THE SUN IS CLIMBING OVERHEAD AND THE BLAST OF heat on my skin after the institutional air of the police station is both a relief and an oppression. The atmosphere has thickened. The northern Minnesota air, choked with humidity, is rising off the 300 million lakes everyone brags are so marvelous, so special, so . . . Minnesotan. I feel like a coating of Thebes itself is settling over my skin, attaching itself to me like cellophane.
The longest day of the year is getting longer every minute.
I check my phone: a voice message from Harrison and a text from Izzy. Nothing from Paul’s wife. And, fortunately, nothing from Melanie.
“Toni, are you still in town?” Harrison’s voice sounds like he genuinely hopes I am. “I don’t know why you ran out, but Izzy and I just want to hang. We haven’t seen you since last Christmas and then you were only here for a day. Don’t leave until we can catch up. Please?”
My cousin can still tug on the one heartstring I have left.
I open the text from Izzy. A GIF with some teen queen, a Disney Princess type, made up and coiffed beyond her years, someone I’m probably supposed to recognize but don’t because of my social media illiteracy. The girl’s shoulders move up and down in a slow-motion shrug while she mouths: “What the fuck?” over and over again, her words subtitled below her plumped-up lips and furled but perfectly shaped eyebrows.
Okay, I have two heartstrings left.
I text Harrison: Still here.
Immediately a typing bubble appears, followed by: Where r u? Onsite?
I’m not ready to tell him where I went or who I saw. My instincts are telling me to keep that quiet.
Not far, I text back.
Izzy and I want to see you, he replies. Just us. Just catching up.
Not at the house. I don’t want to be ambushed by Christopher.
Lunch at the Parth? he suggests. The Parthenon is a diner just outside the main part of town. It’s the place we used to go after school for french fries, the crinkle-cut ones, clearly industrial but slathered in so much fry oil and salt they might as well have been shredded paper for all we cared. My only happy memories of family life after Paul took off are of sitting in vinyl booth seats at the Parthenon with Harrison and Izzy. I could use a happy memory about now.
I text that I’ll meet them at noon. That gives me time to poke around on the Per Olufsen case enough to send Melanie a new status update.
I RAISE THE TOP ON MY CAR—BOTH TO BLOCK OUT THE sun and to hide from inquiring eyes—plug my laptop into the car charger and, with apologies to the environmental-protection gods, turn the car on idle so I can work in air-conditioned and power-corded isolation.
As I unzip the compressed files I downloaded from the Grogan server this morning, my screen lights up with document after document. Oh, this is heaven. I love exclusive access to information, especially information about powerful people that everyone else knows only from the outside. My fingers are tingling, like they used to in law school when I came upon the perfect legal precedent and started writing my brief for class, knowing I’d cracked the problem and all I had to do now was write and reason it out to its logical conclusion. Research. Discovery. It’s what I do best.
I start flying through the documents, feeling my breath even out. I can sense my blood pressure dropping. Here’s where I’m my best self. Here’s where the improbabilities and miseries and emotional black holes of Thebes can’t touch me. Data doesn’t care whether it trusts you or not. Data doesn’t get engaged without telling you or reject your help in favor of a jail cell. It gives you exactly what you need, when you need it. Data can lead to the truth. You just have to figure out how to break the code.
Time logs from Per’s digital calendar open in one window; route information from his limo’s GPS open in another. I start toggling between them to see what evidence we have of Per’s back-and-forth over the past two months. What patterns of motion can I establish? I need to build a foundation of what is routine so I can note what is exceptional—and therefore, where the points of weakness are should opposing counsel ever subpoena his records and calendars.
Quickly it becomes clear that world travel is routine for him, as anyone would expect from the head of a global aviation company. Air Trek lists Per’s own plane as Air Trek One. It wasn’t unusual to see AT1 leave Minneapolis–St. Paul airport three times in one week during the time he was negotiating the new hub—a jaunt to London and back for two days, a quick trip to LA, then out to Oslo for three. Air Trek Industries has locations in ten cities, so no surprise to find that Per has a hotel suite on standby in each of them.
He’s a runner—we talked about running at the cocktail party last night, and he showed me his watch, where he logs in his runs, their coordinates, the mileage. I poke around the cloud apps I’ve accessed with his assistant’s passwords and I add his Garmin data to my screen. He’s religious about it: five to eight miles, six days a week.
I’m tapping out my spreadsheet, cross-referencing all the locations, travel times, meeting logs. Where does he go for leisure? Where does this well-known international playboy play? Follow the money, Melanie said. I open another window: small accounts. Personal banking.
