I wanted to get down to the coach house while Julius was still in the hospital, but I needed to hide the BREENIAC sketch before I did anything else. Gun in hand, I let myself into my building, turning on every light in both Tessa’s and my rooms to make sure no one was lurking. Twice before, electronically sophisticated thugs had jumped me in my own place. As my pals in Homeland Security had proven, the most sophisticated security is meaningless for someone with the right equipment.
All was well. Standing at my big worktable, I took the sketch out of its protective wrapper, holding it by its corners with latex gloves. Even so, part of one edge crumbled. I knew flashing light wasn’t good for such an old drawing, but the sketch was too important to send off without a copy. After I’d copied it, I cut two pieces of clear plastic from a roll in Tessa’s storage closet and laid the drawing between them. I put cardboard backing on both sides and taped a note for the Special Collections librarian to the packet.
Dear Ms. Turley:
I am sending you this fragile document for safekeeping. It was likely created in Germany or Austria in the 1940s and is the initial sketch for what became Edward Breen’s first computer. Who drew it and who owns it are two great unresolved questions right now, but several murders have been committed in the last month because of it and I want to make sure it stays in a safe location.
I know this is an imposition, perhaps even a burden, but I am asking you to hold it in the library in some secure place until I can tell you who owns it and whether the library can keep it. I should know within a week.
Sincerely
V. I. Warshawski
I put my packet into an express shipping envelope and went to a twenty-four-hour outlet in the strip mall down the street. I’d handwritten my note to Rachel Turley, just in case there was a Trojan horse monitoring keystrokes on my laptop. At the office store, though, I logged onto a computer so that I could type up a shipping label and handle some of my e-mail.
If I was going to search more thoroughly into Ada Byron’s identity, I needed to use my subscription databases. This seemed to be the ideal time to do it, while I was logged on to a machine Cordell or the Feds didn’t know about.
While I waited for LifeStory and my other databases to come up with reports on any Ada Byrons between 1940 and 2010, I checked my e-mail. Jake wanted to know where I was and why I hadn’t been in touch. By the time I finished a long letter to him, I was getting a signal that results were waiting for me.
There had been thousands of people named Byron in America during the years bracketed by my search. Twenty-three had actually been named Ada, but none of them cross-referenced with either Benjamin or Julius Dzornen, with the Breens, or with Martina Saginor or Gertrud Memler.
After reading the skimpy entries available for the Ada Byrons, only one stood out: a woman who had died in Tinney, a small college town in western Illinois, seven years ago. Right around the time of Martin’s bar mitzvah, when Judy Binder had stolen a stack of documents from her mother’s dresser.
The Huron County Gazette had written an obituary. Byron hadn’t been a computer programmer, just a library clerk at Alexandrine College in Tinney. After retirement, she had volunteered in the town’s schools as a tutor. She’d died at 102, leaving no family. In a big city, her meager biography wouldn’t have merited an obituary, but her advanced age meant she’d been news in Huron County.
This Ada Byron had been about ten years younger than Benjamin Dzornen. That was all the information my databases could turn up. No sign she’d ever studied physics, no hint that she’d ever left Tinney to work in a lab or a physics department. It was a tenuous link, but she was the only Ada with a date that connected to my story in any way.
I printed the obituary, then checked my e-mail one last time before logging off. Jake, in LA for the last leg of his tour, wouldn’t be up for six or seven hours, but Murray had written, complaining that I wasn’t answering my phone. I called him on one of my burn phones, surprised that he was awake this early.
“Warshawski, who has always done the right thing by you in Chicago?”
“My dog Peppy,” I said.
“Wrong. Me. I have jumped out on more long limbs than are in all of Cook County’s forest preserves to help you on stories. So why do you hold out on me?”
“Murray, I’m knee-deep in the old Muddy, and I have to push on, so could you make this less twenty questions and more what your point is?”
“My point, oh girl detective without peer, is that you could have called me about Julius Dzornen.”
“What, about his car accident? It was already on the wires. I learned about it on NPR when I was driving home last night.”
“And then you went to see him in the hospital.”
“How do you know—oh, you talked to Herta, who is not one of my most fervent fans.”
“I talked to her after he died,” Murray said. “The dead son of a Nobel laureate merits a line—”
“He died?” I interrupted. “When?”