“Because David nearly drowned here?”
“Well, that, but Cal wouldn’t ever sell it. We bought it when we couldn’t afford it and he’d never sell it even when we needed the money. Our finances turned out OK, but I couldn’t figure out why he loved it so. Maybe he saw it as a place to get away from me. Or just a place to be with David and shut me out.” That last part came out before she thought about it.
Jane said nothing. There was no comfort to be given.
They finished their downstairs search and went upstairs. More bedrooms, for when the Halls hosted large parties. Most looked untouched. There was a master bedroom, facing out onto the lake, with a spectacular view.
“I haven’t slept here in years,” Perri said. “Do you think this is where…your mother and…Cal?”
“Don’t think about it. You’re divorcing him.”
“I still love him.” She said it like it was something she hadn’t known.
Jane wanted to reach out and touch her, but she didn’t.
Jane went back down the hall. There was a door near the far end of the hall. Jane could see faint marks of damage along the door frame and the wall—perhaps where a crowbar had once been forcefully applied. It was locked.
Perri ran her fingers along the marks. “Painted over. You two came here and then this was painted over.” She said it like something inside her was breaking.
Jane took the crowbar from her. Without asking permission, she started levering the lock off. It was hard work, and Perri grabbed the bar with her and together they pulled. The door’s lock splintered. Perri kept her grip on the crowbar; Jane let go and stepped into the room. It was a small room, of no real purpose except for a small chair, a TV, and a card table. And, she saw, looking up, an attic door.
“Did you know this was here?” Jane asked. Perri shook her head.
Jane pulled the attic door open. A small stepladder folded out. She crawled up into the attic; the AC unit was on her left. To her right, toward the front of the house, was a wall and a door, dividing this small room from the rest of the attic. Padlocked. And scarred again from an earlier crowbar, but not painted over. Because no one would ever see it.
“Oh,” Jane said. She nearly dropped the crowbar.
“Are you remembering?”
Jane covered her face. “I don’t want to be here.” Fear, like a fire, had lit in her gut, her spine, her brain.
Perri turned from her, taking the crowbar from her hands, and went at the second door, her breath coming sharp. This door was tougher and by the time she splintered the lock, Perri’s face was drenched in sweat.
“I feel sick,” Jane said. It was a sudden punch to the gut; she went to one knee.
“Do you remember this?” Perri asked, kneeling beside her.
“I don’t…we have to get out of here.”
“No, Jane, not yet. Maybe you should go outside and get some fresh air.”
“No.” Jane pushed herself up. “No. I need to see.”
Perri put a hand on her shoulder and helped her up.
The two women looked at each other, and then Jane pushed open the door.
The first surprise was that this part of the attic—a large one, which ran the entire length of the house—was air-conditioned. The room was cold. Inside was a desk, four computers, a server array. It looked like the network setup for a small business. Perri thought, How can this be awful?
Jane went to the keyboard of one of the systems. She slid the hacker drive that Perri had found into the port.
“It wants to know common elements you might use for your passwords,” Jane said. Perri leaned down and typed: her birthdate, Cal’s, their anniversary, the names of the pets they’d had.
“Any other dates?” she read on the prompt.
“The date of the accident,” Jane said suddenly. Thinking of the combination on her mother’s safe, where she’d found her gun, found her hidden medical files. “Try that.”
She did. The computer password was cracked in less than three minutes. The screen opened. Perri sat down in front of the screen. The icons on the desktop appeared to be links to server management apps, and to a distant server elsewhere, marked as being in Iceland.
A browser window opened by default. She pulled the paper with the coded letters and numbers from her pocket and spread it smooth so she could read it. In the space for the web address she started typing in R34D2FT97S: the long, nonsensical code she’d found in her father’s file, the odd web address she’d tried earlier on her mother’s computer. Then at the end she added the .com.
She could see David’s fingers typing the same, like a flash. She closed her eyes and the image was gone.
“Randy said he saw a paper with a long series of numbers and letters. That can’t be a website,” Perri said, watching her type. “No one would ever remember the address.”
“No one would ever accidentally type it in as an address, that’s the point. It didn’t work from my mom’s computer. It must only accept visits from a list of preapproved computer IP addresses. Hers wasn’t, but this one…”
Jane hit Enter. The screen opened to a banner that read, Welcome to Babylon. There was a prompt for username and password.
The jumbled numbers and letters below the address on the piece of paper. One marked “U,” one marked “P.” She entered the “U” code from the paper into username, the “P” code into password.
Jane hit Return.
The site opened.
“Oh, no. No,” Perri said. “This can’t be.”
The front part of the site was old-looking, like a relic from the early days of the web. Only when one clicked through to the various categories did the design get more sophisticated.
Because this was a marketplace.
Sex slaves. Illegal drugs. Illicit weapons. Hacker services. On the first tab the current offer was a thirteen-year-old girl, kidnapped from Cambodia, available to buyers. Jane moused to another tab, and there was a long list of human beings, mostly women and children, available for bidding. Perri made a noise and couldn’t look at it anymore, while Jane started to cry and moved the mouse to the arrow for illicit drugs. Offers appeared on the page, organized by prescription or by illegal. Oxycontin to heroin, cocaine to painkillers.
On another page, requests for hacker attacks against various organizations, individuals, and companies, from the United States to Europe to Africa to China, with payment in digital currencies. It got even worse. A forum of death, of hired killers offering their services. Jane read, numb, as some restricted their services, announcing they would not kill minors or political figures.
“What is this?” Perri said. “This cannot be.”