28
Jerome parks his Wrangler with the nose almost touching the closed gate at 729 Lilac Drive, gets out, and pushes the call button. He has a reason to be here if someone from the Sugar Heights security patrol should stop and query him, but it will only work if the woman inside confirms him, and he’s not sure he can count on that. His earlier conversation with the lady has suggested that she’s got one wheel on the road at most. In any case, he’s not challenged, and after a moment or two of standing there and trying to look as if he belongs—this is one of those occasions when he feels especially black—Holly answers.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Jerome, Ms. Gibney. Bill Hodges’s friend?”
A pause so long he’s about to push the button again when she says, “You have the gate code?”
“Yes.”
“All right. And if you’re a friend of Mr. Hodges, I guess you can call me Holly.”
He pushes the code and the gate opens. He drives through and watches it close behind him. So far, so good.
Holly is at the front door, peering at him through one of the side windows like a prisoner in a high-security visitation area. She’s wearing a housecoat over pajamas, and her hair is a mess. A brief nightmare scenario crosses Jerome’s mind: she pushes the panic button on the burglar alarm panel (almost certainly right next to where she’s standing), and when the security guys arrive, she accuses him of being a burglar. Or a would-be rapist with a flannel-pajama fetish.
The door is locked. He points to it. For a moment Holly just stands there like a robot with a dead battery. Then she turns the deadbolt. A shrill peeping sound commences when Jerome opens the door and she takes several steps backward, covering her mouth with both hands.
“Don’t let me get in trouble! I don’t want to get in trouble!”
She’s twice as nervous as he is, and this eases Jerome’s mind. He punches the code into the burglar alarm and hits ALL SECURE. The peeping stops.
Holly collapses into an ornately carved chair that looks like it might have cost enough to pay for a year at a good college (although maybe not Harvard), her hair hanging around her face in dank wings. “Oh, this has been the worst day of my life,” she says. “Poor Janey. Poor poor Janey.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But at least it’s not my fault.” She looks up at him with thin and pitiable defiance. “No one can say it was. I didn’t do anything.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Jerome says.
It comes out sounding stilted, but she smiles a little, so maybe it’s okay. “Is Mr. Hodges all right? He’s a very, very, very nice man. Even though my mother doesn’t like him.” She shrugs. “But who does she like?”
“He’s fine,” Jerome says, although he doubts if that’s true.
“You’re black,” she says, looking at him, wide-eyed.
Jerome looks down at his hands. “I am, aren’t I?”
She bursts into peals of shrill laughter. “I’m sorry. That was rude. It’s fine that you’re black.”
“Black is whack,” Jerome says.
“Of course it is. Totally whack.” She stands up, gnaws at her lower lip, then pistons out her hand with an obvious effort of will. “Put it there, Jerome.”
He shakes. Her hand is clammy. It’s like shaking the paw of a small and timid animal.
“We have to hurry. If my mother and Uncle Henry come back and catch you in here, I’m in trouble.”
You? Jerome thinks. What about the black kid?
“The woman who used to live here was also your cousin, right?”
“Yes. Olivia Trelawney. I haven’t seen her since I was in college. She and my mother never got along.” She looks at him solemnly. “I had to drop out of college. I had issues.”
Jerome bets she did. And does. Still, there’s something about her he likes. God knows what. It’s surely not that fingernails-on-a-blackboard laugh.
“Do you know where her computer is?”
“Yes. I’ll show you. Can you be quick?”
I better be, Jerome thinks.
29
The late Olivia Trelawney’s computer is password-protected, which is silly, because when he turns over the keyboard, he finds OTRELAW written there with a Sharpie.
Holly, standing in the doorway and flipping the collar of her housecoat nervously up and down, mutters something he doesn’t catch.
“Huh?”
“I asked what you’re looking for.”
“You’ll know it if I find it.” He opens the finder and types CRYING BABY into the search field. No result. He tries WEEPING INFANT. Nothing. He tries SCREAMING WOMAN. Nothing.
