mean it can see you move with just the signals from your Wi-Fi bouncing around the room?”
“Something like that.”
Ruth remembers seeing an infomercial about this. She notes how small the apartment is and how little space separates it from Mona’s. They sit down and chat about what Peter remembers about Mona.
“Pretty girl. Way out of my league, but she was always pleasant.”
“Did she get a lot of visitors?”
“I don’t pry into other people’s business. But yeah, I remember lots of visitors, mostly men. I did think she might have been an escort. But that didn’t bother me. The men always seemed clean, business types. Not dangerous.”
“No one who looked like a gangster, for example?”
“I wouldn’t know what gangsters look like. But no, I don’t think so.”
They chat on inconsequentially for another fifteen minutes, and Ruth decides that she’s wasted enough time.
“Can I buy the router from you?” she asks. “And the EchoSense thing.”
“You can just order your own set online.”
“I hate shopping online. You can never return things. I know this one works; so I want it. I’ll offer you two thousand, cash.”
He considers this.
“I bet you can buy a new one and get another adapter yourself from EchoSense for less than a quarter of that.”
He nods and retrieves the router, and she pays him. The act feels somehow illicit, not unlike how she imagines Mona’s transactions were.
? ? ?
Ruth posts an ad to a local classifieds site, describing in vague terms what she’s looking for. Boston is blessed with many good colleges and lots of young men and women who would relish a technical challenge even more than the money she offers. She looks through the résumés until she finds the one she feels has the right skills: jailbreaking phones, reverse-engineering proprietary protocols, a healthy disrespect for acronyms like DMCA and CFAA.
She meets the young man at her office and explains what she wants. Daniel—dark-skinned, lanky, and shy—slouches in the chair across from hers as he listens without interrupting.
“Can you do it?” she asks.
“Maybe,” he says. “Companies like this one will usually send customer data back to the mothership anonymously to help improve their technology. Sometimes the data is cached locally for a while. It’s possible I’ll find logs on there a month old. If it’s there, I’ll get it for you. But I’ll have to figure out how they’re encoding the data and then make sense of it.”
“Do you think my theory is plausible?”
“I’m impressed you even came up with it. Wireless signals can go through walls, so it’s certainly possible that this adapter has captured the movements of people in neighboring apartments. It’s a privacy nightmare, and I’m sure the company doesn’t publicize that.”
“How long will it take?”
“As little as a day or as much as a month. I won’t know until I start. It will help if you can draw me a map of the apartments and what’s inside.”
Ruth does as he asked. Then she tells him, “I’ll pay you three hundred dollars a day, with a five-thousand-dollar bonus if you succeed this week.”
“Deal.” He grins and picks up the router, getting ready to leave.
Because it never hurts to tell people what they’re doing is meaningful, she adds, “You’re helping to catch the killer of a young woman who’s not much older than you.”
Then she goes home because she’s run out of things to try.
? ? ?
The first hour after waking up is always the worst part of the day for Ruth.
As usual, she wakes from a nightmare. She lies still, disoriented, the images from her dream superimposed over the sight of the water stains on the ceiling. Her body is drenched in sweat.
The man holds Jessica in front of him with his left hand while the gun in his right hand is pointed at her head. She’s terrified, but not of him. He ducks so that her body shields his, and he whispers something into her ear.
“Mom! Mom!” she screams. “Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot!”
Ruth rolls over, nauseated. She sits up at the edge of the bed, hating the smell of the hot room, the dust that she never has time to clean filling the air pierced by bright rays coming in from the east-facing window. She shoves the sheets off her and stands up quickly, her breath coming too fast. She’s fighting the rising panic without any help, alone, her Regulator off.
The clock on the nightstand says six o’clock.
She’s crouching behind the opened driver’s-side door of her car. Her hands shake as she struggles to keep the man’s head, bobbing besides her daughter’s, in the sight of her gun. If she turns on her Regulator, she thinks her hands may grow steady and give her a clear shot at him.
What are her chances of hitting him instead of her? Ninety-five percent? Ninety-nine?