“We’ve hardly seen the animals.” I turned away. “I want to see the birds. The tropical birds. Doesn’t Owen want to ride the carousel? Tell me later, Nate. Before I go.”
“Of course,” Nate said, and we didn’t speak about the lawsuit again as we walked around the zoo. Nate told me how Matt, in his days of drinking and petty crime, conspired to release a bunch of birds from their enclosure.
“He hated the zoo,” Nate said. “Hated it. Would never go. And if anyone mentioned it around him?” He gave a low whistle. “Anyway, it was an enclosure much like this—” Nate gestured to the open habitat, a tropical replica. Birdsong filtered through the warm air and colorful, feathered bodies flickered among the plants. “Which looked like paradise to everyone, except Matt. All Matt saw was a lot of sad birds. He propped open the doors, and then—” Nate began to laugh. “Ah, Lord. Then he tried to shoo the birds out. But of course they didn’t want to go! He terrified them and they flew all around screaming. He got so furious as they’d fly out and fly right back in.”
I laughed at the image, which I could see clearly in my mind.
“You tell great stories,” I said.
“Well, thank you. It looks like I’ve got an agent in my corner whenever I sit down to write my memoirs, hm?” He patted my shoulder.
“I wish.” I sighed.
Nate coaxed me into a conversation about my job, and my dream and despair of becoming Pam’s partner. It felt good, discussing it, and Nate was sympathetic and optimistic.
I dragged out the zoo visit as long as possible. I just want to see the snakes, I said, and then, I really want to see the elephants.
The truth? I didn’t want to talk about the lawsuit.
Owen fell asleep in Nate’s arms, and when that happened, I knew it was time to go. We walked back to Nate’s rental car. He arranged Owen on the backseat and we sat up front.
“Too warm?” Nate said. “Not warm enough?”
“I’m fine. Go on. Tell me about the thing.”
“We’ve had a sort of breakthrough, Hannah. I think you’ll be interested.” Nate kept his voice low; Owen was sound asleep. “You know we planned to subpoena the publisher’s name after we filed the lawsuit, yes?”
I nodded.
“And then Night Owl was taken offline. The distributors should still have records. But”—Nate held up a finger and smiled—“Shapiro enlisted a tech guy to do some digging for us.” Nate opened the glove compartment and withdrew several papers. “He searched the IP addresses associated with Night Owl, with the site where we believe it was originally posted and other sites that have duplicated or reviewed the book. The same IPs kept coming up.”
“Nate, this jargon is lost on me.”
“Bear with me. Our anonymous publisher is not Internet savvy. They did nothing to disguise the IP address, no proxy server, no domain privacy.” Nate grinned like a boy detective. “Our tech guy followed the browsing history for the most prevalent IPs, and one stood out. The same IP is associated with this e-mail address”—he pointed to a page—“which is associated with a domain, which happens to be a blog, and which just happened to rave about Night Owl and advertises it. The same IP regularly searches the book, checks the book’s ratings, et cetera. It’s almost a certainty, Hannah. This is our girl.
Girl? I let out a tremulous breath. Nate passed the papers to me.
The first page showed a jumble of text, strings of numbers and ICANN data, none of which made sense to me.
The second page was a printout of the blog melaniereads.com. There was a black-and-white banner image with a few male torsos and the words Melanie Reads in pink. The subheading read: Recipes, reviews of sexy books, dance stuff, and everything else Mel loves!
I skimmed the Night Owl review. It raved about the hot sex and “unputdownable” nature of the book. I sighed.
“I hate to tell you this, Nate, but reviews like this are all over the Internet.”
“Yes, but not by users who also have accounts at the Mystic Tavern, the site where—”