thirty-three

Sunday afternoon at the storage facility turned out to be a circus side show. The tuba lady honked away at an endless tribute to John Philip Sousa while a body builder with skin-splitting muscles pumped iron in a unit only slightly larger than his shoulder span.

“He seems fit,” I said as the rippled man bounced a medicine ball against his unit’s metal interior. For his neighbor’s sake, I hoped grandma’s china wasn’t in a box against the shared wall.

Frank smirked. “Sure, now your vision returns.”

“I never said I was blind.”

We walked down the storage row and watched as a half dozen renters puttered about their units, shoving cardboard boxes into the airless spaces. My mother, a snob at heart, tilted her nose so high I thought she might flip over backward. This was not her idea of an adventure.

“It’s like a trailer park without running water,” she commented. “How long will this take? Norma is taking me shopping later.”

Frank fiddled with the lock on unit 125. A wad of stale air seeped out when the unit opened. My mother, desperate to cut the visit short, walked up to Bob’s diorama, grabbed a figure off its chair, and turned it over.

“Mom,” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

“Maybe Bob labeled the dolls.”

Frank moved quickly to the table following my mother’s lead. It seemed sacrilegious to dismantle Bob’s art, but at the end of the day, Bob was dead. If his art contained clues, then he’d left them for a reason.

Frank picked up a young girl with long braids who looked to be about twelve. He tilted the little girl to the floor and looked at the bottom of her feet. “T. First initial?” Frank pondered.

My mother picked up the man with the cape. “No letter,” she said. “Makes sense if this one is Bob. He wouldn’t need to label himself.”

I leaned over Bob’s shoulder and pointed to the braided girl’s chair. “Look, her chair also has a T on it. That’s probably how he coded the layout.”

Frank took out his iPad and started snapping pics of the figurines’ faces, feet, and chairs. Sure enough, each doll had a single letter on their foot that corresponded to the one on their chair. I looked carefully at each of the dolls. None looked like the woman with black hair and skinny jeans.

Frank lifted the doughy man. “If we’re right about the first letter corresponding to the person’s name, then this guy’s name starts with an L.”

I stared closely at the doughy man’s face. “He bothers me,” I said. His face, no bigger than a half dollar, was unlikable. “In the photo he appeared to be gloating, but now that I’m looking at him, he seems weak.”

My mother sidled up to us. “It’s his mouth. Look how chin is set back into his face. It’s crumbling, like a baby’s shivering lip.”

I nodded. “Let’s put him back in his seat and see what his body language says.”

Frank placed the doughy man back in his assigned chair. Unlike some of the other dolls, whose legs were casually crossed or stretched, this man’s feet were planted firmly on the floor. His left hand, hidden under the tablecloth, was balled in a fist.

“What do you think, Mom?”

“I feel like I’m stating the obvious, but if Bob placed this man at the table, it means he was part of Bob’s inner circle, and all of these people were Bob’s followers.”

Frank lapped the table. “If they followed Bob that means they all had something in common.”

“Garbage?” I said, but it didn’t sound convincing. “I don’t see a little girl or the doughy man Dumpster diving. Also, we know that Bob was connected to the skinny jeans lady, but there’s no one at the table with short black hair.”

I stepped outside the metal box for some fresh air and an unobstructed view of the warehouse.

“Hey, Charlie’s here,” I said. “Let’s take a break.”

We walked over to the warehouse accompanied by the tuba lady’s music. I felt an urge to swing my legs and march in formation. My mother rolled her eyes and jabbed at her watch.

“Soon,” I whispered.

“Hey,” Charlie said, giving my mother a peck on the cheek. “This is a nice surprise.” Charlie’s flattery provided just enough attention to buy a few more minutes from my mother. “Frank, I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I want to show you.”

“Did you find something?”

“Maybe,” Charlie said as he started to unscrew a panel on one of the computers. “You know how we’re using the extra computers from the warehouse and the bin at the recycling center to beef up the scavenger hunt?”

Frank nodded. “I’m assuming you’ve been cherry picking the pieces most valuable to the scavengers.”

“I have,” Charlie started, “but I’m noticing something different between the two sets of computers. I’m not sure if it’s relevant.”

