“About time, Jarhead. We can narrow it down.”
“Oh, it’s already narrowed down,” said Peter. “The name is Sasha. Sasha Kolodny.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“You’re shitting me. Sasha Kolodny? As in, Sasquatch? The Mad Billionaire? Man, you in deep doo-doo now.”
Sasha Kolodny was an early employee of a certain giant Seattle software company. A notable eccentric in an industry known for eccentrics, Sasha Kolodny was a bearded giant who earned the nickname Sasquatch because of his tendency to wander off into the steep evergreen forest that surrounded Seattle. Apparently he said it helped him think. His net worth including stock options was once reported at over a billion dollars.
In the mid-1990s, Kolodny left the company and used his fortune to launch a new business focused on, if Peter remembered correctly, the technology of sustainability. Hardware, not software. Renewable energy, urban agriculture, that kind of thing. Good ideas, but apparently ahead of their time in the boom years of conspicuous consumption. When the dot-com bubble popped, the whole enterprise went down in flames, taking most of his fortune with it. Kolodny went some flavor of crazy and disappeared. His story resurfaced from time to time in the media, both legend and cautionary tale. The intersection of genius, commerce, finance, and mental instability.
Peter’s knowledge of the man was limited to an article he’d read in Wired magazine years ago. The writer had made a comparison to Howard Hughes, and called Kolodny “one of the principal architects of the modern world.”
The title of the article was “The Mad Billionaire.”
Peter said, “What do you know about him?”
“Prob’ly no more’n you do. Let me look him up.” Peter heard the clicking of the keyboard.
“I don’t have long,” said Peter. June would be back from the bathroom any minute.
“Hold on, Jarhead. Let’s see. Yeah, here’s a ‘where is he now’ article, they interviewed some people who knew him. ‘Brilliant, very driven, and very private.’”
Lewis stopped talking, and Peter knew he was reading.
“Seems like something happened to him in the late nineties. Nobody really knows what, but he really changed. He got manic, obsessed, paranoid. Says here, ‘His focus on sustainability was rooted in his obsession with the collapse of civilization.’ Huh,” said Lewis. “Never knew the man was such a whack job.”
“Can you find out where he is now?”
“According to Wikipedia, he’s off the map. As in vanished, location unknown. The Internet thinks he’s dead.”
“The Internet thinks?”
“You know what I mean. The general fucking consensus, okay? The man wandered into the woods and never came back. Although some conspiracy geeks out there say Sasquatch is alive and well and running a secret lab for the United States government.”
“Was he ever declared dead?”
“How the fuck should I know? I just got started.”
“Maybe you should stop. I’ll do some digging on this end.”
“Jarhead. What the fuck is going on up there?”
June emerged from the gas station. She’d bought a few snacks.
“I’ll call you back,” Peter said, and hung up.
He wondered if a paranoid genius ex-billionaire could muster the enthusiasm to kill his ex-wife over a promising software application.
He thought maybe so.
If he only had one percent of his earlier wealth, he’d have the resources to make it happen.
June looked at him and smiled. She dug into a plastic bag and held out her hand. “Twizzler?”
38
They turned off the commercial strip into a dark, quiet neighborhood of long looping streets in a modified grid. No sidewalks, just gravel shoulders and low ditches to carry the runoff of the near-constant rain. Ranch houses and split-levels and a few older bungalows, some with elaborate landscaping, some adrift in a sea of thriving weeds. Lots of tall pines and cedars and hemlocks, their deep greens clogging up the light.
Dexter Smith’s most recent address was a sprawling 1960s split-level with a big attached garage in Seattle’s North End.
It sat at the back of an enormous corner lot, almost entirely concealed by a dense wall of overgrown cedars and evergreen shrubs along all four edges of the lot. A heavy wooden gate blocked the driveway, held shut by a fat padlock in a wrought-iron hasp. The padlock was closed, although floodlights were lit at the corners of the house, bright in the dim, damp afternoon.
A security camera stood atop the gatepost, facing the driveway.
June cruised by, slightly slower than the speed limit.
She said, “What do you see?”
“A soft fortress in disguise. All that plant growth will keep out prying eyes, burglars looking for an easy target, maybe even neighborhood kids. I’d guess there’s some fence inside those bushes, too, maybe even barbed wire. Inside the perimeter, it’s probably lawn, mowed short, and cameras showing everything. This is someone who thinks about layers of protection and fields of fire.”