“It could be hidden.” This time he hears her clearly because her voice is right next to his ear. He jumps a little, but Holly doesn’t notice. She’s bent over with her hands on her housecoated knees, staring at Olivia’s monitor. “Try AUDIO FILE.”
That’s a pretty good idea, so he does. But there’s nothing.
“Okay,” she says, “go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES and look at SOUND.”
“Holly, all that does is control the input and output. Stuff like that.”
“Well duh. Try it anyway.” She’s stopped biting her lips.
Jerome does. Under output, the menu lists SOUND STICKS, HEADPHONES, and LOG ME IN SOUND DRIVER. Under input, there’s INTERNAL MICROPHONE and LINE IN. Nothing he didn’t expect.
“Any other ideas?” he asks her.
“Open SOUND EFFECTS. Over there on the left.”
He turns to her. “Hey, you know this stuff, don’t you?”
“I took a computer course. From home. On Skype. It was interesting. Go on, look at SOUND EFFECTS.”
Jerome does, and blinks at what he sees. In addition to FROG, GLASS, PING, POP, and PURR—the usual suspects—there’s an item listed as SPOOKS.
“Never seen that one before.”
“Me, either.” She still won’t look directly at his face, but her affect has changed remarkably otherwise. She pulls up a chair and sits beside him, tucking her lank hair behind her ears. “And I know Mac programs inside and out.”
“Go with your bad self,” Jerome says, and holds up a hand.
Still looking at the screen, Holly slaps him five. “Play it, Sam.”
He grins. “Casablanca.”
“Yes. I’ve seen that movie seventy-three times. I have a Movie Book. I write down everything I see. My mother says that’s OCD.”
“Life is OCD,” Jerome says.
Unsmiling, Holly replies, “Go with your bad self.”
Jerome highlights SPOOKS and bangs the return key. From the stereo sound sticks on either side of Olivia’s computer, a baby begins to wail. Holly is okay with that; she doesn’t clutch Jerome’s shoulder until the woman shrieks, “Why did you let him murder my baby?”
“F*ck!” Jerome cries, and grabs Holly’s hand. He doesn’t even think about it, and she doesn’t draw away. They stare at the computer as if it has grown teeth and bitten them.
There’s a moment of silence, then the baby starts crying again. The woman screams again. The program cycles a third time, then stops.
Holly finally looks directly at him, her eyes so wide they seem in danger of falling out of her head. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
“Jesus, no.” Maybe something, or Bill wouldn’t have sent him here, but that? “Can you find out anything about the program, Holly? Like when it was installed? If you can’t, that’s all ri—”
“Push over.”
Jerome is good with computers, but Holly plays the keyboard like a Steinway. After a few minutes of hunting around, she says, “Looks like it was installed on July first of last year. A whole bunch of stuff was installed that day.”
“It could have been programmed to play at certain times, right? Cycle three times and then quit?”
She gives him an impatient glance. “Of course.”
“Then how come it’s not still playing? I mean, you guys have been staying here. You would have heard it.”
She clicks the mouse like crazy and shows him something else. “I saw this already. It’s a slave program, hidden in her Mail Contacts. I bet Olivia didn’t know it was here. It’s called Looking Glass. You can’t use it to turn on a computer—at least I don’t think so—but if it is on, you can run everything from your own computer. Open files, read emails, look at search histories . . . or deactivate programs.”
“Like after she was dead,” Jerome says.
“Oough.” Holly grimaces.
“Why would the guy who installed this leave it? Why not erase it completely?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he just forgot. I forget stuff all the time. My mother says I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my neck.”
“Yeah, mine says that, too. But who’s he? Who are we talking about?”
She thinks it over. They both do. And after perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.
“Her I-T guy,” Jerome says, just as Holly says, “Her geek freak.”
Jerome starts going through the drawers of Olivia’s computer station, looking for a computer-service invoice, a bill stamped PAID, or a business card. There ought to be at least one of those, but there’s nothing. He gets on his knees and crawls into the kneehole under the desk. Nothing there, either.