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Well, to pick the best computers for the scavengers, I had to pop the backs off to make sure they hadn’t been stripped. I’ll show you.” Charlie started to unscrew and remove components from a computer.

“I’m guessing these warehouse computers were already stripped for the good stuff,” Frank said. “It would make sense given the miraculous disappearance of the waste. Someone must have considered the computers valuable.”

“Right? That’s what I thought. Except the warehouse computers are completely intact.” Charlie pointed to the interior of the computer he had just dismantled. It could have been filled with parts from a Mr. Coffee machine for all I knew about computers.

“See?” he said.

We all shook our heads. We were lost.

“These computers,” Charlie said patiently as he pointed to various pieces of plastic and metal with a small screwdriver, “have all the parts needed to run. If we plugged them in, they’d probably be usable. However, the computers from the recycling center were all missing their C drives.”

“Well, then I guess they’d been picked through,” I said.

Charlie shook his head. “If you’re interested in recycling the parts of a computer, you go for the motherboard. That’s the electrical panel that connects the computer’s devices, and it’s the part with the most amount of copper wire. The C drive is useless to a scavenger.”

“So someone opened the back on all of the computers at the recycling center and pulled out the C drive, but left the motherboards?” Frank confirmed.

“That’s correct.”

“I can’t stand it any longer,” my mother whined. “What’s a sea drive?”

“A leisurely car ride along the coast.” Charlie laughed at his own joke.

My mother pouted.

“The C drive,” Charlie said, making a C shape with his hand, “is the computer’s main storage device. When you hit Save, that’s where the information goes, like a virtual file cabinet.”

“Okay,” Frank said slowly. “Isn’t it recommended that an owner remove the main storage device before recycling so their personal information is not compromised?”

“Sure,” Charlie replied. “But no one ever does it. It’s the same thing with shredders. Shredding machines sell like hotcakes, but I’ll bet half are still in their boxes while people stupidly load their garbage pails with everything from their bank account numbers to their credit card statements. That’s why the missing drives caught my attention. I went through seventy computers from the recycling center and every single one was missing a C drive. That’s not typical. People are lazy. I thought maybe Bob removed the drives to protect the users, but then where did the C drives go?”

“Did you ask Jimmy?” Frank said.

“I did, but he didn’t know anything about it.”

I remembered Bob’s tool kit, the one Jimmy had retrieved from the garbage heap. Was Bob removing the C drives from the recycling bin? And if so, why?

Frank nodded his head a few more times and then said, “So I show up at the recycling center with a computer. I hand it over to Bob, and because I’m not a techie, Bob volunteers to remove my C drive and then hands it to me for safekeeping. I go home with the C drive.”

My mother raised her hand. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” Frank replied. “Maybe someone with absolutely no computer knowledge can explain this.”

“People don’t leave a recycling center with garbage,” my mother said. “Only my daughter takes stuff home. For the rest of us, the whole point is to leave the garbage at the recycling center. I’d be furious is someone handed me back a hunk of useless metal and told me to take it home after I’d gone out of my way to dispose of it properly. Not that I’d actually go to a recycling center, but you get the idea.”

I smiled at my mother. It was amazing how logical she could be when she wasn’t looped.

“Maybe Bob smashed them,” I suggested. “I thought you were supposed to take a hammer to your drives.”

“You can,” Charlie replied. “And some people do, literally, smash them, but don’t you think Jimmy would remember Bob taking a sledge hammer to a bunch of computer components? Plus you have to clean up the crushed pieces, or it just makes more garbage.”

“Jimmy said that nonprofits picked through the computers bins for secondhand use.”

“Well, if they did,” Charlie said, “they’d be lugging back a useless shell, because none of Bob’s computers had C drives.”

Frank rubbed his face so hard I could hear the stubble on his cheeks scratching the palms of his hands. “Ten years ago I would have immediately accused Bob of involvement in an identity theft scam, but I’m fairly confident that’s not the case.”

“How do you know?” Charlie asked.

“Because nowadays, people are more aware of identity theft. If there was a localized uptick in identity theft, the police department would know by now.”

“Shouldn’t we confirm with the people who dropped off their computers?” I said. “We’ve got Bob’s receipt pad.”

Frank’s eyes slid to mine. “That we do,” he said as he lifted his phone.