It looks like the logical conclusion is that the majority, if not all, of Per’s dalliances take place in his homes. He isn’t trying to hide his womanizing—goodness, it’s part of his brand. But the clever man aligns it with his philanthropy. A quick scan of his media coverage files shows many photos of Per in one elegant tuxedo after another at a parade of charitable galas with a different woman every time. I’m impressed with the strategy. What high-profile cause wouldn’t want Per Olufsen at their benefit when the paparazzi know that the big news ensuring their big paydays will be all about which supermodel is on the arm of International Business Magazine’s three-time winner of Most Eligible Bachelor that night? The highest traffic and the most shares and retweets came from a benefit for La Scala in Milan last December when Per brought the same woman—an Israeli glamour queen—he had been seen with a week before at the dedication of a new hospital wing in Madagascar. The tabloids exploded with “exclusive” revelations for a week: Per is secretly engaged! Per had a secret wedding! Is that a baby bump from a side-angle view of the Israeli beauty or did she just have high-sodium soy sauce with her sashimi for lunch?
When the next benefit event just three days after Milan—a New York City fundraiser for End World Hunger—shows Per with a gorgeous Ethiopian woman by his side, the tabloids don’t even bother to retract. They don’t care that the previous week’s headline was lies and camera tricks. It’s all entertainment anyhow.
I can imagine what Paul would say if he were sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car.
What are you doing, Toni? Looking for loopholes to allow this corporate asshole to get away with having whoever and whatever he wants? This is your grand plan to use your power and education to make the world a better place?
Bashiir’s voice echoes in my head. Paul doesn’t trust you. My brother’s image fades away, replaced by his roommate, turning his back to me as he returns to his cell.
I close my eyes, shake myself back into the moment. Then I open them and focus again on the screen.
That’s when I see it.
A small note on the calendar. Almost undetectable. But I detect it because, I realize as I double-check the date, I was there.
June 19, 2014. Just two days ago.
“Retainer agreement. GDL Offices. 6 p.m.”
That happened, just as noted. Melanie and Per in her office, the notary public on standby, me in the pit with the rest of the newbie first-year associates, pretending to grind away at some deposition review but quietly gloating about my pivotal role. Basking in the jealous looks from the other first-years as Per blew me a kiss when he and Melanie walked through the pit to the elevators, and at Melanie’s thumbs-up as she came back to her desk.
A few minutes later, she IM’d me. We celebrated in her office with bourbon and Thai restaurant delivery till around ten, finalizing details for the cocktail party for Per that would take place the next evening. That night I decided for sure that I wanted to be Melanie Dwyer when I grew up, and that I was no longer resentful that she pulled me out of Boston and brought me back to Minnesota.
Per’s calendar for June 19 says: “Dinner. M. Dwyer. 8 p.m.”
That never happened.
Sure, it could have been a plan that he canceled. But I spent the evening deep in a bottle with Melanie and she did not seem like she was on the back end of a dinner date gone south. I tab over to the GPS log of Per’s driver—I know he used his official car to come to our offices on Friday because, in my eagerness before he arrived, I was peering out the front window bank of the lobby of our building, pacing back and forth until his cream-colored Mercedes limo with its Air Trek vanity plates pulled up to the portico. Melanie had asked me to personally escort him up to our offices.
There we are on the mileage log: The IDS Building, arrival time 5:57. And there’s the departure at 6:43. From there, the Mercedes doesn’t return to Air Trek’s offices in St. Paul. Nor does it go to Per’s penthouse. It doesn’t even go to the airport. It goes to St. Cloud, sixty-five miles away. GPS pins arrival at 8:14. Cross-checking with Per’s Garmin data confirms that he is in the car.
What is Per Olufsen doing in St. Cloud when his calendar says he’s at dinner with my boss in Minneapolis?
Then I sit straight up in my bucket seat. Little prickles of discovery run up and down my spine. The GPS shows Per’s car leaving St. Cloud at 12:35. More than four hours after it arrives, having gone nowhere.
Is this the four hours I’m looking to seal from the record? Could the GPS log be the key to bulletproofing Per’s alibi for . . . whatever he was doing with some woman not famous enough to enhance his public image?
The hole in the GPS I see now might be the smoking gun. Should I call Melanie to clue her in? Or should I take care of it myself to keep her hands clean and call her with “It’s handled”? Surely I can find a legal loophole that allows me to bury this information so deep in some computer database that it would take thirty paralegals and a tarot card reader to discover it again.
Slow down. Triple-check. This is my hallmark as a researcher—I will always be more thorough than anyone who comes before or after me. I go back to the Garmin. Sure enough, there’s more data for the night of June 19. And it’s a lot.
By 9:00 p.m. the information shows that Per was on foot—somewhere forty-three miles away from the spot where the car stopped in St. Cloud.
I don’t care how dedicated an athlete the man might be—he did not run forty-three miles in less than an hour. He had to have left his car behind and taken another.
What was he doing that required him to switch vehicles? A lawyer’s nightmare: somewhere out there exists a car that can be tracked back to this time and place. I might be able to bury the in-car GPS I know about, but Garmin data in iCloud—that’s beyond my skill set.
I zero in on the coordinates from Per’s watch: 45.32 degrees north, 93.86 degrees west. I type it into Google Maps . . .
My blood freezes.
Two nights ago, between the hours of approximately nine and eleven, Per Olufsen was here.
In Thebes.