“Look on the fridge,” he says. “Sometimes people put shit there, under little magnets.”
“There are plenty of magnets,” Holly says, “but nothing on the fridge except for a real estate agent’s card and one from the Vigilant security company. I think Janey must have taken down everything else. Probably threw it away.”
“Is there a safe?”
“Probably, but why would my cousin put her I-T guy’s business card in her safe? It’s not like it’s worth money, or anything.”
“True-dat,” Jerome says.
“If it was here, it would be by her computer. She wouldn’t hide it. I mean, she wrote her password right under her goshdarn keyboard.”
“Pretty dumb,” Jerome says.
“Totally.” Holly suddenly seems to realize how close they are. She gets up and goes back to the doorway. She starts flipping the collar of her housecoat again. “What are you going to do now?”
“I guess I better call Bill.”
He takes out his cell phone, but before he can make the call, she says his name. Jerome looks at her, standing there in the doorway, looking lost in her flappy comfort-clothes.
“There must be, like, a zillion I-T guys in this city,” she says.
Nowhere near that many, but a lot. He knows it and Hodges knows it, too, because it was Jerome who told him.
30
Hodges listens carefully to everything Jerome has to say. He’s pleased by Jerome’s praise of Holly (and hopes Holly will be pleased, too, if she’s listening), but bitterly disappointed that there’s no link to the Computer Jack who worked on Olivia’s machine. Jerome thinks it must be because Janey threw Computer Jack’s business card away. Hodges, who has a mind trained to be suspicious, thinks Mr. Mercedes might have made damned sure Olivia didn’t have a card. Only that doesn’t track. Wouldn’t you ask for one, if the guy did good work? And keep it handy? Unless, that is . . .
He asks Jerome to put Holly on.
“Hello?” So faint he has to strain to hear her.
“Holly, is there an address book on Olivia’s computer?”
“Just a minute.” He hears faint clicking. When she comes back, her voice is puzzled. “No.”
“Does that strike you as weird?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Could the guy who planted the spook sounds have deleted her address book?”
“Oh, sure. Easy. I’m taking my Lexapro, Mr. Hodges.”
“That’s great, Holly. Can you tell how much Olivia used her computer?”
“Sure.”
“Let me talk to Jerome while you look.”
Jerome comes on and says he’s sorry they haven’t been able to find more.
“No, no, you’ve done great. When you tossed her desk, you didn’t find a physical address book?”
“Uh-uh, but lots of people don’t bother with them anymore—they keep all their contacts on their computers and phones. You know that, right?”
Hodges supposes he should know it, but the world is moving too fast for him these days. He doesn’t even know how to program his DVR.
“Hang on, Holly wants to talk to you again.”
“You and Holly are getting along pretty well, huh?”
“We’re cool. Here she is.”
“Olivia had all kinds of programs and website faves,” Holly says. “She was big on Hulu and Huffpo. And her search history . . . it looks to me like she spent even more time browsing than I do, and I’m online a lot.”
“Holly, why would a person who really depends on her computer not have a service card handy?”
“Because the guy snuck in and took it after she was dead,” Holly says promptly.
“Maybe, but think of the risk—especially with the neighborhood security service keeping an eye on things. He’d have to know the gate code, the burglar alarm code . . . and even then he’d need a housekey . . .” He trails off.
“Mr. Hodges? Are you still there?”
“Yes. And go ahead and call me Bill.”
But she won’t. Maybe she can’t. “Mr. Hodges, is he a master criminal? Like in James Bond?”
“I think just crazy.” And because he’s crazy, the risk might not matter to him. Look at the risk he took at City Center, plowing into that crowd of people.
It still doesn’t ring right.
“Give me Jerome again, will you?”
She does, and Hodges tells him it’s time to get out before Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Henry come back and catch him computer-canoodling with Holly.
“What are you going to do, Bill?”
He looks out at the street, where twilight has started to deepen the colors of the day. It’s close to seven o’clock. “Sleep on it,” he says.