chapter sixteen

I didn’t waste any time. Speeding out of Genesys, I scanned the pack of protestors through the lobby’s picture windows, looking for Harvey Pink. Protestors still massed outside the building. But the hype had disappeared into the wind.

A long stream of profanity followed. Still, it’s a rare ice addict without a record. Even without Maclaren’s file, I’d find Pink before long.

Right now, Dr. Lee was my person of interest, and in order to locate him, I’d need to track his barcode for recent purchases. That required special skills.

With Genesys in my rear-view mirror, I weighed options. The case was closed, and I was on vacation, so technically I hadn’t stuck my toe over the line. But my foot was right at the edge. If enough evidence turned up to reopen the Devonshire case as a homicide, repeat visits would be necessary for the record. I didn’t want my online activity to flag the attention of Captain Tatum, or cause trouble for Shin or me if and when the case came to court.

Shin could find out if Lee’s barcode had registered new activity, but until I’d played out my hunch, it was better if I didn’t involve my partner any more than I had to. After all, I had asked him to close out the case.

So, at 1:15 I pulled into the Starbucks on Camarillo and Tujunga in North Hollywood.

I spotted her immediately via the electric-kiwi stripe in her otherwise inky black hair. Denver Lakshmi was a nineteen-year-old Ex-hacktavist, now gainfully employed with the LAPD through the ex-con employment program I’d hooked her up with. She had awesome I.T. skills, a killer memory, and never skipped her lunchtime java. Moreover, where Shin was a straight arrow whenever regulations were concerned, Denver liked to bend the rules.

Denver’s hands moved like the conductor of an invisible, inaudible symphony as she sat at one of the little outdoor tables. From the way she swiped back and forth with her right hand and directed her gaze towards the left, I knew she was scanning code in one window and viewing images in another. But I couldn’t see the files. She must have been wearing a Solo Shell VPN that blocked both the audio and visual to all but the user. When she touched the glimmer of silver embedded in both her brow and left ear, I knew I was right.

Denver’s head bobbed back and forth in time with inaudible music. Circling around in back, I touched the edges of her I-Brow and ear wearables simultaneously. The strains of some upbeat Bollywood tune spilled into the air.

Fear morphed into a scowl when she saw it was me.

“You will meet a tall dark man soon.” I read aloud from the now-visible psychic dating website Denver’d been checking. “Hey, is your parole officer tall?”

“No, she’s not,” Denver said in her snarkiest tone. She inclined her head. “I’ve already met somebody, Piedmont, but you keep visiting me, and people will think you’re in love.”

“The sooner I get the information I need, the sooner we save your reputation,” I rapped in time to the Bollywood tune.

“I’m busy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.”

She swiveled around in her seat and I saw her mood T-shirt with the one word question WHY? change from black to magenta with the shift in body temperature.

“Go ahead and laugh.” She pointed at the floating horoscope with short square nails painted kiwi and mint green to match her hair. “This is my future we’re talking here.”

“If you want clues to your future, look at your past.”

“That’s depressing. My past sucks.”

“Trying to game the government will do that.”

Denver had been arrested as a minor for trying to hack into DARPA via backdoors in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Department. She thought all cool gadgets should be free to the public. What she got was a visit from the FBI. Denver’d been on the verge of a long stay in juvie and possibly a stint in Federal prison after she turned eighteen. Fortunately, her excellent legal team gained Denver a much shorter sentence in a local juvenile facility. There she’d come to my attention as one of those kids whom it might still be possible to turn. We needed talent like hers on our side. And Denver was basically a good kid. So, I helped her get the job.

“They never would have caught me if those corporate sellouts hadn’t punked me out. It’s all a conspiracy rigged against the little guy. Corporations own the universities and government. They make the rules.”

“Before you’re drafted for the Hunger Games,” I said, “I need a current address.” Pulling Lee’s barcode and credit card numbers from Britney’s file, I slapped them down on Denver’s table. “Not the Palisades place. Cross check with retailer and credit report files for recent purchases.”

“Pitiful.” She rolled her eyes, her expression the platonic ideal of teenage distain. Denver was already entering the info in her search engines. Using the latest analytical formula, she needed only three bits of information—metadata such as location or timing—to identify the unique signature purchasing pattern of ninety-per cent of people. And Denver had much more than three bits for Lee.

She sliced through paywalls, those websites restricted to paying users only. Financial information was supposed to be encrypted, but many companies sold client information to other companies. Companies that used old software. That information was easy for any reasonably computer savvy user like me to access. But Denver could move through this stuff like a laser cutting paper.

“Any useful cookies on him?”

“Like maggots on old meat,” she said. “There’s code here from like 2038.”

“What’s he been buying?”

Swish, swish, swish. Denver’s fingers swiped and minimized floating images back and forth on the air in front of us. “Digital scratchers, big ATM withdrawals at a couple casinos, and a lot of high-premium gas. He shops regularly at a Whole Foods north of Santa Barbara. He eats non-hydrogenated almond butter and organically grown veggies. Your basic high-tech-upper-middle class-wheatgrass-scientist demographic.”

“Except for the scratchers and casinos. Sounds like he likes a flutter at the tables. What about money problems?”

