And etcetera? Maybe that was an expression unique to Palfry County. “What does Lieutenant Downey reckon?” I asked. “Do you two think that Freddie Walker killed Schlafly?”
“Not likely. We hoped it could be a falling-out of thieves, but Walker was on his way back from Mexico at the time our ME says Schlafly was shot. Not that Walker wanted to tell us where he’d been, but when he saw it was that or a murder rap, he produced the manifest that showed him on a private plane leaving Juárez at four that same morning. Our ME says the deed was did by six A.M. at the latest, and likely earlier. Kind of hard to tell with the birds pecking out his pecker.”
I held the phone from my ear just in time to avoid another hearty guffaw. Maybe Kossel was a psychopath who had shot Ricky Schlafly himself and now was enjoying jokes about the dead man’s organs. Pecked his pecker, kayoed his kidneys, beaked his brains. Or the sheriff was merely one of those nerveless people who can fly bombing missions.
“Of course, it could have been one of Walker’s boys doing the deed on his behalf. Your lieutenant will look into that; could be the guy whose brains you beat out. Pity, in a way; can’t get a confession out of a man who can’t talk.”
I was tired of explaining how I’d come to knock “Bullet” Bultman down the stairs. Let Murray and the Palfry County sheriff imagine I’d carefully executed a move that got Bultman’s head to hit on the edge of a stair. Maybe it would make the next punk more hesitant to act when he saw me. Or the next punk would be so freaked he’d shoot me on sight.
I missed a couple of lines from Kossel, but heard his sign-off line: “We’ll be sending you a subpoena for the inquest, Warshawski, so don’t you go too far away.”
“I love you, too,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
I looked at my notes. Freddie Walker had been in Mexico; Metargon heiress Alison Breen was down there helping set up a computer lab. Mexico was a big country, but could they have met? Could she be a spoiled rich drug user? She wouldn’t be the first young person whose parents didn’t know she had a habit.
I called Jari Liu at Metargon. I started to tell him I’d met his boss earlier in the afternoon, but he already knew.
“Cordell told me to give you any help you need; we’re very anxious to locate young Martin.”
That made it easy: I wanted a photo, and I was sure they had a good head shot, given the way he’d quickly added my face to his database. Liu said it would be in my in box by the time I hung up.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“A crystal ball,” I said. “Someone who understands Martin Binder’s personality. Mr. Breen thinks he could be reconstructing your Princess Fitora code for the Chinese, or just for Microsoft or Apple.”
“Yeah, I know,” Liu said sourly. “He chewed my ass pretty hard for not telling him myself that Martin had vanished. It’s so commonplace for cowboy programmers to leave without warning that I didn’t think I needed to do anything more than report it to HR and my own department head. I’m supposed to have guessed if Martin was missing that there was a danger he was selling our secrets to the highest bidder.”
“You think that’s a real possibility?” I asked.
“Money didn’t seem important to Martin, but he might be motivated by revenge. Not against Metargon per se, we had a good rap, or I thought we did, but he might want to show the richer, cooler kids that he could grab the spotlight in ways that would be beyond them.”
“You think he could rebuild your code?”
“There’s a story about Mozart my old man told me, when he thought I could be another Yo-Yo Ma,” Liu said. “It was a big disappointment when I had a tin ear. Anyway, Mozart, the boy genius, is sitting in the Vatican chapel listening to a mass. The music is jealously guarded: only Vatican musicians get to see the score. Mozart hears it once, goes home, writes out the score.”
“Even if Martin has that kind of mind where he lays it all out in his head and sees it, Mr. Breen said it would be millions of lines of code,” I objected.
“We only let people work on a few aspects of a program to avoid the temptation to share it with a bigger world. But with someone like Martin, if he mastered the underlying architecture, he wouldn’t need the whole code to reconstruct a big piece of the program. That’s what Cordell is worried about, but nothing on any of our nerve endings suggests that a third party has seen the code.”
“You’d have heard?”
“High-end computing is like any high-stakes game. People are always spying on each other, trying to figure out or steal what the competition is doing. We don’t always hear everything, but especially after talking to Cordell this morning, we’re very much on the watch for it and nothing is bubbling up.”