“He’s overdrawn his checking account a few times,” she said. “Missed the mortgage payment twice. Looks like his wife took over the bills about a year ago.”

“Give me dates and locations on all Lee’s purchases in the last six months,” I said. “What about a billing address?”

“He charged his barcode. No shipping address either,” she said, “so don’t ask.”

“Medical?”

Her fingers swiped the air again, making Denver look like a conductor of pixels.

“Lots of visits to shrinks in the past few years. Anti-anxiety meds, but who doesn’t take those? Hello.” Denver mimed a snipping motion. “He had a vasectomy a while ago. And he’s burned his social networking sites. There’s nothing there but an empty wall.”

Like Britney Devonshire’s.

“Gambling and a vasectomy,” I said half under my breath. “What about legal fees? Anything?”

“You link vasectomy to lawyers? You’re really weird, you know that?” Denver kept searching, then cocked her head and turned to me. “But not totally insane. Meet Pang Kim and Jacob Lester, both attorneys at law.”

“Divorce?” I stared at the two smiling lawyers Denver’d linked to their respective websites. “Or tax?”

“One each.” She cast me an appreciative glance. “The psychic website should hire you.”

“I’m not psychic,” I said. “Just a cop.”

Lee’d been talking to a divorce lawyer but hadn’t filed for divorce. “When did he get the vasectomy?”

“Five years ago,” Denver said. “Why?”

Five years ago, but Britney Devonshire hadn’t known Lee then. So, if she’d tried to pin paternity on him with that blood spot, Lee would have known it was a scam without a DNA test. Contradictions kept mounting.

“Everybody lies,” I said. “And hides stuff.”

“Like you doing searches on the Q.T.?” Denver’s mood T-shirt now read WHY NOT? in green.

I winked. “I’m on vacation. And I’m one of the good guys.”

“Not that good.” With a knowing grin, she downloaded the information. These days most people store whatever data isn’t on the cloud in their DNA. Thumb drives have become literal since that’s where the USB port is. But I don’t like using even my junk DNA for storage, so I go old school. Denver handed me the flash-dot, the miniature memory stick the size of a pinky fingernail. For just a second, the lagoon green of Denver’s T-shirt bounced off the reflective surface of the Starbuck’s window. The question flickered on her glasses. Then it vanished like a rainbow in full sun.

Lee’s favorite new hang-out was an Indian casino just outside Clara Vista, one of those little beach towns on the coast north of Santa Barbara.

“This is me saying good-bye, Piedmont.” Waving her hand in dismissal, Denver flipped back to her horoscope.

I wagged my finger at her good-naturedly. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” The line from high school Shakespeare was still in the mental hard drive.

“Who’s Brutus?” Denver said.

“Backup singer in an old death-metal band.” I watched as she touched the edge of the I-Brow wearable again and retreated back into her Solo-Shell.

I was in a good mood. Clara Vista—the search had given me my next move.

As I walked out, Denver whirled back around, her head and heart already focused on her stars caught in the web.

***

October afternoon sun beat down on the city. Beads of sweat trickled down my spine by the time I reached my Porsche. In the car’s cool interior, I voice-activated the number on my glove phone I still knew by heart.

Frank Waldron, my former partner from NOHO homicide answered on the ninth ring—pretty good, considering. Frank appeared, floating in the Nokia Handy’s L-shape between my thumb and forefinger. He had a face like a dried apple, but the eyes were still bright and lively.

“Hey, Frank, it’s me,” I said. “You look like shit.”

He’d turned fifty-five last year. Frank had bad knees and a cheap animatronic arm that gave him chronic pain. He’d lost his left arm when the Sphinx collar turned ugly. While the Sphinx arrest got me promoted to Homicide Special, it had permanently retired Frank on disability. And disability didn’t pay enough for one of the deluxe animatronic arms. I’d offered to make up the difference, but Frank was allergic to anything even close to a handout.

“And you still dress like you’re going to a photo shoot, not a homicide scene.” He was grinning now though, not wincing. “I knew you couldn’t drive a desk for long.”

“You saw the news.”

He laughed. “Lots of lightning. Thunder hit yet?”

Lightning to thunder was our code for the time delay between the shit that goes down on the street and the emotions that flood in, sometimes days after.

“Still standing,” I said. “You busy?”

“You know.” He wasn’t.

Now a licensed private investigator, Frank got by on disability payments, pension, and whatever his buddies threw him in the way of work. He and his wife Ruth had moved inland, up north of Oxnard where property values were cheaper.

“Listen, if you’re free,” I said, “I need you to put some eyes on a Lexus SUV out your way.”

After all, there was nothing in the regulations that prevented Eddie Piedmont, private citizen on vacation, from hiring a licensed private investigator to find Lee.

“Roger that, house mouse,” Frank said.

He was never gonna let me live down desk duty. But I was glad to hear him breaking my balls. It meant he hadn’t given up.

“Ta ma-de, Frank,” I said with real affection for the old guy.

“I see your vocab hasn’t improved,” Frank said. “Just gone global.”

I walked him through what I already knew about Lee before ending the call.

With Frank on the job, I looked forward to my first night of real sleep since the shooting. I hoped it’d be dreamless.